Why in the world does it cost over 1,000 dollars to get an activity log for an airplane?
I’m betting by “activity log,” you’re referring to a >5 year history for an aircraft.
Like many things, the price is associated with the cost of being able to offer the service rather than the actual cost of delivery.
It’s a really complex and expensive service to offer. We maintain flight records for nearly 150,000,000 flights in our database. In order to operate this service reliably and continually grow, we operate data centers in three different locations around the world and employ a staff of over a dozen developers and operations engineers to run this infrastructure. We have a 24/7/365 operation to ensure connectivity to over a dozen data feeds, offices in two cities, and require a large operation in order to operate the business.
On top of all that, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on servers, including redundant equipment in the event of a technical or environmental (e.g., hurricane) disaster to ensure that data is never lost.
The cost of commercial services reflects those expenses and the quality and consistency of the data is commensurate with the effort put into the service.