The assumption that comprehensive global risk intelligence requires expensive commercial data subscriptions is wrong. The barrier isn't budget. It's knowing where to look and how to collect at scale.
I've been building a daily global collection system for a risk intelligence platform. Here's what we found about the actual cost and architecture.
The official source tier that most vendors ignore
Governments, UN agencies, and international organizations publish an enormous amount of structured, high-quality intelligence for free. Most commercial intelligence vendors are reselling or summarizing these sources, adding normalization and search on top of data that's publicly available.
The first production tier starts with sources that cover the highest-signal intelligence categories:
ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) provides geocoded conflict events with actor classification, event type, fatality counts, and geographic precision for every country experiencing political violence. API access for non-commercial use is free with registration. The data is current to within 24 hours for most conflict zones.
ReliefWeb provides humanitarian crisis data, displacement figures, disaster impacts, appeal funding, and crisis response updates through a documented JSON API. It's updated multiple times per day for active crises.
CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities is a daily-updated JSON feed of every actively exploited software vulnerability. Free, official, and more operationally relevant than full CVE databases for most threat intelligence applications.
OpenSanctions aggregates OFAC, EU sanctions, UN Security Council Consolidated List, UK OFSI, and dozens of other national sanctions lists into a single normalized database with a free API. The alternative, building individual connectors to each national sanctions authority, takes months. OpenSanctions has done it.
WHO Disease Outbreak News provides structured outbreak data through an OData API. Epidemiological intelligence that took specialized commercial feeds to access a decade ago is now a free API call.
NASA FIRMS provides global wildfire data with geographic coordinates, confidence levels, and satellite timestamps through a free API. Coverage is global, updates run every few hours, and the cost is $0.
GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System) provides real-time alerts for earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and volcanic events with severity scoring through a structured RSS/XML feed.
World Bank Indicators API provides 15,000+ development, economic, and demographic indicators for every country. Data quality and coverage vary, but core indicators, GDP, population, trade exposure, are comprehensive.
The cost model
For a daily global collection system covering all of these sources:
| Source | Cost | Update frequency | |--------|------|-----------------| | ACLED | $0 (research license) | Daily | | ReliefWeb | $0 | 4x/day | | CISA KEV | $0 | Daily | | OpenSanctions | $0 (entity search) | Daily | | WHO | $0 | As needed | | NASA FIRMS | $0 | 3 hours | | GDACS | $0 | Real-time | | World Bank | $0 | Varies | | US Federal Register | $0 | Daily | | EU Official Journal | $0 | Daily | | UK Gazette | $0 | Daily |
Infrastructure to run daily collection jobs: a Cloud Run instance or scheduled Cloud Function processing these feeds costs approximately $2-5/month for a system covering all sources.
Total for global-tier-one collection: under $10/month.
The scraping tier
Official APIs cover a lot, but not everything. Government gazettes, regulatory enforcement pages, procurement portals, and court records are often published only as HTML or PDF. These require scraping with LLM-powered extraction.
For PDF-based official publications, national gazettes, official journals, regulatory bulletins, the pattern is:
- Download the PDF on a daily schedule
- Extract text (with OCR for image-based PDFs)
- Detect language and translate if needed
- Pass extracted text to an LLM for structured extraction of notice types, affected entities, and effective dates
The LLM cost for this layer depends on volume. For a country gazette that publishes 200 notices per day, GPT-4.1-mini at $0.40/1M tokens costs approximately $0.04/day for the extraction. For 50 country gazettes, that's $2/day.
Palm Beach County civil court hearings: The scraper I built processes 500+ new civil cases per day using Playwright for browser automation and GPT-4.1-mini for structured extraction from HTML tables. Cost: $0.02/day.
This is not an approximation. I measured it.
What this enables
For a risk intelligence platform:
- 195 countries covered with daily conflict, humanitarian, and political data from ACLED and ReliefWeb
- All major sanctions lists updated daily through OpenSanctions
- Cyber threat feed updated daily from CISA KEV
- Environmental hazards updated every few hours from NASA FIRMS and GDACS
- Official policy changes captured daily from the Federal Register, EU Official Journal, and UK Gazette
For country-specific deep coverage:
- Procurement and regulatory intelligence from official gazettes at $0.04/country/day
- Court and enforcement records where portal scraping is permitted
The total cost for comprehensive global coverage using this architecture is under $50/month for infrastructure and LLM extraction combined.
What commercial vendors are actually selling
Understanding what's free clarifies what commercial intelligence vendors are actually selling: normalization, search, analyst curation, and entity resolution, not proprietary data collection.
The raw data from ACLED, ReliefWeb, CISA, and the others is the same data that goes into commercial intelligence products. The value-add is the work of making it searchable, linking it to named entities, resolving conflicts between sources, and presenting it in a format that doesn't require a data engineer to use.
That's real value. It's just not the value the marketing suggests.
For organizations building intelligence platforms rather than consuming them, the free source tier gets you most of the way to production-quality global coverage. The expensive part isn't the data. It's the normalization, entity resolution, and quality scoring that makes the data usable for decisions.
The architecture principles
Use API or bulk download first. Scrapers are fragile and maintenance-intensive. If a source publishes structured data through an API or downloadable file, start there. Only scrape when no structured alternative exists.
Store raw before processing. Every API response, every downloaded file gets stored in immutable object storage before any parsing or normalization. When a parser fails, and parsers fail, you can reprocess from the raw capture at zero additional collection cost.
Source registry over pile of scripts. Every source gets a record: source ID, jurisdiction, endpoint, parser, cadence, credentials, terms of use, expected schema, and last-success timestamp. The registry makes the system auditable and makes adding new sources a configuration change rather than a code change.
Daily digest plus failure report. Operators need two outputs: the intelligence from the day's collection, and the health of the collection system itself. A missing feed that goes undetected for a week is a blind spot that corrupts confidence in everything else.
PurviewX builds global intelligence collection systems for organizations that need current, multi-source risk data. Start a conversation.