Comparison · checked November 8, 2026
PACER docket alert options compared
Ways to hear about new filings in federal cases: check PACER yourself, read the courts' free RSS feeds, use CourtListener's docket alerts, subscribe to a commercial service such as PacerMonitor, or run an Actor on the RSS feeds. What each costs where the price is published, and what each misses.
PACER RSS Docket Monitor — New Federal Court Filings on Apify Store. Pay per result; see the Store page for current pricing.
At a glance
| Option | What you get | Cost, as published | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| PACER (pacer.uscourts.gov) | The official record: dockets and documents for every federal court | $0.10 per page, at most $3 per document (searches, reports and transcripts uncapped); billed only above $30 a quarter | Reading the docket and the documents themselves |
| Court RSS feeds (CM/ECF) | New docket entries as each court chooses to publish them | Free, no login | Watching whole courts, if the court publishes a full feed |
| CourtListener docket alerts (Free Law Project) | Email or webhook alerts on dockets you follow, from RSS and other sources | A number of alerts free (more with the RECAP extension); members unlimited; bulk commercial rates on request | Individuals following specific cases |
| PacerMonitor | Federal case research with custom alerts | Plus $49/month (5 alerts), Professional $99/month (20), Enterprise $499/month (15 users, unlimited); API by quote | Teams that want a research tool with alerts |
| Our Actor: PACER RSS Docket Monitor | New entries from court RSS feeds, filtered by party, case, entry type or keyword, as JSON | $0.005 per court feed checked, $0.003 per matching entry, $0.001 per unfiltered entry (Store API) | Feeding new filings into your own systems on a schedule |
Prices and limits as each provider published them on November 8, 2026; they change, so check the linked page before you decide.
PACER
PACER is the federal judiciary's own access service and the source every other option draws on. Its fee page: "$0.10 per page", "You won't be charged more than $3 per document", no maximum for search results, non-case-specific reports or transcripts, "$2.40 per audio file", and "Users are billed on a quarterly basis if they accrue more than $30 in the previous quarter" (PACER: How fees work). PACER is where you read the documents; it is not an alert service.
Court RSS feeds
Many district and bankruptcy courts publish an RSS feed of new docket entries from CM/ECF, free and without a login, but each court decides whether to publish one and which entry types it carries. Our own probe of every court's feed (district and bankruptcy courts on 2026-10-17, appellate and national courts on 2026-11-07) found: district courts 42 full, 22 partial, 17 empty, 13 that did not answer from a datacenter IP; bankruptcy courts 52 full, 19 partial, 6 empty, 17 no answer; courts of appeals 6 partial and 7 empty. The court-by-court table is on PACER RSS feeds by court.
CourtListener docket alerts
Free Law Project's CourtListener sends docket alerts by email or webhook "when there are new filings in cases" (CourtListener help: Alerts). Its help page says it allows a number of docket alerts for free, gives a bonus to users with the RECAP browser extension, lets members "create as many docket alerts as they need" while monitoring for commercial usage, and offers bulk commercial rates; it also says alerts "are only as good as our sources", and that for less active cases they may take longer "or may not arrive at all" (CourtListener help: Docket Alerts for PACER). For a person following a handful of cases, this is the best free option.
PacerMonitor
PacerMonitor's pricing page lists Plus at $49 a month (single user, documents 15¢ a page, 5 custom alerts), Professional at $99 a month (documents 10¢ a page, 20 custom alerts), Enterprise at $499 a month (15 users, unlimited custom alerts), an API by quote, and a free account at a flat $5 per document (PacerMonitor: Plans and Pricing).
Our Actor: PACER RSS Docket Monitor
PACER RSS Docket Monitor reads the courts' public RSS feeds, normalizes each entry (court, case number, case type, entry text, document link, filed time) and filters by party, case number, case type, entry type, keyword or bankruptcy chapter; monitor mode returns only entries not seen on earlier runs, with an optional webhook. On November 8, 2026 the Store API listed $0.005 per court feed checked, $0.003 per matching entry and $0.001 per entry when no filter is set. It sees only what the feeds publish: no documents, nothing from courts with empty feeds, and older filings only through an optional CourtListener pass with your own CourtListener token.
Where the alternatives are better
- Following a few specific cases: CourtListener docket alerts are free up to its limit and draw on more sources than RSS alone.
- Reading documents: PACER (or a service that resells its documents, such as PacerMonitor) is required; RSS feeds and our Actor give the entry and a link, not the PDF.
- Courts without a full feed: a commercial service that polls dockets will see entries that a partial or empty feed never publishes.
- Our Actor fits when you want every new entry matching a filter across many courts, as structured JSON in your own pipeline, on a schedule.
Other PACER Actors on Apify Store
Most of these search the RECAP archive (historical dockets) rather than monitoring live feeds.
| Actor | Total users | Primary price per result |
|---|---|---|
Federal Court Dockets Search - PACER/RECAP Diligence APIpink_comic/recap-federal-court-dockets | 22 | $0.002 |
Federal Court Records Scraper - PACER RECAP & Opinionshaketa/federal-court-records-scraper | 18 | $0.003 |
PACER Court Records Intelligence MCP — 1B+ Federal Casesandrew_avina/pacer-intelligence-mcp | 17 | $0.003 |
PACER RSS Docket Monitormoving_beacon-owner1/pacer-rss-docket-monitor | 3 | $0.00999 |
PACER RSS Docket Monitor — New Federal Court Filings (ours)owlabee/pacer-docket-monitor | 1 | $0.003 per match |
From the Apify Store API (GET https://api.apify.com/v2/store?search=pacer) on November 8, 2026, the most-used results. Store pages show current figures; most Actors also charge a small per-run start fee.
Sources
All checked on November 8, 2026 unless noted.