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OpenSanctions
👤 Friedrich Lindenberg (Built data tools for anti-corruption reporters, including at OCCRP, before founding this in 2015.)🌐 sitepudo.org𝕏
AML law forces every bank to screen names. OpenSanctions gives the database away and bills only the businesses.
Will it work? · our read
Mandated demand. Almost 15 people serve several hundred commercial customers in 90+ countries, because AML law makes the buying non-optional. No absolute revenue is public - judge it on that.
01How the money moves
Crawl 410+ sanctions, watchlist and PEP sources, four times a day
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Publish the whole database free under CC BY-NC
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Businesses must license it: €0.10 (about $0.11) per query, or a flat self-hosted fee
02The numbers
650+ clientsStatedrevenue never disclosed
2026-07
The company publishes no revenue figure. Its own word for 2024 growth is 'threefold', with no base given. This was 2024 at OpenSanctions
Runs on revenue since the 2023 incorporation, and says it tripled in 2024. No absolute figure published.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
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About OpenSanctions - GmbH established 2023, "operating on revenue since its incorporation", "several hundred commercial customers across more than 90 countries"; 2015 origin and founder built data tools for newsrooms and anti-corruption organizations "including at" OCCRP.This was 2024 at OpenSanctions - "threefold increase in revenue"; 96 to 270 sources; ISO 27001:2022 (published 2024-12-20).This was 2025 at OpenSanctions - team "almost 15 members"; partners Quantifind, Neterium, Quantexa, Taktile (published 2025-12-18).Data licensing - "Trusted by 650+ clients worldwide"; 410+ sources covered; 1,250,918 people.SaaS API or self-hosted? - "€0.10 per successful API call", volume pricing above 20,000 req/mo (updated 2026-06-01).
Every figure was taken from a page we fetched as raw bytes and string-checked, not from a search snippet. OpenSanctions publishes no revenue number: the About page says only that the GmbH (incorporated 2023) has been "operating on revenue since its incorporation" with "several hundred commercial customers", and the 2024 review claims a "threefold increase in revenue" with no base. So we headline clients, not money. Caveat on that headline: /licensing/ says "650+ clients worldwide" while /showcase/ still says "over 500 partners", and both counts mix paying customers with free journalist and civil-society users - the company's own word for the paying subset is "several hundred". No FILED figure is reachable: a German GmbH this size files abridged accounts carrying no P&L, and we could not open a filing to check, so we assert nothing about one. NorthData was JS-blocked to us. €0.10 converted at 1.1467 USD/EUR (ECB via Frankfurter, 2026-07-16), corroborated at 1.1448 by a second feed; the €0.10 figure itself is printed on the FAQ page (faq/api/license-cost/), which moneyFlow now cites directly rather than the /licensing/ overview page that doesn't carry the number. The 2015 date is the project's start; the company is 2023. "almost 15" and "threefold" are the company's own wording, kept verbatim rather than sharpened. The founder's OCCRP history is limited to what the About page states - "building data tools for newsrooms and anti-corruption organizations at the time, including at" OCCRP - no dates or job title are published anywhere we could open, so we dropped the earlier "data team lead 2016-2021, built Aleph" claim, which no source actually carried. Founder links were confirmed from pudo.org itself, which links twitter.com/pudo; his LinkedIn returned 999 and is omitted rather than guessed. No drama invented: the 2021 shift to business licences is documented on their blog, and the rest is execution and patience. We never score you.