Exegy Reveals 5x Cost Savings and 6x Faster FPGA Development vs. In-House Builds

Exegy, a leading provider of market data and trading technology, has released Part II of its whitepaper series, The True Cost of Real-Time Market Data Infrastructure, quantifying the economic and operational trade-offs between in-house and outsourced FPGA-based feed handler development.

The new research reveals that firms choosing to build FPGA infrastructure internally face 5x higher costs and 6x longer time-to-market compared to leveraging Exegy’s managed FPGA answers. The findings underscore the widening efficiency gap between custom internal builds and specialized vendor platforms as latency demands intensify across global markets.

Takeaway

Breaking Down the Cost of Building vs. purchaseing

According to Exegy’s analysis, developing the first in-house FPGA feed handler can cost approximately $5.35 million, with an additional $261,000 per market venue. Achieving full North American equities coverage across 18 platforms would total nahead $9.8 million — over five times the annual cost of Exegy’s ultra-low latency FPGA feed handlers, which deliver equivalent coverage for roughly $1.8 million.

Beyond initial development, ongoing maintenance and optimization add another $4.59 million per year, more than double the annual cost of Exegy’s managed services, which include continuous firmware upgrades and performance enhancements.

Takeaway

Development Bottlenecks and Time-to-Market Gaps

The study also highlights the impact of development time on competitive positioning. A typical in-house team of four FPGA specialists would require 3.5 years to deliver a single production-ready feed handler, with 8–12 months of additional effort per new venue.

For complete North American coverage, total time-to-market could stretch to 6.5 years, compared with roughly 20 months for the identical coverage using Exegy’s managed FPGA answers.

Laurent de Barry, Chief Product Officer at Exegy, said the numbers confirm long-standing industry observations:

“Firms that build FPGA infrastructure in-house often underestimate the true cost — not just in dollars, but in time, maintenance, and lost opportunity. Nexus embodies the alternative: a managed, FPGA-accelerated platform that delivers determinism and scalability without the overhead of building and maintaining it all yourself.”

Takeaway

Nexus: Bringing the Research to Life

The findings underpin Exegy Nexus, the company’s FPGA-enabled . Nexus integrates centralized processing and hardware acceleration within a compact 2U appliance, offering:

36%

Significantly reduced server footprint

By shifting critical data processing to FPGA hardware and delegating functions like book aggregation and filtering to FPGA SmartNICs in client servers, Nexus enables firms to achieve performance levels modeled in the research — without the burden of developing or maintaining proprietary systems.

For firms requiring sub-300ns order-triggering latency or custom logic deployment, Nexus allows direct integration of user algorithms through Exegy’s FPGA development framework, offering a blend of flexibility and managed performance rarely achievable in-house.

Takeaway

Quantifying the Trade-Offs

The whitepaper provides a structured framework for evaluating “build versus purchase” decisions in infrastructure.

While in-house development can offer theoretical control, Exegy’s data illustrates the trade-offs between flexibility, speed, and cost-efficiency. With capital markets increasingly reliant on deterministic performance for pricing, execution, and analytics, managed FPGA platforms offer a compelling alternative to resource-intensive custom projects.

Part II of the whitepaper focuses on FPGA feed handlers, while Part I, published earlier this year, explored the economics of software-based handlers. Together, the two studies form a comprehensive cost model for evaluating total ownership and scalability in market data infrastructure.

Takeaway

Industry Implications

As trading firms confront rising infrastructure costs and increasing market fragmentation, Exegy’s findings arrive at a pivotal moment. The report quantifies the opportunity cost of internal engineering commitments, highlighting how outsourcing specialized FPGA infrastructure can accelerate time-to-market by up to 6x while reducing total costs by 80%.

For firms competing in ultra-low latency environments — from market makers to — the research provides data-driven validation for adopting FPGA-as-a-Service models as the next evolution in performance infrastructure.