Why it’s free

Then we looked at what would actually have been sold. Small companies may file filleted accounts — a balance sheet and nothing else — and since 6 April 2025 “small” means turnover up to £15m, a balance sheet up to £7.5m and 50 staff. On the first 168 companies this tool read, five disclosed turnover and three disclosed profit. For most companies, the paid layer would have been a balance sheet you can read free.

The watchlist alerts were no better a reason. Companies House runs a free service called Follow that emails you the moment a filing is accepted, on as many companies as you like. Charging for a nightly version of that would have been cheek.

A hundred subscribers is about £47,000 a year and a support desk. Founder Capital lends £100k to £2m against trading businesses and buys accountancy, legal and advice firms. One facility is worth more than the whole subscription line; one acquisition, several times over.

The people who research UK private companies are the people we want to meet — owners working out what they are worth, buyers screening, lenders sizing, accountants advising clients. Charging them to look is charging admission to our own showroom.

An account, and what you do with it. If you screen practices in one city, we can reasonably guess you are buying. If you keep checking your own company, you may be thinking about selling. That is the trade: the tool is free, and occasionally we get in touch about something we do — lending, buying a practice, or an introduction.

What we do not do is sell your data on, or pass what you looked at to the company you looked at. Every figure in here is public information from Companies House; who read it is not, and it stays with us.

Seats and desk features for teams who screen for a living — shared lists, list monitoring at scale, exports, an API. Not the data. If that ever changes for something you already use, you will be told before it does, not after.