"When I registered this domain name a year ago, I was amazed it was still available," says FinancialContent President Greg Fidan. Now his company is amazing the big financial content distributors such as Stockpoint, by undercutting their prices by as much as 80%.

FinancialContent functions on an ASP model -- Web sites wishing to carry investor content such as stock quotes, public company news and portfolio managers can go to FinancialContent's site to select what they want and integrate it seamlessly into their own site with a minimum of technical effort or know-how. Fidan, who is bootstrapping the company without substantial outside investors, says most of his employees come from investment sites where they were previously frustrated by how expensive and hard-to-integrate this type of content was.

FinancialContent launched a free beta test to about 100 clients late last year. Then it launched its paid service March 6th. So far approximately 70 paying clients have signed on -- all of whom came from word of mouth. The big surprise: although Fidan expected his customers would be small entrepreneurial sites, it turns out his real market may be with big sites that are sick of paying big prices.

How can FinancialContent keep its prices so low? (Monthly minimums now run at $750.) VP Sales Stephen Malaster explains, "Our technology allows me to personally handle 40 clients easily. The big guys average two clients to every sales rep." Fidan adds that the prices of the raw data feeds, that his company pretties up into useful content, have "come down drastically since the market downturn."