Every source carries a licence profile
Every market observation, corporate fact, filing claim, event and private document in Quantify Terminal is stored with the source it came from and a machine-readable licence profile for that source. The profile records what is permitted: display, non-display, derived use, caching, redistribution and AI retrieval. Those permissions are enforced at the gateway, at retrieval time, for every caller. The desk never depends on which vendor supplied a field, and no caller can read past what the licence allows.
Display versus non-display
Display use is a person looking at data on a screen: a quote panel, a chart, a filing viewer. Non-display use is data consumed by a process rather than a person: fed into a model, a screen, a backtest, a risk calculation or an agent. Exchanges and data providers license the two differently, and many licence display use but restrict non-display use to separately entitled users. Quantify Terminal records which of the two each source permits and applies it. A field licensed for display only can be shown, but it will not be fed into a model, a screen or an agent.
What the free tier is licensed for
The free desktop terminal ships with delayed market data, core research, charting and portfolio tools. Delayed data is licensed for display and for the research and portfolio work that runs on the desk. Real-time and low-latency feeds carry per-user entitlement and reporting obligations, and they are part of the paid plans that open with the next release.
Why some data is delayed
Real-time redistribution of exchange data requires per-user entitlement, reporting back to the exchange, and in most cases a fee per user per month. Delayed data does not. Keeping the free tier on delayed data keeps it licence-clean for everyone who installs it, without a registration step that the data does not justify. When you move to a paid plan, the entitlement is recorded against your account and the real-time feed is switched on for you, not for the software in general.
How entitlements are enforced
Enforcement is not a setting in the client. It happens at the gateway, once, for every request, whether the request comes from the desktop, a spreadsheet, a notebook or an autonomous agent.
- Each request is checked against the licence profile of every source it would touch.
- Derived, cached and AI-retrieved data inherits the rights of the source it was derived from. A model cell built from a display-only field cannot be exported to a process the source would not permit.
- When a feed fails, Data Guardian fails over only to an alternate provider you are entitled to. It never borrows from one you are not.
- For private documents, embedding access is document access. Vector indexes carry the same permissions as the documents they index, so nothing surfaces through an AI answer that a user could not open directly.
- Every read and write records an audit event with the permissions in force at the time.
What the system will not do
- Show you data you are not licensed to see.
- Feed display-only data into a model, screen, backtest or agent.
- Retrieve a source for an AI answer where the licence forbids AI retrieval.
- Cache or redistribute beyond what the licence permits.
Licensing conversations
If you are evaluating for a firm, bringing your own data licences, or need a specific feed entitled, write to sales@mail.quantifyterminal.com. For how the rest of the system handles security, data and exports, see Trust.