Common questions, straight answers.

No. Arcthane is a research tool. We surface and rank publicly available federal contract awards and related events. We do not make recommendations to buy or sell securities. You make your own decisions.

Billing is self-serve. Capture starts with a 7-day trial: card at signup, nothing charged until the trial ends, cancel any time before then and pay nothing. Terminal is charged at checkout and live the same minute. Capture is an organisation licence: Starter at $349/mo or $3,600/yr includes 2 seats, Team at $699/mo or $7,200/yr includes 6 (seats 7+ at $99/mo). Terminal is billed monthly or annually, with seats at $199/mo. No setup fee on any plan. Cancel any time, one click in your account page; your access runs to the end of the paid period. No free tier: you use the real product from day one.

We re-score the universe every 2 hours and push alerts as soon as something meaningful lands on a company or ticker you're watching. Signals caught late are flagged honestly: a signal that says "likely priced in" is the one that saves you money.

Public federal sources: contract awards and subawards, SAM.gov solicitations, appropriations and budget lines, SEC filings, FDA decisions, the Federal Register, patents, and sanctions lists, plus market data (options and sentiment) to detect when the tape already believes it. Everything a score is built from is shown on the signal's detail page.

The score is fully published: it is the percentile of the award's size within the historical scored population, the only ranker that survives out-of-sample testing on our own ledger. Context (materiality against revenue, sector and agency history, macro regime) is shown on every signal's detail page as diagnostics derived from realized outcomes. The realized results are on the track record page, losing rows included; the transparency is the moat.

The tools, not the information. Every company and every record is visible on both plans, public or private; the plans differ in tools, formats and specific datasets. Capture is the capture toolset: company profiles for any federal contractor, the recompete calendar, competitor discovery with the My Company comparison, departments research, events browsers with a calendar view, an any-target watchlist with a daily brief, and CSV export of record surfaces. Terminal includes everything in Capture and adds the investor datasets and tools: model signals and scores with the full reasoning, intraday delivery, a screener, portfolio tracking, rule-builder alerts, insider trades and analyst grades, the REST API and the raw scored dataset. Current prices are on the pricing page; Terminal has an annual prepaid option.

Yes, one click in your account page. No prorating tricks, no retention dark patterns. Annual plans simply run to the end of the paid period.

No. Portfolio tracking is manual: you log positions, we score them and alert you when the historical edge fades. We never ask for brokerage credentials.

Neither. Subscriptions are the entire business model, which keeps the incentives pointed one way: the signal has to stay sharp enough that you keep paying for it.

It's better than audited: it's live. The numbers on the track record page recompute from realized outcomes, use fixed buckets assigned at signal time, and include every bucket that underperformed. Subscribe and check the feed against the record yourself.