5 Free SEC Filing Tools Every Investor Should Know in 2025

Professional investors spend real money on tooling.

Bloomberg can run $24,000+ per year. AlphaSense can be $10,000+ per seat. Even “cheaper” options like BamSEC are hundreds of dollars annually. That kind of budget makes sense if you’re running a fund, less so if you’re managing your own portfolio or just starting out.

The good news: the underlying information is the same for everyone. The SEC makes filings public for free. The only real question is how comfortably you can get to that data.

This guide walks through five free tools that, together, give you a surprisingly complete research stack in 2025. We’ll look at what each one is actually good at, where it falls short, and how to combine them so you can monitor filings, study companies, and follow insiders without paying for a terminal.

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The Quick Comparison

Here’s the high-level view before we dive into details:

Tool	Best For	Real-Time	Watchlists	Insider Trading	Mobile
Earnings Feed	Live monitoring, company profiles	✅ Instant	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	✅ Excellent
SEC EDGAR	Official source, complete archive	❌ Delayed	❌ No	✅ Yes	❌ Poor
OpenInsider	Form 4 insider transactions	⚠️ Near real-time	❌ No	✅ Specialized	⚠️ Basic
Last10K	Financial ratios, Excel exports	❌ Daily updates	❌ No	❌ Limited	❌ Desktop
QuiverQuant	Alternative data, Congress trades	⚠️ Varies	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ Good

Think of this less as “pick one” and more as “what job do I need done today?”

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1. Earnings Feed

Website: earningsfeed.com
Best for: Real-time filing alerts, tracking companies, mobile-friendly monitoring

Earnings Feed is what happens when you take the raw SEC feed and wrap it in a modern interface. Instead of polling EDGAR and clicking through lists, you get a live stream of filings that updates as soon as documents hit the SEC.

The core experience is simple: a real-time feed, company pages, and watchlists.

• The live filings feed shows every 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, S-1, 13D/13G, and Form 4 as it arrives, usually within seconds.
• Company profiles give you a clean overview: recent filings, basic stock data, and company details in one place.
• With watchlists, you can follow a set of tickers and see just their filings in a focused stream, instead of wading through the entire market.
• There are also form-type hubs (like 10-Ks, 8-Ks, and insider trades) plus filters by industry or exchange if you prefer to slice the universe that way.

The big selling points are speed and usability. You don’t need to wire up RSS feeds, and you don’t have to be at a desk—Earnings Feed is built to be checked on a phone in a couple of taps.

On the flip side, it’s not trying to be a full-blown document workstation yet. You can jump into filings quickly, but you can’t run full-text searches or redline versions inside the app. For deep document comparison, you still lean on EDGAR or paid tools.

Best way to use it:
Treat Earnings Feed as your radar. Put your portfolio and watchlist names into a list, glance at it during the day, and let the feed tell you when something important files.

You can start here: Create a free watchlist →

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2. SEC EDGAR

Website: sec.gov/edgar
Best for: The official source and full historical record

EDGAR is where all roads lead. Every 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, proxy, registration statement, and Form 4 is filed here first. All other tools are essentially nicer front-ends on top of this database.

The upside is obvious: you get complete coverage and official documents straight from the regulator. You can search by company name, ticker, or CIK, and you can pull up a company’s entire filing history from the mid-1990s onward. For anything that looks unusual in another tool, EDGAR is the place you go to double-check.

The downsides are also obvious the first time you use it:

• The interface is dated and click-heavy.
• It’s easy to get lost in long lists of filings.
• There are no native watchlists or alerts—you have to refresh pages or set up RSS feeds yourself.
• On mobile, it’s barely usable unless you’re very patient.

EDGAR is best treated as the source of truth, not your daily driver. Use it when you need the original PDF or HTML exactly as filed, when you’re hunting for older documents, or when you want to verify something you saw elsewhere.

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3. OpenInsider

Website: openinsider.com
Best for: Following insider buying and selling (Form 4s)

If your main curiosity is, “What are insiders doing with their own stock?”, OpenInsider is built for you.

Form 4 filings are the reports insiders must file when they buy or sell shares. OpenInsider takes that stream and turns it into something you can actually work with:

• A consolidated transaction feed so you can see insider trades across the market.
• Tools to highlight cluster buys, where multiple insiders buy around the same time—often more meaningful than one person acting alone.
• The ability to drill into specific insiders and see their history across time and companies.
• Filters by role, transaction size, and other parameters.

It’s a focused, single-purpose tool—and that’s the trade-off. You don’t get 10-Ks, 10-Qs, or 8-Ks here. The UI is functional but old-school. There’s no native watchlist concept; you’ll be leaning on filters and manual checks.

Used well, though, OpenInsider is a great way to spot situations where management is committing real money, and then use other tools to investigate the underlying story.

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4. Last10K

Website: last10k.com
Best for: Getting clean fundamentals and exporting data to Excel

Last10K sits partway between raw filings and a full data terminal. It parses SEC filings and extracts the fundamentals—revenue, margins, EPS, balance sheet items—and presents them in a structured, analyst-friendly way.

Instead of hand-typing numbers from a 10-K into a spreadsheet, you can:

• Pull up financial tables with multi-year history.
• Use ratio views to quickly see profitability, leverage, and efficiency metrics.
• Export what you need to Excel or CSV and do the rest of your work in your own models.

The free tier is enough to get a lot done, especially if you’re comfortable working with smaller batches of data and focusing on one company at a time. Some screening and advanced features sit behind a paywall, and updates are generally daily, not second-by-second—but for fundamental research, that cadence is usually fine.

Last10K is very much a desktop experience. You’re not going to live here on your phone. Think of it as your “get the numbers out of SEC filings and into Excel” assistant.

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5. QuiverQuant

Website: quiverquant.com
Best for: Alternative data and political/“edge case” signals

QuiverQuant doesn’t start from SEC filings; it starts from the idea that interesting information leaks out in public but underused places: Congressional trading disclosures, government contracts, lobbying reports, and so on.

On top of that, it does also surface insider trading data, but the real differentiator is the alternative datasets:

• Which members of Congress are trading which stocks, and when.
• Which companies are landing large government contracts.
• Who is ramping up or down lobbying spend.
• Patent data and other non-standard signals.

Update speed varies by dataset, but the point isn’t “millisecond-level news” so much as “what is the government and political class doing around this name?”

You wouldn’t use QuiverQuant as your primary SEC reader. You would use it when you want to add a political or policy dimension to your research, or when you’re specifically interested in themes like “Congress trades” or “government contractors.”

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Putting It Together: A Free Research Workflow

None of these tools is perfect on its own. Together, they’re surprisingly powerful.

A practical way to combine them:

• For daily awareness, use Earnings Feed. Let it tell you what just filed for the companies you care about, and give you a clean way to open those filings quickly.
• For definitive documents and older history, fall back to SEC EDGAR. Anything that looks odd or is missing elsewhere, you confirm here.
• For insider behavior, split duties: Earnings Feed for quick Form 4 awareness and OpenInsider when you want to screen or dig deeper into patterns and clusters.
• For financial modeling and quick ratios, use Last10K to extract and export the numbers from filings, then work in Excel.
• For alternative angles, dip into QuiverQuant to see whether politicians or government contracts are moving around a name.

You’re not trying to memorize every interface. You’re just deciding “what job am I doing right now?” and then picking the lowest-friction tool for that job.

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When (If Ever) to Pay for Tools

Free tools cover a lot of ground, but there are legitimate reasons to layer on something paid:

• You’re doing heavy due diligence and need fast full-text search inside filings, side-by-side comparisons, and clean export of tables. (This is where a tool like BamSEC comes in.)
• You need everything in one place—market data, news, broker research, filings, transcripts—and you’re in a professional role where a terminal (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, etc.) is a standard line item.
• Time is more expensive than software. If a paid tool saves you hours every week and your day job is analysis, the ROI is straightforward.

If you’re managing your own money, still learning, or running a lean setup, there’s no reason to start there. In 2025, the free stack is genuinely good.

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The $0 SEC Research Stack

A simple, effective combination looks like this:

Purpose	Tool	Why It’s in the Stack
Real-time monitoring	Earnings Feed	Fast alerts, watchlists, works great on mobile
Official archive	SEC EDGAR	Canonical source, full filing history
Insider tracking	OpenInsider	Deep Form 4 screening and history
Fundamentals & exports	Last10K	Clean financial tables and Excel-ready data
Alternative/political data	QuiverQuant	Congress trades, contracts, and other edge datasets

Total cost: $0. The only real investment is learning to use each tool for the specific thing it’s best at.

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Get Started

If you want to put this into practice today, a good first step is to get your monitoring in place:

1. Create a free Earnings Feed watchlist with your portfolio and watchlist names.
2. Bookmark SEC EDGAR for those times you need the original document.
3. When you see insider activity in Earnings Feed’s insider hub, pop over to OpenInsider to see the bigger pattern.

The filings are public. The tools are free. The edge comes from actually paying attention.