iBorrowDesk

What it is

One person's site, running for over a decade, that takes Interactive Brokers' public shortable-shares files and makes them readable: what it costs to borrow a stock right now, the rebate, and how many shares the broker says are available. Around fifteen thousand securities, free, with no account and the most recent year of history for everyone.

It is in this category because cost to borrow is part of the same job as short interest — the question of how crowded and how expensive the short side of a stock is — and it is the cheapest honest answer to half of that question. What it is not is short interest, and the site's own FAQ is more careful about that distinction than most paid products are.

It is more of a tool than the description suggests. Each ticker gets linked charts of borrow fee and shares available with ranges from seven days — intraday — out to everything, there is a screener with fee and availability sliders across seventeen countries, and threshold alerts by email are available to free accounts with the allowance rising on the paid tiers.

The value is the framing. A borrow fee that jumps from 2% to 40% tells you something an end-of-month filing cannot, and here it is visible without a subscription, from the broker that publishes the file rather than from a vendor's model of it.

Pricing

Free and ad-supported, with two ways to pay. Patreon from $1 a month removes the advertising and raises the alert allowance to ten securities, and the vendor states that $10 a month raises it to fifty and adds history back to 2015 plus CSV export — a statement to take on its own terms, since Patreon's public page showed only the $1 entry when checked. Separately, $500 once buys a year of access to the archive as CSVs covering the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

That archive price is the interesting one, with one string attached worth reading twice: the payment is one-off and what it buys is a year of access, not files you keep. Inside that year it is the only route in this category to a bulk borrow-fee history at a published price — daily fee and availability from July 2015, with high, low and rebate from January 2021 in most cases.

Data & coverage

Borrow fee, rebate rate and shares available, from Interactive Brokers, for North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with the archive adding Mexico. Updates run about every fifteen minutes for North America during US hours and about hourly elsewhere, which is the upstream file's cadence.

What is absent is everything else: no short interest of any kind, official or estimated, no fails-to-deliver, no days to cover, no insider or ownership data. A recent rebuild added European and Asia-Pacific archives during 2026 and rebuilt the front end, so this is maintained rather than merely still up.

Limitations

• Not short interest. It says so itself, and a reader arriving from a squeeze story should read that sentence twice.
• One broker. Interactive Brokers' availability and rates, not a market composite.
• A rolling year of history unless you pay — a ticker checked on 21 September 2026 returned 259 daily rows back to 22 September 2025, and the range control says so in as many words. Full history is behind a Patreon tier whose contents are stated by the vendor rather than on the payment page.
• No supported API. The public endpoints behind the site are undocumented, ungoverned and unannounced.
• One person, no company. A decade of continuity and no entity, no terms of service and no support commitment behind it.
• The $500 archive buys a year of access, not the files forever. Read that sentence on the premium page before treating it as a dataset purchase.

Alternatives

ChartExchange serves the same Interactive Brokers borrow fee with history back to 2016, plus the official FINRA short interest and SEC fails-to-deliver, from $19.95 a month with an API. ORTEX covers cost to borrow across the whole lending pool rather than one broker, from $39 a month. S3 Partners has the richest borrow data and sells it only by contract. The rest of the category is at insider, 13F and congressional trade trackers.