Is there a free insider trading API?

What "free" actually gets you

"Free tier," "free trial," and "no credit card" are not the same claim, and providers mix them freely. The table below separates whether a provider's free access is recurring (an allowance that resets, indefinitely) from a one-time trial (a fixed budget that runs out and doesn't come back), and notes what's actually reachable at $0 — because several providers gate their most useful endpoints behind a paid tier even while marketing a free one.

SecuritiesDB, API Ninjas and InsiderScreener.com checked directly from their own pricing/docs pages as of September 2026. sec-api.io, EODHD, EdgarTools, Earnings Feed and SEC Daily API checked July 2026 (see /compare for the wider comparison). Vendors change pricing often — verify current terms before deciding.

Provider by provider

SecuritiesDB

SecuritiesDB's own page titles itself "Free Insider Trading API" and its meta description says plainly "No API key required." That part is accurate: a single GET endpoint, /api/v1/stocks/{ticker}/insider-activity, returns a net buy/sell ratio and recent Form 4 transactions for one ticker at a time, with no signup and no key. What the page doesn't publish anywhere is a rate limit, a daily or monthly cap, or an SLA — so it's genuinely open, but there's no documented guarantee about how much you can pull before something throttles or changes. It's also narrower in scope than a general insider-data API: one endpoint, one ticker per call, no cross-company search or filter, no webhooks, no bulk history.

API Ninjas

API Ninjas' Free plan is a real $0/mo tier with no credit card required, allowing 100 API calls/hour on its "free servers." Its insider trading product is actually three endpoints: /v1/insidertransactions (search/filter across companies and insiders) is available on the free plan, but /v1/insiderdetails (full transaction history for one named insider) and /v1/insiderslist (every insider at a company) are both marked "Premium only" in API Ninjas' own documentation. Even on the free endpoint, the limit and offset parameters — which control how many results a call returns and where it starts — are also flagged Premium-only. In raw hourly volume (up to 2,400 calls/day if called constantly) it can outpace Form4API's 500/day, but two-thirds of the insider product and result pagination sit behind a paid plan.

InsiderScreener.com

InsiderScreener.com has no free tier of any kind. Its cheapest recurring plan, API Starter, is SEK321.30/mo at a promotional rate (from a stated SEK459/mo), for 1,000 credits and 1 request/second. What it markets as a "Trial pass" is a one-time SEK919 purchase for 2,500 credits over 14 days that does not auto-renew — a paid, single-use trial rather than a free one, and by that measure a worse entry point than sec-api.io's free (if limited) 100-call trial.

Ranked, most to least free

Ordered by how much a developer can actually build and evaluate against at $0, not by raw call count alone:

1. Form4API — recurring 500/day, no card, every endpoint included.
2. EdgarTools — unlimited and no key, but a local library you run and poll, not a hosted API.
3. API Ninjas — recurring and no card, but only 1 of 3 insider endpoints and no result pagination without paying.
4. SecuritiesDB — no key needed, but one narrow endpoint with no published rate limit to plan around.
5. SEC Daily API — recurring 1,000/month, but poll-only and market-hours-only ingestion.
6. EODHD — recurring free tier exists, but it doesn't include insider data at all.
7. sec-api.io — free, but a one-time 100-call trial, not recurring.
8. Earnings Feed — no $0 tier found; entry pricing starts at $10/mo.
9. InsiderScreener.com — no free tier at all; its "trial" is a one-time paid purchase.

Why the difference matters

A one-time trial and a recurring daily allowance answer different questions. A 100-call trial tells you whether the API returns the fields you expect. A 500-calls-a-day allowance that never expires is enough to build and run something real against — a screener that polls periodically, a webhook receiver you can actually test with live data over days or weeks, a backtest against real historical values — without hitting a wall on day one or needing a card on file before you've decided the data is worth paying for.

That's the specific gap Form4API's free tier is built to close: 500 requests/day, 15,000/month, full endpoints including post-trade return fields, one read-only webhook, and full data history at 20 pages of query depth — ongoing, with no credit card and no expiry.

Frequently asked questions