THE LANGUAGE OF DATA SERIES | PART 7 OF 7
How Should Data Be Priced?
Member uses at cost, commercial uses at market, and the case for charging the user of a capability instead of everyone
By Saul Klein and John Reilly September 2026
Once you see MLS data feeds as licenses, permissions to use a copyrighted database that working brokers build together, pricing stops being mysterious and becomes three principles. This article, which stands alone, walks all three, ending with the one that answers a question every MLS board eventually faces.
Principle one: member pricing for member uses, at cost. Feeds that support the practice of brokerage, the feed behind your website, the feed behind your client portal, the feed behind your back office tools, are part of what membership buys, and the long standing framework requires that charges for them be reasonably related to the MLS’s actual costs and applied without discrimination. The MLS is not supposed to profit from a working broker’s access to the cooperative the broker helps build. It is supposed to recover what the access costs.
Principle two: market pricing for commercial uses. When the use is not brokerage, when the data powers a media product, an analytics business, an AI application, a portal’s valuation tool, the arrangement belongs on the commercial track: a negotiated license at market terms, priced for the value of the rights granted, with scope, retention, and enforcement written in. The user is not buying membership. It is buying an asset’s output, and assets are priced by markets, not by cost recovery. One refinement within any track: granting access to data and handing over a copy of it are different products. A copy surrenders the owner’s possession and most of its practical control, so replication, where permitted at all, carries the premium.
Principle three: the user of a capability pays for the capability. Here is the case that makes the principle concrete. Every broker is entitled, on request, to a feed of their own listings, everything they ever contributed, delivered in standard format, with no restriction on what they do with it. That entitlement is right, and it should be untouchable: your listings are your listings. But an entitlement is not the same thing as a subsidy. Standing up and maintaining the data return capability costs real money: the infrastructure, the security, the support, the standards compliance. Most brokers will never request the feed. So who should pay to keep the capability alive: the few who use it, or everyone, through dues that quietly carry the cost for a service most members never touch?
The better answer is the user. Charge the requesting broker the actual cost of the delivery, and charge nobody else anything. This is not a loophole around the entitlement; it is how the entitlement is written. The governing policy itself says delivery charges shall be reasonably related to the actual costs incurred by the MLS. Cost follows use. The broker who wants the capability gets it, promptly and without argument, at what it actually costs to provide, and the broker who never wants it never pays a dime toward it. Economists call this cost causation: the party that causes a cost bears it. Members call it fairness. The alternative, folding the cost into everyone’s dues, feels free but is not. It is simply the same cost, hidden, spread across thousands of members who receive nothing for it, which is precisely the kind of quiet cross subsidy the current rethinking of data access is trying to unwind.
Put the three principles together and the whole pricing debate becomes legible. Member uses at cost. Commercial uses at market, with copies priced above access. Capabilities priced to the users who invoke them. Access to your own data as an absolute right, with the delivery of it priced honestly rather than buried. Every serious proposal now on the table, whatever else it gets right or wrong, is an attempt to move from the old world, where all of this was undifferentiated and unpriced, toward some version of those principles. The debates ahead are about where the lines fall. The direction is no longer in doubt.
This article stands on its own and is also part of the practitioner series “The Language of Data”. Copyright 2026 Saul Klein and John Reilly. All rights reserved. Commentary and general information, not legal advice.
