Vigil vs Companies House free alerts

What the Companies House free alerts do

Companies House offers a free email alert system. You subscribe to a company by name or number, and you receive an email every time a document is filed. The email tells you that a filing happened. It doesn't tell you what was filed, what it means, or whether it warrants any action.

A routine annual confirmation statement and a compulsory strike-off notice trigger the same notification: "A document has been filed for [Company Name]." There's no distinction between significant events and routine paperwork.

Most people who set up CH alerts stop reading them within weeks. The signal-to-noise ratio is low enough that the emails become background noise. When something genuinely important happens, it arrives looking identical to the 40 routine filings that preceded it.

What they don't cover

The most important gap is the London Gazette. When a UK company applies to be voluntarily struck off, it must publish a notice in the London Gazette. Creditors have two months from that date to object and recover debts. Companies House does not send an alert for this. The Gazette is a separate, independent publication.

Thousands of UK creditors miss this window every year. The debt doesn't become legally uncollectible the moment the company dissolves, but recovering it becomes considerably harder. The Gazette notice is your clearest signal and your best opportunity.

The free alerts also don't cover director monitoring at a person level. If a director you deal with moves between companies, or has a pattern of directing companies that dissolve, you won't see that from CH alerts alone.

What Vigil adds

Vigil connects to the Companies House real-time data stream and monitors the London Gazette daily. Every alert is filtered: you only receive notifications for events that are typically significant, not every filing regardless of type.

When a director resigns, the alert tells you the director's name and their role, not just that "a filing was made." When a charge is registered, the alert tells you whether it's secured against all assets and how many charges the company now has. When a First Gazette Notice appears, the alert tells you the objection deadline, what DS02 is, and where to file it.

When the free CH alerts are enough

If you have one or two companies you want to keep a loose eye on and you're comfortable reading CH filing types yourself, the free alerts are a reasonable starting point. They're free, and if you're willing to check each email manually and look up the filing on CH, you'll catch most events.

They're less suitable if you're monitoring more than a handful of companies, you need the Gazette covered, or you want alerts that tell you what something means rather than just that it happened.

When Vigil makes more sense

• You have suppliers or customers with outstanding invoices you can't afford to lose
• You need London Gazette dissolution alerts — the two-month objection window is a real risk for your business
• You're monitoring more than five companies and the volume of CH emails isn't workable
• You want to know what a filing means, not just that it happened
• You need Slack delivery alongside email