The US publishes financial statements for free on EDGAR. But then you have to parse the unstructured data, normalize it so you can compare a bank to an airline

The US publishes financial statements for free on EDGAR. But then you have to parse the unstructured data, normalize it so you can compare a bank to an airline to a manufacturer and then you have to accommodate mergers and acquisitions throughout history and every revision a company makes for prior periods, and then you're starting to talk about real money and the price of Cap IQ or Compustat or Factset starts to look pretty attractive, especially if your alpha doesn't come from your proprietary methods of databasing financial statements.