The CFPB gives away every complaint record for free, and 1Lookup turns a company name into a finished summary for $0.010.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's public database of the consumer complaints it has published about financial products and the companies behind them. It comes three ways: a search tool in the browser, a CSV ZIP download of all complaint data or a filtered subset, and an Open Data API. The CFPB says the database generally updates daily.

Nothing. The database page says 'All complaint data we publish is freely available for anyone to use, analyze, and build on.' The browser search tool, the CSV download and the Open Data API are all free, and the API's OpenAPI document declares no security scheme, so no key is listed. Checked October 2026.

2 credits per company with complaints, free when the database holds no complaints for it. On the Starter plan ($99 a month for 20,000 credits) a check is about $0.010, which covers 10,000 companies a month and is $9.90 per 1,000. At the Enterprise end of the rate card it is about $0.004. The CFPB is the cheaper bill, because its data is free; what the price buys is the finished summary, the name matching and the shared balance.

The CFPB's API returns complaints and counts for a query, so a buyer who wants the 12 months against the 12 before, or the share answered on time, runs the queries and computes it, which its filters and counts make possible. 1Lookup does that work: it matches the name against the CFPB's own company list and returns the total, the two 12-month windows with the change in percent, the share answered on time, the share closed with relief, the count still in progress, the five products and issues named most often, every company response and the channels used, in one JSON payload or one CSV row.

Every individual complaint record: complaint ID, date received, date sent to company, product, sub-product, issue, sub-issue, company, company response, company public response, timely response flag, submitted via, state, ZIP code and tags. It also filters by company, date range, product, issue, state, ZIP code and more, offers the whole database as a CSV ZIP and fetches a single complaint by ID. 1Lookup returns counts and categories for one company at a time, never an individual complaint or a consumer's location, and has no filter by state, ZIP code or date range.

Only complaints sent to companies for a response are eligible to be published, and the CFPB publishes them after the company responds, confirming a commercial relationship, or after 15 days, whichever comes first. It does not publish complaints it refers to other regulators. The database page says it is not a statistical sample of consumers' experiences in the marketplace and that these complaints are not representative of all consumers' experiences with a financial product or company. 1Lookup returns the counts as published, with no rate per customer.

The CFPB says the database generally updates daily, and its API's _meta block carries last_updated, is_data_stale and total_record_count. 1Lookup reads the database when you ask, shows the day it was read in checked_at and the date of the newest complaint, and counts the last 12 months back from that day. A repeat lookup of the same company by the same user within one day is answered from the saved result at no charge.

Yes. Each search response carries counts by company response, issue, product, state, submitted via, timely and more, and the API filters by date received, so the same figures can be built with date filters. You would also handle the company-name step and the arithmetic, and the search returns at most 100 results per request. For a one-off question or a pipeline you already run, the free API is the better choice.

There is no other source for these complaints, so this is a different way in rather than a replacement. If you need the complaints themselves or a bulk download, use the CFPB. If you want a company name turned into a finished summary of counts, billed only when the database holds complaints and on the same key as phone, email and IP checks, 1Lookup's Complaint Check does that.

On price, depth and source. It is free, official, returns every individual complaint, can be filtered by state, ZIP code, product and date, offers a CSV download of the whole database and updates daily. 1Lookup charges per company with complaints found and returns counts and categories only.