Form4API vs edgar.tools

Free tier: 500/day forever vs a 14-day trial

edgar.tools positions its free access around a 14-day trial — a fixed evaluation window, not a daily allowance that resets. That answers a narrower question than an ongoing free tier does: it tells you whether the tool works, but not whether it holds up over weeks of real use, because the clock runs out regardless of how many calls you've actually made.

Form4API's free tier is 500 calls a day (about 15,000/month), indefinitely, with no credit card required — every core endpoint and post-trade return field included, not a stripped-down subset. For building and testing something real over more than two weeks — a screener, a webhook receiver, a backtest against historical data — that's a materially different evaluation budget.

MCP tool access: free-tier reach vs tier-gating

Both products lead with MCP as a distribution channel. Form4API's MCP server ships 35 tools plus 6 ready-made research prompts, and 22 of those 35 tools work on the free plan — the free tier is a real, usable subset, not a locked demo.

edgar.tools describes its own MCP tools as tier-gated, per its public positioning — meaning some or most tools require a paid plan before you can call them at all. The exact split of what's reachable on a trial versus a paid tier could not be independently confirmed for this page (see below), so treat that as a question to ask edgar.tools directly rather than an assumption to carry into a purchase decision.

What could and could not be verified

Every other comparison page in this cluster is built by fetching the competitor's current pricing and docs pages directly. That was attempted here too, and it failed: edgar.tools/pricing and edgar.tools/docs both returned a Cloudflare "Just a moment..." JavaScript challenge page (HTTP 403, header Cf-Mitigated: challenge) to every automated request, after a complete TLS handshake — confirming it's a real bot check on their side, not a network problem on ours.

So this page states only what Form4API can confirm about itself (sourced directly from its own pricing config and MCP server documentation) and what edgar.tools states about its own positioning (MCP-first, tier-gated tools, 14-day trial). It deliberately does not carry specific edgar.tools dollar figures, because they could not be checked at time of writing and a prior internal check found edgar.tools' own public tool-count claims inconsistent across its pages. Verify current terms directly at edgar.tools before deciding — and if programmatic verification of a vendor's claims matters to your evaluation, note that Form4API's own pricing, docs, and status pages return normally to any request, with no browser challenge.

When edgar.tools may be the better fit

Being upfront about where a competitor may fit better is the point of this cluster, even where its own numbers are hard to verify. Consider edgar.tools over Form4API if:

• You want an MCP-first, tools-based workflow across the broader SEC filing corpus, not just insider transactions — that appears to be its core design, per its own positioning.
• A short, focused evaluation window works for you. A 14-day trial is enough to answer "does this tool return what I need" even if it isn't enough for weeks of production testing.
• Insider data specifically isn't the priority. Form4API is deliberately narrow (Form 4, Form 144, 13F-HR, Congress); if your work spans the wider SEC corpus, a broader-scope MCP tool may fit better — verify current coverage directly on edgar.tools.

Side-by-side

Form4API figures sourced directly from its own pricing config and MCP documentation, checked September 2026. edgar.tools cells describe its own stated positioning where confirmable; every other cell is marked as not independently verified, because edgar.tools' pricing and docs pages returned a bot-verification challenge to every automated request. Verify current terms directly at edgar.tools before deciding.

Frequently asked questions