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Free DCF Calculator: Intrinsic Value With SEC Data, Sensitivity Table, and Reverse DCF

The DCF calculator most retail investors get gated out of. Pulls live SEC EDGAR fundamentals, runs a two-stage DCF with a sensitivity heatmap, then asks the question that actually matters: what growth is the market pricing in?

Vadim Kouznetsov·4 June 2026·9 min read

How this DCF calculator is different

The discounted-cash-flow universe online splits into two unsatisfying groups. Either you pay (Stock Unlock caps free users at three valuations per week across five tickers; AlphaSpread paywalls anything useful; Simply Wall St requires a signup; institutional-grade tools start at $50/month). Or you get a stripped-down toy: a single text box for "expected growth", no live data, no sensitivity, no honest read on what the model can and cannot do.

This calculator is in a third category. It is genuinely free. It runs on live SEC EDGAR XBRL data — primary-source financials pulled straight from the company's most recent 10-K, not aggregated estimates. And it does the three things every serious DCF user actually needs:

A sensitivity table. A single-point DCF is useless because the answer depends entirely on inputs nobody can know precisely. The 5×5 grid we render below the headline number shows the intrinsic-value-per-share output across five growth rates × five discount rates. The cells are colour-coded against the current market price so you see at a glance which assumption changes actually flip the verdict.
A reverse DCF. Forward DCFs are easy to manipulate ("what growth rate produces an attractive valuation?"). The honest direction of the question is the opposite: "given today's market price, what growth rate is the market implicitly assuming?" If the answer is 25% per year for the next decade — as it currently is for several mega-cap tech names — you have just learned something useful: the price requires growth that has never been sustained at that scale. The reverse-DCF panel on every result page does this calculation automatically.
A Buffett-style margin of safety overlay. Knowing intrinsic value is half the work. The other half is knowing the price at which you would actually buy — typically 25% below intrinsic value, the conservative discount Buffett applies as a rule. The calculator shows both numbers: the intrinsic value at your assumptions, and the maximum buy price with your chosen margin of safety. The verdict (Buy / Watch / Pass) follows mechanically from those two numbers against today's market price.

How the math works (in 90 seconds)

A two-stage discounted cash flow model values a business as the sum of two things:

Stage one — the present value of the free cash flows the company is expected to generate over an explicit forecast period (default ten years). Each year's projected FCF is discounted back to today using the discount rate (your required return). A dollar ten years from now is worth less than a dollar today, and the discount rate determines exactly how much less.

Stage two — the present value of the terminal value, which is the company's worth at the end of the explicit forecast, capitalised in perpetuity at a long-run growth rate. The Gordon Growth Model formula is Terminal Value = FCF_year_N × (1 + terminal_growth) ÷ (discount_rate − terminal_growth). The terminal value is then itself discounted back to present.

Add the two together → enterprise value. Subtract net debt (long-term + short-term debt minus cash) → equity value. Divide by shares outstanding → intrinsic value per share. That number is what the calculator displays as the headline result.

The calculator uses sane Buffett-style defaults: a 10-year explicit forecast, 2.5% terminal growth (long-run inflation), 10% discount rate (reasonable required return for a US equity), and a growth rate auto-suggested from the company's actual 5-year FCF history but capped at 15% (because no business sustainably compounds free cash flow above that rate at scale).

Where the SEC data comes from

When you type a ticker, the calculator fetches three things in parallel:

Company facts JSON from SEC EDGAR's XBRL API (data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/...). This is the primary source — every US-listed common stock files 10-Ks with the SEC in XBRL format. We pull the company's full annual history of operating cash flow, capital expenditures (to compute FCF = OCF - Capex), revenue, shares outstanding, and balance-sheet debt + cash.
The latest price quote from Yahoo Finance's chart endpoint — the same source we use across the other tools, no auth required, six-hour cache.
The ticker-to-CIK mapping from SEC's published company_tickers.json so we can translate from a ticker symbol to the 10-digit CIK that XBRL uses.

The result is that every input on the calculator comes from a primary source rather than an aggregator. You can verify any number by opening the company's actual 10-K on SEC.gov.

What the sensitivity table tells you

Most retail DCFs miss the entire point of the exercise. The intrinsic value is not the headline number — it's the range of plausible numbers across plausible assumptions. The 5×5 sensitivity grid we render shows that range explicitly.

The rows are five candidate growth rates (0%, 5%, 8%, 10%, 15%). The columns are five candidate discount rates (6%, 8%, 10%, 12%, 14%). Each cell is the fair-value-per-share output of the DCF if you assume those specific inputs. Cells are colour-coded:

Green — fair value comfortably above today's market price. The thesis works under these assumptions.
Amber — fair value near today's market price. Marginal.
Red — fair value below today's market price. The thesis does not work under these assumptions.

A great signal is when the green/amber/red boundary lines up cleanly with a plausible assumption boundary. If a stock only looks attractive at 15% growth and 6% discount rate (the top-left corner — both heroic), that's a Pass. If a stock looks attractive even at 5% growth and 10% discount rate (the mid-cells), that's a meaningful Buy signal.

What the reverse DCF actually does

A forward DCF answers "given my growth assumption, what is the fair value?". A reverse DCF answers "given today's market price, what growth rate is the market implicitly assuming?".

The calculator solves this by binary-searching the growth rate g until the DCF's fair value equals the current market price (with all other inputs — terminal growth, discount rate, horizon — held constant). The implied growth that comes out of this solver is the most useful single number in value investing for one specific reason: it is testable.

For Coca-Cola in 2026, the calculator might say the market is pricing in 22%-per-year FCF growth for the next ten years. Coca-Cola is a 130-year-old consumer-staples company growing revenue at ~4% per year. Pricing in 22% growth is unsustainable. Verdict: Pass.

For a different stock, the reverse DCF might come out at 6%. Now the question becomes "do I think this business can grow FCF faster than 6% over the next decade?" — a question you can investigate by reading their 10-K, understanding their moat, and forming your own view.

The reverse DCF turns valuation from a guessing game into a hypothesis-test. It is the single most valuable feature of this calculator.

Where DCF works and where it doesn't

DCF is the right tool for valuing mature, profitable, predictable businesses — consumer staples, established software, dominant payment rails, regulated utilities, industrials with stable demand. These are the businesses Buffett and Klarman built their reputations on, and the DCF framework is genuinely informative for them.

DCF is the wrong tool for several common situations:

Hypergrowth tech companies with negative or volatile free cash flow. The forward DCF requires multi-decade growth assumptions nobody can responsibly make. The right tool is reverse DCF (use this calculator's reverse-DCF panel) — work backward from price.
Banks, insurers, and financial holding companies. They use different accounting (interest income vs operating revenue), different leverage profiles, and different terminal-value mechanics. Use price-to-book or our SCHD analysis for an example of how dividend-screened indices price these.
Distressed or turnaround companies where the next 12-24 months of cash flow are highly uncertain. Use scenario analysis or a probability-weighted approach instead.
Pre-IPO / private companies. No reliable historical FCF; no SEC filings. See our anthropic valuation breakdown for how private-tech valuations are actually set.
Real estate investment trusts (REITs). Use AFFO / FFO per share against price; cash flow accounting differs from a standard operating company.

If your ticker is in one of these categories, the calculator will either return an error (negative FCF makes the forward DCF refuse to compute) or it will produce a number that you should treat with extreme caution. The reverse-DCF panel still works in all cases.

A worked example: Coca-Cola (KO)

Run the calculator on KO and you'll see:

Latest FCF (most recent fiscal year 10-K, from SEC EDGAR): around $5 billion. The history shows a dip from $9–11 billion in 2021–2023 due to bottler restructuring — toggle "Use normalized 5-year FCF" to use the $8 billion average instead, which is closer to KO's normalised cash generation.
5-year revenue CAGR: about 4%/yr — KO is mature.
Auto-suggested growth rate: 4% (capped at 15% by methodology; KO's actual 5-year FCF CAGR is slightly negative thanks to the bottler dip, but the calculator clamps it to zero to keep the headline result reasonable).
Intrinsic value at default inputs (5% growth, 2.5% terminal, 10% discount): roughly $25 per share (with normalised FCF; lower with latest-year FCF).
Current market price: around $78.
Verdict: Pass — the market is pricing KO well above what 5%/yr growth justifies.
Reverse DCF: the market is implicitly assuming 22%/yr FCF growth for the next decade. KO has not grown FCF at 22% per year in any decade in its 130-year history. This is the value-investor's read.

The Buffett conclusion from this analysis: KO is a fine business at a wrong price. The calculator gives you that answer in 30 seconds with no setup.

Why this calculator stays free

The honest answer: because the AI-product side of the business pays for it. Every DCF result page CTAs to our AI agent, which runs the complete Buffett-style thesis on any US ticker — moat verification, owner-earnings refinement that goes beyond the basic FCF approach, bear case, kill criteria — in five minutes. The calculator is the lead magnet. The thesis product is the conversion.

Stock Unlock and ValueInvesting.io and AlphaSpread all use the calculator as the funnel to a paid subscription. We use it as the funnel to a per-ticker AI thesis, which we believe is the better product anyway. Either way, the math should not be gated.