Use Case: XBRL Financial Statement Backfill
A sample SEC API pricing simulation for converting historical XBRL filings into structured JSON.
Use Case: XBRL Financial Statement Backfill
This example estimates the cost of converting historical XBRL filings into structured JSON for financial modeling or analytics.
Assumptions
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Product | SEC API |
| Workflow | Filing discovery and XBRL conversion |
| Endpoint patterns | GET /v1/filings, GET /v1/xbrl-converter |
| Example tickers | AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, TSLA, AMZN |
| Filing types | 10-K, 10-Q |
| Company coverage | 100 companies |
| Historical period | 10 years |
| Estimated transferred data | 120 GB/month |
Example requests:
| Purpose | Example endpoint |
|---|---|
| Find Apple 10-K and 10-Q filings | GET /v1/filings?ticker=AAPL&form_type=10-K,10-Q&filling_date_start=2016-01-01&filling_date_end=2025-12-31&page_size=200 |
| Convert Apple XBRL by accession number | GET /v1/xbrl-converter?accession_number=0000320193-25-000079 |
| Convert Microsoft XBRL by accession number | GET /v1/xbrl-converter?accession_number=0000789019-25-000010 |
Estimated usage
Data transfer rate:
$10 per GB
Estimated monthly usage:
120 GB × 10 credits/GB = 1,200 credits
Plan comparison
| Plan | Price per Credit | Monthly cost | Included credits | Estimated monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pay As You Go | $1.00/Credit | No commitment | N/A | $1,200.00 |
| Committed 64 | $0.85/Credit | $64 | ~75.29 credits | $1,188.71 |
| Committed 256 | $0.75/Credit | $256 | ~341.33 credits | $1,114.67 |
| Committed 512 | $0.70/Credit | $512 | ~731.43 credits | $980.57 |
| Committed 1024 | $0.65/Credit | $1,024 | ~1,575.38 credits | $1,024.00 |
Result
For this sample, Committed 512 has the lowest estimated cost.
Committed 1024 fully covers the estimated usage, but Committed 512 is still lower in this scenario because the remaining usage after the included credits is billed as overage.
Caveat
Actual transferred data depends on the number of filings, XBRL response size, filing complexity, selected companies, retries, and whether the workflow also downloads original HTML, XML, TXT, or PDF filing documents.