Why would the number of data points correlate to budget? Perhaps there’s a chance if the business scales with paying users, but that’s unlikely to be true in finance.

At that number of observations, I would assume depth of market data so probably HFT use case. HFT is notoriously expensive to try to compete in

Or IoT data, which is notoriously hard to make money on.

Or someone using sound recorder on Windows.

I'm no market data specialist, but that seems like order of magnitude just top-of-book for US equities? The equity options market, at least, is orders of magnitude larger.

actually, any number of crypto APIs will give you tens of millions of points per day, for free (though that was not our use case).

Money is not only diffrentiator. For example, sometimes you couldn't just buy something, because they won't sell. Or stop selling to you.