Before Invest is live

This project started with a personal frustration — one I explain in more detail on the About page. The goal was to turn raw SEC data into usable tables, transparently, without any intermediary.

What’s online today is a first step. The current features cover less than 10% of the finished product I had in mind when I started this project over a year ago.

Here’s where things stand and where they’re going.

100 companies and the income statement

Why start with the 100 largest market caps, and only their income statement?

The challenge was building an engine from scratch — one capable of retrieving and assembling data for any company while adapting to its specific structure. Over time, companies use different concepts, sometimes custom ones, to describe the same accounting reality. The engine had to be flexible enough to absorb those variations and handle each company’s edge cases.

To validate the idea and ship a first version, narrowing the scope was non-negotiable. The income statement of the 100 largest companies became the target for this first pass.

Now that the theory is validated and the engine is running in production, what comes next?

What’s next

The priorities are clear:

Complete the financial statements. Add the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement, with all associated ratios — everything needed for a complete fundamental analysis on the 100 companies already here.

Expand the catalog. Progressively push new companies through the engine.

After that, it depends on what I want to build and what you tell me matters.

Controlling the full data chain end-to-end — XBRL parsing, document storage, no dependency on any data vendor or third-party API beyond the SEC itself — removes any technical barrier to building new features. I want to integrate AI to summarize 80-page SEC submissions, run automatic analysis on figures, compare companies side by side. The ideas and the motivation are there. The only constraint at this point is the time I can dedicate to it, and that depends directly on your support.

A solo, independent project

Before Invest is 100% solo. I built this engine to answer a specific need: a complete, unfiltered view of a company’s financial health before investing.

For me to keep developing the site full-time and make it sustainable, the project needs to generate revenue. That’s why a subscription is in place from day one.

If the tool is useful to you and you want to see what comes next — Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, AI features — here’s how you can help:

• Try the engine on the free company, NVIDIA: if you’re convinced of the data’s value, subscribe to access the rest of the catalog.
• Tell someone about it.
• Report bugs: if you spot a discrepancy in the numbers or an issue with the interface, use the dedicated bug report button on each company’s page.

You can also reach me by email or on Twitter / X @vlagch.

V0 is live. Good investing.