The two products sit at different layers. Tardis.dev sells the raw material. Aperiodic sells 220 point-in-time metrics built from it, as parquet (catalog).
What Tardis.dev costs
Tardis.dev prices each plan by who you are and which markets you want. These are its listed monthly prices for the Perpetuals and All Exchanges data plans (tardis.dev, checked November 5, 2026):
| Subscription | Perpetuals | All Exchanges | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Academic | $350 | $650 | Students and researchers with a university email; quarterly or yearly billing only; CSV files only |
| Solo | $700 | $1,200 | Individual traders; CSV files only |
| Professional | $1,000 | $2,200 | Adds the raw replay API and Tardis Machine |
| Business | $3,000 | $6,000 | Up to 10 API keys; all history with yearly billing |
How far back you can download depends on how you pay: 4 months of history when billed monthly, 12 months quarterly and 4 years yearly. Everything since 2019-03-30 needs Business billed yearly (billing FAQ, checked November 5, 2026). The order form has a $300 minimum, and the FAQ says Tardis.dev offers no discounts and no refunds.
For comparison, Aperiodic is free for every metric over 2025 on BTC, ETH, SOL and 10 RWA perps, on all three venues. Aperiodic Pro is $199 a month billed yearly or $249 month to month, with 5 years of history either way. Prime is $399 billed yearly or $499 month to month, with the full history either way (pricing). The two are not the same product, so read on before comparing the numbers. For every other vendor's entry price, see crypto market data pricing, vendor by vendor.
Where Tardis.dev wins
Say this first, because it decides most purchases.
- Raw L2 and L3. Tardis.dev offers tick-level L2 and L3 order books, trades, options chains and liquidations (tardis.dev, checked September 29, 2026). We do not sell raw order book updates at all.
- Tick-level replay. Its client libraries and HTTP API replay historical data tick by tick, with the raw replay API running to roughly six minutes behind real time (data FAQ, checked September 29, 2026). No aggregate replaces that, ours included.
- Exchange breadth. Tardis.dev lists 50+ spot and derivatives exchanges (tardis.dev, checked September 29, 2026). We cover three venues.
- History on its top plan. Yearly Business subscriptions include all history since 2019-03-30 (billing FAQ, checked November 5, 2026). Our Pro plan carries 5 years; Prime and Institutional carry full history, from 2020 on Binance and 2019 on OKX.
Tardis.dev also says its archive is free of survivorship bias, and as a raw archive it does not restate history (data FAQ, checked October 1, 2026). On those two, the vendors are level.
If one of these is the reason you are shopping, the rest of this page will not change your answer.
Where Aperiodic is the better alternative
You get the metric, not the pipeline. From trades, you would compute taker buy and sell volume, signed delta, size buckets and a toxicity score per bar, then validate it, then keep it point-in-time as the data revises. We ship those as columns.
Bars on the clock you trade on. An exchange timestamp says when the venue matched a trade. A live strategy only sees the trade when the message reaches it. Tardis.dev records that arrival time on every tick, at 100ns precision (data FAQ, checked October 1, 2026), and leaves the bars to you. Aperiodic records it at the collection point closest to each exchange and builds every metric on it when you pass timestamp="true": a 5-minute bar then holds only what had arrived by its close, so a backtest cannot act on a print that had not reached you yet. Exchange time is the default, one parameter away.
The files are small. Here is one real preview file, pulled with no API key:
# Install the Aperiodic CLI into ~/.local/bin
mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aperiodic-io/cli/main/install.sh | INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/.local/bin" bash
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
aperiodic flow --preview --exchange binance-futures --symbol perpetual-BTC-USDT:USDT \
--interval 5m --timestamp exchange --start-date 2025-05-01 --end-date 2025-05-31 \
--output-dir ./data && echo "Saved to $PWD/data"It returns one parquet file: 8,928 rows, every 5-minute bar in May 2025 (31 × 288), with 36 order-flow metrics per bar, in 788,789 bytes (770 KiB). The columns include taker_buy_volume, volume_delta, flow_entropy, flow_toxicity_score, and buy and sell volume split into small, medium and large orders.
# pip install pandas pyarrow
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("data/2025-05.parquet")
print(df.shape) # (8928, 37): time + 36 metricsOr have your agent run it and read the file for you:
Read https://aperiodic.io/start.md and follow it. Then pull the free `flow` preview and show me the bars with the biggest net taker flow.You can evaluate it before you pay. The preview needs no key and no account. Tardis.dev also offers free sample CSVs without an API key (tardis.dev, checked September 29, 2026), so this is not a point against them. What differs is what the sample contains: raw ticks there, finished features here.
The entry price is lower. Aperiodic self-serve starts at $199 a month billed yearly ($249 month to month) with no sales call (pricing). The cheapest Tardis.dev plan you can pay monthly is Solo, at $700 for Perpetuals (tardis.dev, checked November 5, 2026). Pro and Prime carry a personal licence; Prime Commercial carries a commercial licence for internal business use (licensing). Institutional adds negotiated terms and an SLA.
What every plan gives a backtest
- Every perpetual on Binance, OKX and Hyperliquid stays in the data after it is delisted, so a backtest sees the coins that were listed at the time, including the ones that later died.
- Published bars are never recalculated. A backtest you run next year reads the same history as one you run today.
- Every metric comes on exchange time or on local time (when the data reached us). On local time, a bar only holds what you could have seen by its close.
- Prime and above have no API rate limits, and Pro has high ones. The Python SDK downloads 10 files at a time by default.
Side by side
| Tardis.dev | Aperiodic | |
|---|---|---|
| What arrives | Raw ticks: trades, quotes, L2/L3 book updates, options chains, liquidations | 220 computed metrics across 19 datasets |
| Venues | 50+ spot and derivatives exchanges | Binance futures, OKX perps, Hyperliquid perps |
| Granularity | Every tick, with replay | 1m to 1d self-serve; 15s/30s on Institutional |
| History | 4 months billed monthly, 12 months quarterly, 4 years yearly; all since 2019-03-30 on yearly Business | 5 years on Pro; full history on Prime and Institutional, monthly billing included |
| Timestamps | Exchange and local on every tick (100ns); you build the bars | Exchange and local timestamps; every metric built on either clock |
| One month, BTC perp | Raw trades and book updates you aggregate yourself | 770 KiB parquet, 36 flow metrics at 5m (measured on this page) |
| Delisted instruments | Kept (stated survivorship-bias-free) | Kept, on every covered venue |
| Revisions | None: a raw archive | None: published bars are never recalculated |
| Download limits | 20 TB a month of transfer below Business; one active key | None on Prime and above, high on Pro; parallel downloads |
| Try before paying | Free sample CSVs, no key; a one-month trial covering days 1 to 10 of the previous month | Preview slice with no key; a free account gets every metric for 2025 on BTC, ETH, SOL and 10 RWA perps |
| Entry price | $350/month Academic (quarterly or yearly only); $700/month Solo; $300 minimum order, no discounts | Free for 2025 on BTC, ETH, SOL and 10 RWA perps; paid from $199/month billed yearly ($249 month to month), personal licence |
| API keys (entry plans) | 1 active key (Academic, Solo, Professional) | Per plan; see pricing |
| Built for | Execution research, book reconstruction, market-making calibration | Signal research, backtests, ML features |
Tardis.dev prices and history checked November 5, 2026, other facts September 29, 2026, against tardis.dev, the billing FAQ and the data FAQ. Pricing changes; check their site before you buy.
Migrating from Tardis.dev fields
If you already aggregate Tardis.dev CSVs (data types, checked September 29, 2026), this is where the work goes:
| Tardis.dev (per tick) | Aperiodic (per bar) |
|---|---|
trades.side, trades.amount | flow: taker_buy_volume, taker_sell_volume, volume_delta |
trades.price, trades.amount by size | flow: taker_buy_large_order_volume and the small and medium variants |
trades.price against the book | slippage: realized cost in bps |
derivative_ticker.funding_rate | funding |
derivative_ticker.open_interest | open_interest: open_interest, open_interest_notional, open_interest_pct_change |
derivative_ticker.mark_price, index_price | derivative_price, basis |
Which one to buy
Buy Tardis.dev if your edge depends on fills: queue position, maker fill simulation, latency-sensitive execution, or a venue outside Binance, OKX and Hyperliquid.
Buy Aperiodic if your question is about signals: cross-sectional factors, regime features, cost-aware backtests, ML inputs on perps at 1 minute or slower.
Many desks run both, raw ticks for execution research and aggregates for everything else.