01 · Product name
OpenSanctions
Sanctions and PEP data. Free for non-commercial use.
Published by OpenSanctions.
In short
OpenSanctions is the sanctions and PEP collection at opensanctions.org. On 18 Oct 2026 the homepage said to search 2,044,592 entities from 475 sources, updated that day. The licensing page the same day printed other totals, including 1,141,400 people, and said 470 or more sources. Quote the page you mean. The exemption page says non-commercial use is free under CC BY-NC 4.0. Commercial screening needs a license or the API, whose smallest printed bundle is 500 credits for €50. A match is a lead, not a finding of guilt.
Product pricing strategy
02
Free and paid
Non-commercial download is the free tier the exemption page describes, under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0, with no sign-up required for the bulk file. The same page says free API keys exist for public-interest work. Commercial screening is not that tier. The API page, opened 18 Oct 2026, says a business email signup starts with 2,000 free credits, then sells bundles: €50 for 500, €400 for 5,000, €2,000 for 30,000, €5,000 for 100,000, and €15,000 for 500,000. Prices exclude VAT. One credit is one metered operation, valid for a year. A screening license or a reseller license is quoted by the sales team. The licensing page describes those as flat-rate internal use or wholesale redistribution and does not print a third set of euro figures. Do not add the homepage entity count to the licensing-page people count. They are different sentences from the same day.
Utility and features
03
OpenSanctions publishes a deduplicated dataset of sanctions, politically exposed people, and related watchlists. The homepage on 18 Oct 2026 offered entity search and a screening tool, and it printed 2,044,592 entities, 475 data sources, and the date 2026-10-18. The default collection card on that site repeated 2,044,592 entities. The licensing page, opened the same day, said the bulk data is open for download so you can inspect it before you buy, called the collection fully open source, and printed counts that do not add up to a single homepage total: 1,141,400 people, 298,004 organizations, 270,572 securities, and other smaller sets, plus “470+” sources and “47 mn+” facts. Keep those sentences apart.
- Homepage count, 18 Oct 2026. The homepage said 2,044,592 entities and 475 data sources, updated that day.
- BY-NC for non-commercial use. The exemption page says the bulk download is free for non-commercial use under CC BY-NC 4.0.
- API bundles in euros. The API page lists €50 for 500 credits through €15,000 for 500,000, VAT excluded.
The exemption page says non-commercial use, such as a student project or personal research, does not need permission to download the bulk data, and that the project grants free API keys for public-interest work. It names journalists, advocacy groups, and academic researchers among exemption categories. Commercial use is a screening license, a reseller license, or the hosted API. The API page prices credits, excluding VAT: 500 for €50, 5,000 for €400, 30,000 for €2,000, 100,000 for €5,000, and 500,000 for €15,000, with a sales conversation above one million. It says one credit is one metered operation and credits last a year. A name match is a candidate. Open the source the record links to before you treat it as the same entity.
- 1
Search a company in the public entity search and open the sources on the record.
- 2
For a bulk file, read the exemption page and stay inside non-commercial terms, or get a license.
- 3
If you call the API, record the credit cost of the call and the bundle you bought.
- 4
Treat a name match as a candidate until identifiers agree.
Caveats
04
An OpenSanctions row is a statement extracted from a public list, linked to a source. It can be a sanctioned company, a politically exposed person, or another watchlist entry. It is not a conviction, and a similar name is not the same person. The matcher documentation says scores need dates, nationalities, and identifiers to cut false positives. Use those fields. Do not stop at the name.
Counts moved inside a single day. The homepage said 2,044,592 entities and 475 sources. The licensing page said 470 or more sources and printed category totals that are not a second copy of the homepage number. Date whichever figure you cite. BY-NC 4.0 is not a license for a commercial product. If the use is commercial, the API bundle or a screening contract applies, including the VAT note. A free credit balance is not a promise that a production screen stays inside the trial. This listing searched a company name in the public interface. It did not screen a private individual.
Screenshots
05
Potential use cases
06
- A company name has to be checked before a meeting. Use the public entity search and open the sources on any row. On 18 Oct 2026 the homepage said 2,044,592 entities and 475 data sources, updated that day. The licensing page the same day printed 1,141,400 people, 298,004 organizations, and 470 or more sources. Cite the page whose number you mean. A similar name is a candidate until the identifiers agree. Do not screen a private person from this write-up.
- A product team wants the bulk file. The exemption page says non-commercial use is free under CC BY-NC 4.0 and needs no permission to download. It also describes free API keys for public-interest work, including categories for journalists, advocacy groups, and academic researchers. Commercial screening is a license or the hosted API. Read the exemption page against the actual use. A newsroom that sells subscriptions should not assume the non-commercial sentence covers it.
- Finance asks what the API costs. The API page lists bundles excluding VAT: €50 for 500 credits, €400 for 5,000, €2,000 for 30,000, €5,000 for 100,000, and €15,000 for 500,000. A business signup starts with 2,000 free credits. One credit is one metered operation, valid for a year. A screening license is a separate quote. Do not add the free credits to a bundle and call the sum the price.
Hard cases
The case where the first result is easy to over-read.
Two counts from the same morning are merged
The homepage total and the licensing-page category totals were both visible on 18 Oct 2026 and they are not the same sentence. Pick one page. BY-NC is not the API price list. A name match is not a sanctions finding until the linked source and the identifiers say so. This listing did not look up a private individual.
Practitioners using it
Posts on X from people describing a concrete use. The quote is the post. Likes and reposts are the counts saved with it, not a live total. A label marks a creator, a maintainer, a data partner, or an investor.
FinCrimeRadar A tool for checking an individual or company against sanctions lists, politically exposed persons databases, and adverse media. It checks against the OpenSanctions database, GDELT, and BBC and OCCRP reports. It looks pretty good as a supplementary screening tool,…
Compliance teams can't send customer records to an LLM API. So I fine-tuned Laya, a 322M open model, on an M4 Mac: 86.80 → 98.86 F1 on 50k unseen OpenSanctions pairs. Frontier LLMs: 98–99. On-prem, ~46 pairs/sec, $0. https://t.co/jsFNIjiX2C
Questions
Is OpenSanctions free?
The exemption page says non-commercial use of the data is free under CC BY-NC 4.0. Commercial screening uses a license or the API. A business signup starts with 2,000 free credits, then the printed bundles.
Which entity count should I cite?
On 18 Oct 2026 the homepage said 2,044,592 entities and 475 sources. The licensing page printed category totals, including 1,141,400 people, and said 470 or more sources. Cite the page.
Citations
07
Titled sources. These public pages are what the quotes on this listing come from.
Product
OpenSanctions
https://www.opensanctions.org/Pricing
OpenSanctions licensing
https://www.opensanctions.org/licensing/Pricing
OpenSanctions API
https://www.opensanctions.org/api/Documentation
Free and non-commercial use
https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/commercial/exemption/