Written by the pipeline that builds the data, regenerated with every refresh (2026-09-07).
The free files are the whole dataset from 2024 on — no delay, no login — and they stay free. None of it is secret: the state portals are public and biglocalnews/warn-scraper is open source. We measured the gap on 2026-09-03, when the archive held 45,755 rows (it holds 45,775 in today's build — this paragraph deliberately keeps the numbers from the day the measurement was taken): only 1,188 of them (2.6%) were older than what the state portals still serve today. So the $199 archive is not scarce data — it is 39 portals already scraped, de-duplicated into one schema with stable ids, as a 7 MB CSV (plus JSON) you can load in one line.
The one exception is Connecticut. CT DOL took its per-year WARN listings offline in 2025 and the replacement document library starts at September 2025; we rebuilt 2010–2025 from Internet Archive captures. Of the 871 Connecticut notices in the archive, 844 are dated before that cut-off and are not served by any state portal today.
What you are paying for is maintenance. Portals change layout, drop fields and go quiet; keeping 39 of them normalized every day is the work. WARN Watch is the same trade: a year of daily checks against your employer list that you never have to keep running. If that is not worth more to you than an afternoon and a cron job, use the free files with our blessing — that is what they are for.
What "maintenance" means, in today's build:
Example: the raw files carry 82 different name strings for Burlington Coat Factory of Texas (store numbers, "dba" trade names, punctuation); all resolve to one company_canonical value, so a count per employer is one line of code instead of a regex you maintain. Same schema in every state, stable ids, both dates ISO. That is the weekend of work, done every morning.
Then you already get the layoff signal — a flag on a company record, inside the tool your team lives in. Keep it. What a sales-intelligence seat does not hand you is the filing itself as data: the date the notice was filed, the date the cuts take effect, the worker count as filed with the state, the state’s own notice text, and every earlier filing by that same employer — 45,775 of them back to 1988, as a CSV you can join to your own tables under CC BY 4.0. Those are two different products: one tells a rep to call today; the other lets you count, chart, audit and cite. We sell the second, and we do not sell seats.
Who that second product is for: anyone who has to answer a question with the record instead of a notification — WARN-compliance and employment-law research (how many notices in a state ran under the 60-day line, and which employers filed them), labor economists and reporters (a state-by-state series since 1988, stable ids, one schema), workforce boards and outplacement firms planning where the next cohort lands, and engineers who would rather have a file than a per-seat login. See the notice-period analysis → · How this compares to the paid trackers ↓
