Free Due Diligence Tool: How to Run Due Diligence for Free
Most due-diligence software is priced for a corporate budget — a few thousand dollars a year before you've screened a single company. That pricing makes sense for a bank's compliance desk and no sense at all for a founder checking a supplier, an analyst sizing up a target, or anyone who just needs to know who's on the other side of a deal. The good news: the records that real diligence is built on are public and free, and you no longer need an enterprise contract to search them. A free due diligence tool like OpenDD puts the same primary sources a professional would use behind one search.
The short answer to "is there a free due diligence tool?" is yes — and it's free precisely because the underlying data is. SEC filings, court dockets, patent and trademark registers, and government watchlists are all published by the agencies that hold them. The work a tool adds is knowing which record answers which question and pulling them together into something you can actually read.
What a free due diligence tool should actually do
"Free" is worth nothing if the checks are thin. A tool worth using should cover the same ground a manual review would: confirming the company's real legal identity and filing standing, reading its financials over several years rather than one flattering quarter, verifying the intellectual property it claims to own, surfacing litigation and bankruptcies, screening for sanctions and export-control hits, and scanning for adverse media that never made it into a filing. If you want the full picture of what each of those involves, we wrote a plain-English overview of what due diligence is and the six types that keep coming up.
Two things separate a credible free tool from a toy. First, every finding links back to its source, so you can open the actual 10-K or docket instead of trusting a summary. Second, it's honest about coverage — a name that doesn't appear on a watchlist is not proof of innocence, just an absence of a match, and a good tool says so.
How to run due diligence for free, step by step
The process is the same whether you're doing it by hand or with a tool; a tool just collapses the tab-juggling. In practice it runs in this order:
- Pin down the entity. Confirm the exact legal name and registration — the brand on the website is often not the filing entity. For U.S. public companies this starts at SEC EDGAR.
- Read the financials and filings. Pull several years so you're looking at a trend, and read the risk factors management is legally required to disclose.
- Verify the IP. Check that the company actually owns its patents, trademarks and code, with clean chain of title. Our IP due diligence checklist walks through the traps.
- Check litigation and sanctions. Search federal dockets for suits and judgments, then screen against OFAC, BIS and other restricted-party lists — see the sanctions screening guide.
- Scan adverse media, then export. Look for investigations, fines and misconduct in the news, tied to real sources, and save the whole thing as a report.
Prefer to have a model assemble the report for you? That's the idea behind free AI due diligence, which drafts the write-up from the same primary sources.
What "free" really means here
It's fair to be skeptical of "free," so here's the model in plain terms. OpenDD is free for individuals and free for companies that register with a company email; there's a monthly credit allowance that covers real usage, and you can earn more credits by referring others. Higher-volume and law-firm use has a paid plan, but the core diligence — the six checks above, on any company, with downloadable reports — costs nothing. You can see exactly what each tier includes on the plans page.
The honest limits are the same as they'd be for any diligence, free or paid: public records are only as current as their last update, some sources throttle automated access, and a watchlist match is a lead to verify, not a verdict. Use a free due diligence tool for what it's genuinely great at — a fast, organized, well-sourced first pass that tells you where to look harder — and confirm anything that matters against the primary source. None of it is legal advice; when a real deal is on the line, that's what your counsel is for.