Finance techie clones Bloomberg's $30,000 Terminal with Perplexity AI in single afternoon

Finance techie says they cloned Bloomberg's $30k-a-year Terminal with Perplexity's Computer -- project draws both praise and sizable skepticism

The launch of Perplexity's Computer got quite a bit of attention from almost everyone with an interest in AI. The new product combines multi-model and multi-agent for both researching and autonomously executing complex tasks. Naturally, almost every techie put it to the test, including X user @hamptonism (Hampton). They claim to have needed but one afternoon to build a clone of Bloomberg's Terminal, going as far as saying "Perplexity just became the first Al company to truly go head-to-head with the Bloomberg Terminal." Those are the pudgiest of bold claims, as the Terminal costs a few pennies at around $30,000 per year. It's also Bloomberg's bread-and-butter, representing about 85% of the firm's approximate $12 billion yearly revenue. Hampton showed a short clip of them operating their terminal clone, and it definitely resembles the Terminal's basic information and feeds, an impressive feat, at least apparently. The effort drew immediate praise and no amount of AI hyperbole, borderline stating that Bloomberg is done for. The fact that it's possible today to build a tool of this caliber with an afternoon of talking to a bot is definitely eyebrow-raising, but as the saying goes, looks can be deceiving, and beauty only goes skin-deep. Many users immediately pointed out that the data feed for Hampton's clone comes from Perplexity Finance, which itself is an AI bot that aggregates information from various sources. Ultimately, this means that the clone's "real time" information isn't quite so, even assuming that Perplexity Finance gets actual zero-delay, true real-time data to begin with, a doubtful fact on its own. This fact is further highlighted by various comments noting that the true value of the Bloomberg Terminal is in its underlying real-time data provided directly by thousands of financial services. If Bloomberg's own words are an indication, its service covers "more than 200 billion pieces of financial data daily, [across] 6.5 million entities", presumably most if not all of it in true real time. That's a feat that Hampton's clone almost certainly cannot claim, whether for speed or for breadth of information. Second, Terminal is a highly complex, highly customizable product, even coming with its own keyboard. Hampton's ticker/dashboard is impressive, but it's hard to believe that Terminal's estimated 30,000 function commands developed over four decades have all been replicated. Third, the Terminal is not only a highly evolved read-only dashboard -- it's used to issue market orders of many types. Hampton themselves go over the Terminal's capabilities in a post. There are a lot of positives in Hampton's effort, regardless, though. At its core, it's extraordinary that a few hours of quality time with a high-powered bot can yield this result as it is, and as they point out, it's a step towards democratizing access to financial analysis. Moreover, anyone can ask the bot for the functions they need from the Terminal, as relatively few will need everything it can offer. The design can also evolve and be iterated upon with additional prompting, too. While it's quite hyperbolic to claim a bot can replicate the Bloomberg Terminal, it can be argued that with enough effort, folks can make a simplistic, skin-deep version of it that's enough for their needs. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Perplexity AI Just Turned A $30,000/Year Bloomberg Terminal Into A $200/Month Subscription - iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (BATS:IGV)

For decades, the Bloomberg L.P. Terminal has been the undisputed operating system of global finance. Walk onto any trading floor in New York, London, or Hong Kong and you'll see it glowing in black and amber. It's more than software -- it's infrastructure. The Terminal doesn't just provide data; it provides identity. Thousands of keyboard shortcuts. Proprietary functions. Instant messaging between traders, analysts, and dealmakers. Real-time feeds licensed from exchanges across the globe. At nearly $30,000 per year per seat, the price has never been trivial. But the switching cost was never really about money. It was about habit and network. That dominance generated $12.6 billion in annual revenue last year -- largely from terminal subscriptions. But that reign may be starting to crack. Perplexity Just Launched 'Computer:' Why Wall Street Should Pay Attention On Wednesday, Perplexity AI introduced a new product called "Computer." It's not just another chatbot. According to the company, Computer can research, design, code, deploy, and manage projects end-to-end. It automatically selects the best model for each task -- Claude for reasoning, Gemini for research, Grok for speed -- and can operate autonomously in the background for hours or even days. In a post on X, Perplexity described it as "what a personal computer in 2026 should be" -- personal, persistent, secure by default, with hundreds of connectors, memory, file access, and web integration built into its infrastructure. That's ambitious. But what caught Wall Street's attention wasn't the description. It was the demonstration. Shortly after launch, a viral post by user @hamptonism -- viewed 7.5 million times -- showed Perplexity Computer building a functional market-analysis terminal to evaluate NVDA using Perplexity Finance. No local setup. No single-LLM limitations. No specialized hardware. Just an AI system orchestrating everything. The comparison was immediate: the Bloomberg L.P. Terminal. The Economics of Disruption At $30,000 per year per seat, Bloomberg is built for large institutions. But not every market participant needs the full stack. Independent traders, smaller funds, fintech startups, and global operators often need similar insights at a fraction of the budget. If a roughly $200-per-month AI subscription can replicate even a majority of key workflows, the pressure starts at the edges. Disruption rarely begins by replacing the incumbent's largest clients. It begins by serving those priced out. And then it moves upmarket. What It Means For Markets This story lands at a sensitive moment for software stocks. The broader software sector has already been under pressure amid concerns about AI commoditization and weakening pricing power. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (NYSE:IGV) is down roughly 24% year to date, reflecting investor anxiety about how durable traditional SaaS business models really are in an AI-native world. If AI agents can replicate high-value workflows at dramatically lower cost, the market may begin to reassess which companies truly have defensible moats -- and which ones relied primarily on interface lock-in and subscription inertia. Pricing power is the foundation of premium multiples. If AI compresses switching costs across industries -- from finance terminals to enterprise software -- valuation frameworks may need to adjust. Bloomberg is not a public company. But the implications ripple outward. Because if a $30,000 product can be challenged by a $200/month subscription, investors will inevitably ask a broader question: How many other software franchises are more vulnerable than they appear? Photo: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.