There are two very different reasons people reach for SEC data, and sec-api.io is built for the harder one. If you came here comparing options, the first thing to figure out is which job you actually have: do you need parsed, standardized financials — or do you just need the filings themselves, reliably, without building a crawler against EDGAR's rate limits? The answer decides whether sec-api.io is worth its subscription for you or whether a pay-per-run actor does the job for a fraction of the cost.
What sec-api.io actually sells you
sec-api.io is not "an EDGAR proxy." Its value is the layer it adds on top of EDGAR. The headline capabilities are the things that are genuinely painful to build yourself:
- Standardized financial statements. It converts XBRL into normalized JSON so a 10-K's income statement comes back as queryable line items, not a tag soup you have to map per company.
- Full-text search across filings going back years, with filters by form type, date, ticker and CIK.
- Specialized extractors — insider trading (Forms 3/4/5), 13F holdings, executive compensation, IPOs/S-1s, 8-K events — returned as structured records.
- A real-time stream of new filings as they hit EDGAR, which matters for trading and monitoring use cases.
That is a lot of curation, and it is priced like curation: a recurring subscription with a monthly query allowance, where heavier endpoints and higher volumes push you into higher tiers. If those parsed outputs are your product, that price is fair — you are buying the parsing you would otherwise build and maintain.
Where a pay-per-run EDGAR scraper fits
The SEC EDGAR scraper actor on Apify targets the second job: pull filings and their metadata on demand, pay for the run, and move on. No monthly plan, no per-query budget to ration. You hand it tickers or CIKs and form types; it returns the filing index entries and documents as clean JSON or CSV.
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/renzomacar~sec-edgar-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"tickers": ["AAPL", "MSFT"],
"formTypes": ["10-K", "8-K"],
"fromDate": "2024-01-01"
}'This is the right tool when you want filing documents, accession numbers, filing dates and links — the raw material — rather than a vendor's normalized financial model. If you have your own parsing pipeline (or an LLM that reads the filing text), the scraper feeds it directly without you paying twice for parsing you do not use.
Pricing models side by side
sec-api.io
- Monthly plan, tiered by volume
- Query budget you ration across endpoints
- Premium extractors cost more
- Carries whether or not you run it this month
EDGAR scraper actor
- Free-tier platform credits to start
- Pay only for the job you run
- No recurring commitment
- $0 between jobs
The economics flip on usage shape. A team querying standardized fundamentals every day, all month, gets more from a subscription. A team doing a quarterly bulk pull, or backfilling a research dataset once, usually pays less per-run and avoids carrying a plan they touch twice a year.
Capability ledger: who wins each line
| Job | sec-api.io | EDGAR scraper actor |
|---|---|---|
| Raw filing documents & metadata | Yes | Yes — core job, cheaper at one-off |
| Standardized XBRL financials | Yes (its moat) | No — raw filings, parse yourself |
| Insider / 13F / comp extractors | Yes, pre-parsed | Filing text only |
| Full-text search across history | Yes, indexed | You query by ticker/CIK/form |
| Real-time new-filing stream | Yes | Scheduled re-runs, not live |
| One-off bulk backfill cost | Subscription overhead | Pay once, walk away |
| Feeding your own parser / LLM | Pay for parsing twice | Raw input, no double pay |
The honest recommendation
Don't switch off sec-api.io to save money if its parsing is the work. Standardized financials, the insider-trading and 13F extractors, indexed full-text search and the live filing stream are real engineering that you would have to rebuild and keep correct as EDGAR's formats drift. If you query those daily, the subscription earns its keep.
But a large share of "SEC API" searches are really "get me these filings without getting throttled by EDGAR." For that — a research backfill, an occasional document pull, feeding raw filing text to your own model — a per-run scraper is the un-bundled, cheaper answer. You pay for the crawl you needed, not a year of capabilities you will not call.
Pull EDGAR filings on demand, pay per run
Hand it tickers or CIKs and form types, get filing documents and metadata as JSON or CSV. Start on Apify's free-tier credits — no subscription, no query budget.
Open the SEC EDGAR scraper → Or get done-for-you leadsDisclosure: links to Apify on this page are affiliate links. If you create a paid account through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We recommend the actor because we build and ship it on Apify ourselves. We are not affiliated with sec-api.io; product and pricing details reflect publicly reported information and may have changed since publication. SEC EDGAR data is provided by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.