A permanent price war is not the outcome I would expect for $FICO. The more common pattern when a monopoly becomes a durable duopoly is: monopoly pricing → aggressive entrant discounting → incumbent response → market-share rebalancing → eventually more rational oligopoly pricing. FICO already appears to be in the first two stages. What is happening right now is genuine price competition. TransUnion announced $0.99 per VantageScore 4.0 mortgage score in March 2026. Equifax separately offered VantageScore 4.0 at $4.50 through 2027 and even offered it free to some customers buying FICO scores. FICO, meanwhile, introduced its direct licensing program, offering either $10 per score, or a performance model of $4.95 per score + $33 when the loan funds. They explicitly said the $4.95 price represented roughly a 50% reduction in the average per-score charge going into resellers. So this isn't theoretical. The arrival of VantageScore has already forced a change in FICO's pricing architecture. And FHFA now lets approved lenders choose between Classic FICO and VantageScore 4.0, even on a loan-by-loan basis, which makes competition more meaningful than if lenders had to commit permanently to one system. Historical analogies $T vs MCI/Sprint. Initial competition produced dramatic price reductions; later competitors often moved headline prices together while fighting through discounts. $Visa/ $Mastercard. Two dominant networks coexist with enormous margins; fees did not collapse because network effects and switching constraints protect economics. $SPGI / $MCO / Fitch. Competition emerged, but incumbents remained deeply embedded and highly profitable because customers need recognized standards $KO / $PEP. Strong brands allow both firms to raise prices while competing heavily elsewhere. The AT&T example is particularly interesting. After AT&T's virtual monopoly weakened, the FCC reported that interstate long-distance rates fell more than 40% after 1984. But competition didn't remain a simple price war forever. By the 1990s, the FCC observed that AT&T basic-rate increases were frequently matched almost immediately by MCI and Sprint. At the same time, the companies fought much harder over attractive high-volume customers through discounts: effective rates for heavier users fell roughly 15–28% between 1991 and 1995. That is exactly the kind of equilibrium I could eventually imagine in credit scores: FICO raises list price 4%. Vantage raises 3%. But Rocket Mortgage gets a huge volume rebate from Vantage. FICO responds with a negotiated contract. Small lenders pay something closer to list price. In other words, headline pricing can rise while effective pricing remains competitive. Visa/Mastercard shows why two players don't necessarily destroy pricing power Payment networks are another useful comparison because the product is a very small cost relative to the economic transaction, while network acceptance and installed infrastructure matter enormously. Despite substantial competition between networks, Federal Reserve data show average network fees per transaction rose approximately +32% in 12 years. So Visa and Mastercard didn't spend decades continuously undercutting each other toward marginal cost. Why? Because customers don't choose exclusively on price. They care about acceptance + reliability + infrastructure + historical data + integration + risk + brand recognition. That's also true for FICO. A lender probably isn't going to change its credit-risk ecosystem to save $0.50 on a score unless the total economic benefit is meaningful. Moody's/S&P may actually be the best analogy Credit ratings are particularly similar to credit scores because you're buying a trusted standardized opinion of credit risk that is embedded in regulation, contracts, models and financial infrastructure. There are ten SEC-recognized NRSRO rating organizations today, yet as of the end of 2025 S&P had about 1.078 million outstanding ratings and Moody's about 684,000, versus roughly 2.193 million across all NRSROs. Together that's around 80% of the outstanding ratings count. New competition didn't commoditize the product. An old SEC submission from Fitch is revealing: "Fitch argued that its emergence as a third serious competitor to Moody's/S&P introduced price competition and innovation." Yet decades later Moody's and S&P remain enormously important because recognition and embeddedness matter. What could happen to FICO from now: 100% FICO → 70% FICO / 30% Vantage might be much more realistic than: 100% FICO → 50/50 → prices collapse toward zero. But FICO has one important disadvantage VantageScore is jointly owned by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. That changes the economics considerably. The bureaus don't necessarily need to maximize the standalone royalty on VantageScore. They can make money from: credit-report data → mortgage reports → related products → lender relationships → other analytics. Consequently, they potentially have an incentive to price VantageScore very aggressively to weaken FICO's royalty extraction. TransUnion's $0.99 offer illustrates exactly this possibility. That's more dangerous for FICO than competing against another standalone scoring company that needed to generate a 70% operating margin from the score itself. I therefore expect two different periods 2026-2029: unusually intense competition This is when Vantage has the strongest incentive to sacrifice price for market share. Imagine Vantage currently has 10% and wants 30%. An extra dollar of price today is much less important than convincing Rocket, UWM, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and large resellers to redesign processes around Vantage. Once those systems are built, Vantage becomes much harder to remove. So during this period I would expect Vantage price << FICO price and FICO responding through discounts, direct licensing, contract changes and potentially lower net pricing. That is probably the greatest risk to FICO's historical pricing-power story. But at 60/40 or 70/30, the incentives change Suppose eventually FICO = 65–70% Vantage = 30–35%. At that stage, Vantage no longer has as much incentive to destroy industry pricing. Consider the game theory. If FICO charges $5 and Vantage charges $4 both earn attractive economics. If Vantage cuts to $2 and FICO responds with $2.50; Vantage captures some share but destroys the value of the entire market. Then FICO cuts again. Both become worse off. There is therefore a natural incentive in many mature duopolies for price competition to become less aggressive once market shares stabilize. This does not require collusion. Competitors can independently observe one another's pricing and realize that constantly undercutting is economically unattractive. Visa/Mastercard, Coke/Pepsi, Moody's/S&P and many airline markets exhibit versions of that behavior. There is one reason FICO/Vantage may remain more competitive than those examples FHFA explicitly wants competition. Its stated rationale for introducing multiple credit scores includes promoting competition and lowering costs. And crucially lenders can currently choose the scoring model loan by loan. That's different from Visa/Mastercard. A mortgage lender doesn't necessarily have to abandon FICO completely. It could say: FICO gives us the better economics for this borrower → FICO. and: Vantage gives us better economics here → Vantage. That creates ongoing price elasticity. So I wouldn't assume FICO eventually returns to its previous monopoly pricing behavior. What I think the most likely equilibrium looks like It is not FICO $10 → Vantage $1 → FICO $1 → permanent commodity pricing. And probably not FICO $10 → Vantage $9 → both increase 10% every year forever. More likely: Phase 1 FICO monopoly price ↓ Vantage enters very cheaply ↓ FICO discounts/restructures pricing ↓ Vantage gains meaningful share Phase 2 FICO remains premium incumbent Vantage remains cheaper challenger ↓ both gradually raise prices ↓ large lenders negotiate substantial rebates The result could therefore be: lower price level + lower pricing growth than monopoly FICO, but still excellent economics. And there's an important upside to this thesis: FICO doesn't need to retain a monopoly for the Scores business to remain an extraordinary business. If FICO ultimately holds, say, 70% of a two-player market, with high switching costs, regulatory acceptance, decades of historical performance data and pricing increasing roughly GDP+ instead of 10–20% annually, it can still generate extremely attractive returns. The part of the FICO thesis that I think has genuinely changed is therefore not "FICO pricing power disappears", but "The era in which FICO could repeatedly raise mortgage-score prices almost irrespective of competitive response may be ending." Historically, the AT&T example suggests the first few years after monopoly can be painful for price; the Visa/Mastercard and Moody's/S&P examples suggest that once the oligopoly settles, rational pricing can return-but probably from a lower base and at a slower rate.