A friend of mine spent $2,400/year on a financial data subscription.
I showed him FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) and SEC EDGAR. Same data. Free.
He cancelled the subscription that afternoon.
Here's my curated list of free datasets that compete with paid alternatives.
Financial & Economic Data
| Free Source | Replaces | Saves |
|---|---|---|
| FRED | Bloomberg economic data | $2K+/yr |
| SEC EDGAR | Capital IQ filings | $5K+/yr |
| Yahoo Finance API | Refinitiv stock data | $3K+/yr |
| World Bank Data | EIU country reports | $1K+/yr |
| Eurostat | Statista EU data | $600/yr |
| IMF Data | Moody's macro data | $2K+/yr |
Health & Pharma
| Free Source | What You Get |
|---|---|
| OpenFDA | Drug events, recalls, labels — 15M+ records |
| ClinicalTrials.gov | 450K+ clinical trials |
| PubMed | 36M+ biomedical papers |
| WHO GHO | Global health indicators |
| CDC WONDER | US mortality, natality data |
Geospatial & Satellite
| Free Source | What You Get |
|---|---|
| NASA EarthData | Satellite imagery, climate |
| Copernicus | Sentinel satellite data |
| OpenStreetMap | Complete world map data |
| USGS Earth Explorer | Landsat imagery |
NLP & Text
| Free Source | Size | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Common Crawl | 250B+ pages | Web corpus |
| Wikipedia Dumps | 60M+ articles | Knowledge base |
| arXiv | 2M+ papers | Research corpus |
| Project Gutenberg | 70K+ books | Literary analysis |
Computer Vision
| Free Source | Images | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| COCO | 330K | Object detection |
| Open Images | 9M+ | Classification |
| Unsplash Dataset | 3M+ | Photo analysis |
The Pattern
Government agencies, international organizations, and research institutions produce the highest quality datasets. They're funded by taxpayers and mandated to share.
Private data companies often just clean and repackage these same sources.
Full Collection
I maintain a comprehensive list with API endpoints, rate limits, and code examples:
- Awesome Free Datasets — 100+ curated datasets
- Awesome Free Research APIs — 200+ free APIs
- Free API Directory — Categorized API list
What paid data source would you love a free alternative for? I'll try to find one. 👇
More research tools: github.com/Spinov001
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