Some of the biggest banks have priced written research cheaply in order to lure clients to pricier premium services—a “perfectly legitimate” business model, says Sanford Bragg, principal at Integrity Research, which helps the buy side find research.

For written analysis, Morgan Stanley charges $25,000 for 10 users, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has offered the same price for four logins. At Bank of America Corp., it’s $30,000 for five users with an additional point system for querying analysts and attending events. Buying 50 points costs $20,000. A one-on-one meeting with corporate executives is $150 per attendee to arrange. These prices are according to fund managers who asked not to be identified because the agreements are confidential.

JPMorgan, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America declined to comment. Deutsche Bank and the European Securities and Markets Authority didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.

The new rules mandated by the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or MiFID II, have generated complaints about fairness from every corner. Detractors say MiFID II favors big banks over smaller brokerages and independent research analysts; bigger asset managers over smaller ones; U.S. firms over European ones, and large-cap stocks over smaller ones. In short, Goliath over David.

Big banks have a few advantages. One, their coverage is more comprehensive. Two, because of their diverse revenue streams, they can afford to make less money off research. Among top-tier clients, 60 percent of their external research and advisory budget in Europe goes to global investment banks, according to data provider Greenwich Associates.

“Some of our competitors as a result have increased the cross-subsidization of their research departments from their banking,” said Colin McGranahan, head of research at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. “What it’s causing in some instances is sort of a return to a situation we try to correct two decades ago where banking is now paying for a much larger portion of the research department and is exerting more influence over how the research department acts.”

In the second year under Mifid II, the market is starting to stabilize. After slashing equity research budgets by 19 percent last year, large European institutions are planning just another 6 percent cut in 2019, with the average budget at $8.3 million, Greenwich data show.

Meantime, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority has said that it’s examining whether prices that are too cheap still constitute inducement; it’s due to issue a report on the topic in the third quarter. The agency declined to comment.

Amid the complaints, there’s a bright side for some fund managers.

“We actually discovered it’s quite nice to have fewer phone calls, fewer emails,” says Thomas Brown, a London-based fund manager at Miton Group, which oversees 4.6 billion pounds. “We get more time to actually do our own work.”