How to Search SEC EDGAR Filings by Ticker, Company Name, or CIK (Without Paying for an API)

If you've ever tried to pull SEC filing data programmatically, you know the pain. The EDGAR full-text search is clunky, the submissions API returns deeply nested JSON that's annoying to parse, and the rate limiting (10 req/s with a mandatory User-Agent) means you can't just hammer it from a script. The commercial options aren't cheap either. sec-api.io starts at $49/mo. Quandl (now Nasdaq Data Link) is $29/mo for basic access. Financial Modeling Prep charges per call. If you just need filing metadata and don't want to build a whole pipeline, that's a lot of overhead. I built a free actor on Apify that wraps the EDGAR API and gives you clean, flat JSON for any company lookup. No API key needed. You pay per result on Apify ($0.005/company) and it handles the pagination, rate limiting, and data flattening. What it actually returns For each company, you get: CIK, ticker, SIC code (industry classification), EIN, state of incorporation, filer category, phone number, business and mailing addr