Competitive intelligence when you have no CI team.
Most of what an enterprise platform sells you is already public. If you are a clinical-stage oncology company with one lead asset and nobody whose job is competitive intelligence, you can cover eighty per cent of the ground for nothing. Here is exactly how — and here is the part where it stops working, which is the part nobody writes down.
The free stack, named
Every item below is a primary or near-primary source. Used together and read consistently, they are a real watch programme.
- ClinicalTrials.gov
- The registry of record. Who is running what, in which phase, with which primary completion date. Free, authoritative, and the single most under-used source in the field.
- PubMed / Europe PMC
- Your competitors publish before they announce. Mechanism papers and early-phase results land here months ahead of a press release.
- SEC EDGAR
- 8-K filings carry material events before the trade press writes them up, and they are legally constrained to be accurate. For any US-listed competitor this is the fastest reliable channel.
- FDA and EMA newsrooms
- Approvals, designations, CHMP opinions. Primary, dated, free.
- Endpoints News, Fierce Biotech, BioPharma Dive
- The daily trade press. Excellent for deals, financings, personnel moves and the shape of a story. Secondary by nature — good for detection, not for a claim you will act on.
- Company newsrooms and IR pages
- The pivotal readout is announced here first, usually before market open. Most watch programmes skip these entirely and only see the coverage.
- Google Patents / Espacenet
- Composition and method filings reveal direction years before a trial registers.
- Google Alerts
- Free, crude, and still the cheapest way to not miss your own molecule’s name.
When this is genuinely enough
We would rather say this plainly than sell you something you do not need. The public stack is sufficient when any of the following is true:
- Your competitive set is small and stable — two or three named programmes you already know by heart.
- Somebody on your team reads primary literature by reflex and has the hours to do it weekly.
- You are pre-clinical, and the moves that matter to you are years from a readout.
- You need the raw record rather than an interpretation — you have the judgement, you just need the inputs.
If you recognise yourself there, take the list above, set the alerts, and spend your money elsewhere.
Where the free stack actually breaks
It does not break on coverage. The sources are there. It breaks on three things, and they are worth naming precisely because they are the only honest reason to pay anyone.
It gives you events, not implications. A registry entry tells you a competitor started a Phase 3. It does not tell you whether that changes your comparator assumptions, your positioning, or the evidentiary bar you will be measured against. The gap between the event and the decision is the whole job.
It costs the hours you do not have. A watch that covers registries, filings, newsrooms, literature and patents across a competitive set is several hours a week, every week, forever. It is not the reading that fails — it is the consistency. The week the readout lands is the week you were closing a financing.
Silence is invisible. The hardest signal to catch is a trial that quietly stopped enrolling, a completion date that slipped twice, a programme that vanished from a pipeline page. Nothing announces an absence. You only see it if somebody is comparing this month's record to last month's.
The four options, side by side
| Option | Cost | What you get | The right case |
|---|---|---|---|
| The public stack, read by you | Free | Everything above, plus your evenings | You have the time, and the judgement, to read it yourself |
| An enterprise data platform | Subscription, seat-based, annual — vendors do not publish list pricing | Breadth across all of pharma, structured and searchable | You have an analyst whose job is to sit inside it |
| A CI consulting project | Per project, scoped and quoted | A deep one-off answer to a defined question | You need a decision-grade study once, not a standing watch |
| A managed analyst (this is us) | From $2,000/mo, published | The reading, done and delivered as a brief | The question recurs, and nobody in-house owns it |
What Prognyx is — and is not
This matters because we are routinely mis-filed. Prognyx is not a platform. There is no login, no dashboard, no database to search, no seats to provision. We do not compete with the tools above on breadth, and we do not resell anyone's data.
What you buy is a person's output. We watch a competitive space you name — a target, a mechanism, an indication — and send briefs when something moves. Every claim traces to the primary record: the NCT, the filing, the label, the abstract. When something cannot be confirmed from public sources, the brief says so in those words rather than smoothing it over. That discipline is the product.
Oncology only, deliberately. One named analyst, publicly accountable: Rali Filali, M.D. candidate — fifth-year medical student. Not a physician, not an oncologist — the credential is a candidacy, and we say so on the about page rather than let it be inferred generously. The method is published, including the audit gate every brief has to clear.
How to decide in five minutes
Ask one question: in the last quarter, did a competitor move in a way we learned about late?
If the answer is no, the free stack is working. Keep it and stop reading.
If the answer is yes, the failure was not access to information — it was that nobody owned the reading. That is a staffing gap, and it has three solutions: hire an analyst, buy a platform and give somebody the time, or delegate the reading. We are the third.
Month to month · no lock-in · no seat minimum
From $2,000 / month
A monthly retainer, scoped to your pipeline: continuous watch across your targets, mechanisms and indications, plus the briefs that come out of it. That is a fraction of an enterprise platform, where CI subscriptions run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year and up.
See the next move first.
Tell us the one asset you'd want watched. We'll send back a sample competitive brief on it — sourced, sharp, no strings.
Request a sample brief → How we workLast reviewed 29 July 2026. This page describes public and commercial tools from their public information; it does not claim to be exhaustive and invents no pricing. Prognyx has no affiliation with any of them and takes no referral fee. Names and trademarks referenced belong to their owners. Verify current scope and pricing with each vendor directly.