Weiss Ratings Free: What You Get Without Paying

If the “America’s Next Subprime Crisis” presentation has you interested in Weiss Ratings but not yet ready to spend the $49 for the Safe Money Report trial, a fair question is what you can get from Weiss Ratings free of charge first. The answer is: more than you might expect, though the free tier is deliberately the front porch rather than the house.

The Free Ratings Themselves

Weiss Ratings publishes letter grades on banks, insurers, stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds, and the firm’s basic ratings are browsable without payment. That is not a promotional gimmick; it is the business model. The firm has graded financial institutions since 1971 and does not accept payment from the companies it rates, as founder Dr. Martin Weiss states in the presentation: “I have never accepted a dime from the companies we rate, and I never will.” The public-facing ratings are the firm’s marketing: you can look up your own bank’s grade or an insurer’s grade without buying anything, which is genuinely unusual in an industry that usually puts every data point behind a paywall. For more on that, see our “Dr. Martin Weiss: Track Record and Crisis Calls, Reviewed” piece.

The depth is where the free tier ends. Free lookups give you the grade and the summary reasoning. What sits behind the paid tier is the full database, “nearly 60,000 Weiss ratings all updated in real time,” the sorted lists (which banks and insurers are weakest and strongest, not just a one-at-a-time lookup), and the analysis that connects them.

What the Subprime Pitch Sells on Top

The presentation’s offer is a $49 trial year of the Safe Money Report, and its five reports are the packaged version of the ratings work. The X-Lists deliver “the precise names, state, and Weiss rating of the nation’s banks our data indicates are at the greatest risk of insolvency,” the insurer lists (including annuity issuers), and a sell-hold-buy rating for “every single stock in the S and P 500.” The pitch’s framing of the moment is that the $3 trillion private credit market is “not subprime mortgages, but subprime private credit,” and the lists are how you check your own exposure: your bank, your annuity provider, your funds. The four named stress events in the pitch (First Brands’ $11 billion-plus Chapter 11 with missing collateral, Tricolor’s double-pledged collateral and SEC fraud charges, the 5% withdrawal cap at BlackRock’s HPS fund, the redemption backlogs at Blackstone’s BCRED) are all documented, which is what drives the urgency. For more on that, see our Weiss Ratings piece.

How to Use the Free Tier Wisely

Here is a practical sequence that costs nothing. First, find the actual issuer behind any annuity or financial product you hold (the contract names the insurer, not the marketing brand). Second, look up that insurer’s Weiss grade in the free tier, and compare it with the grades from the paid-by-issuer agencies, keeping in mind the conflict the pitch describes: co-presenter Nilus Mattive’s insider account of downgrade appeals and ratings withdrawn “so the public never found out.” Third, look up your bank. Fourth, if what you find worries you, the paid tier’s sorted lists and real-time database are what the $49 trial actually adds.

The free tier is also the honest way to test the firm’s claims before buying. The pitch’s track record includes advance warnings on Bear Stearns, Lehman, Citigroup, and Fannie Mae, plus the firm’s own count of having “called ninety seven percent” of the 549 bank failures since 2008. You cannot verify the 97% yourself, but you can spot-check current grades against how institutions have actually fared since they were graded, which is a reasonable free due-diligence step.

Who the Free Tier Suits Best

The free ratings suit three kinds of people especially well. First, the annuity shopper: check the issuer’s grade before signing a decades-long contract, at no cost. Second, the skeptic of the whole pitch: spot-checking current grades against subsequent real-world outcomes is the fairest possible test of the firm’s 97% bank-failure claim, and it requires no subscription. Third, the retiree who simply wants to know if their bank is well capitalized, which is a reasonable question in any year, crisis or not. If you fall into any of those groups, the free tier is genuinely sufficient until you want the sorted lists and the real-time database behind them.

The Honest Bottom Line

The free tier will not give you the X-Lists, the playbook, the gold report, or the income strategy reports; those are the paid product, delivered inside a $49 trial year with a 12-month refund window and keep-the-reports courtesy, terms among the most generous in the newsletter industry. What the free tier gives you is the core data point the firm is known for: an independent grade on the institutions holding your money, produced by a firm that is paid by readers rather than by the rated.

For the product mechanics behind the annuity side of the research, see our guide to how annuities work and what they really cost. For the protective ground the paid reports cover, see portfolio protection strategies for a shaky market, and for the parallel lending-risk argument, subprime AI debt inside the AI bubble warnings.

You can review the presentation and the full offer here.

The Weiss Ratings free tier is one of the few genuinely useful free resources in the financial newsletter universe: check your bank and your insurer before you spend a dollar, then decide whether the sorted lists and the crisis playbook are worth the $49. That order of operations is how the free tier is meant to be used.

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