DeleteMe and Incogni are the two names anyone shopping for a data broker removal service ends up comparing. We've used both, on real personal records, across roughly 90 days of monitoring. Here's the honest read: DeleteMe is older, more transparent, and shows you what it's actually doing. Incogni is cheaper and bundles cleanly with Surfshark. Neither is the "right" answer for everyone — and there are two other services worth knowing about before you click.
What these services actually do
Data brokers are companies that scrape, aggregate, and sell your personal information — name, address history, phone numbers, relatives, estimated income, political affiliation, the works. Sites like Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, MyLife, Radaris, and Intelius are the consumer-facing tip of an industry that includes hundreds of less visible aggregators. Every one of them has a legal opt-out process. Every one of them makes that process tedious on purpose.
A data broker removal service does the opt-outs for you, on a recurring basis (because brokers re-add your records — that's the whole business model). You hand them your name, addresses, emails, and phone numbers; they file the removal requests; they re-check periodically. That's the entire product category. The differences are coverage (how many brokers), cadence (how often they re-check), transparency (do they show you what they did), and price.
DeleteMe vs Incogni at a glance
DeleteMe: the transparent veteran
DeleteMe (run by Abine, the same people behind Blur) has been in the data broker removal business since 2010 — longer than the entire competitive set combined. The product reflects that maturity. Every quarter, you get a removal report: a PDF that lists, broker by broker, what records they found, what they removed, what's pending, and what re-appeared. We've read these reports for clients and for our own records. They're detailed enough that you could, in theory, audit DeleteMe's work yourself.
The price is the wedge: $129/year for a single person, $229 for a couple, $329 for a family of four. That's the highest in the category. What you're paying for is coverage breadth (around 750 brokers, including a long tail of smaller aggregators competitors don't touch), the human-team model (Abine's removal specialists handle escalations the automated services bounce off of), and the audit trail.
Incogni: the price-pressure pick
Incogni launched in 2021 as Surfshark's privacy product, and the strategy is obvious: undercut DeleteMe on price, ride the Surfshark VPN distribution channel, and bundle aggressively. At $77/year (often lower with a Surfshark One subscription), it's roughly half the price of DeleteMe for one person.
The trade-offs: smaller broker coverage list (Incogni quotes a smaller number publicly, and the actual removal velocity reflects that), less detailed reporting (you get a dashboard with status counts, not a PDF audit trail), and an automated-first removal pipeline that handles the well-behaved brokers fast but escalates slower on the difficult ones. For 80% of users, that's fine — the well-behaved brokers are the ones whose listings show up first when someone Googles your name.
If you already use Surfshark VPN, the bundle math is hard to argue with. If you don't, Incogni still beats DeleteMe on raw price-per-broker for the brokers it covers.
Optery: the cheapest, most monitoring-heavy option
Optery is the third name worth knowing. The free tier is a genuine product — it scans 100+ broker sites and shows you exactly which ones have your records, with screenshots, before you pay a dollar. The paid tiers ($3.99–$24.99/month depending on scan cadence and broker coverage) include real monthly re-scans with visual proof of removal.
What makes Optery interesting: the monthly cadence (vs DeleteMe's quarterly) catches re-listings faster, and the screenshot-based reporting is the most evidence-heavy in the category. We've moved one of our test profiles to Optery's $9.99/month Core tier and the dashboard is consistently the most informative of any service we've used.
iolo Privacy Guardian: the ecosystem play
iolo Privacy Guardian belongs in this list because if you're already running iolo's System Mechanic for PC cleanup, it slots into the same ecosystem and the bundle pricing is reasonable. As a standalone purchase, it's narrower in scope than DeleteMe, Incogni, or Optery — it's stronger on browser-level tracker blocking and search-history scrubbing than on the broker opt-out side. We'd recommend it as a complement to one of the three above, not a replacement.
(For full disclosure: iSupraDesign LLC has a joint venture and partnership relationship with iolo via Loyal Companies. We've kept Privacy Guardian out of the headline pick deliberately — it doesn't beat the dedicated broker-removal services on broker coverage, and we'd rather you know that than pretend otherwise.)
How we'd actually choose
The honest framework, after 90 days of running DeleteMe, Incogni, and Optery side-by-side on real records:
- Pick DeleteMe if you want the most thorough job, you're protecting a family (the family plan is the best value in the category), or you want a paper trail you can show a lawyer if something goes sideways.
- Pick Incogni if you already have Surfshark, you're price-sensitive, or you want "set and forget" without thinking about reports.
- Pick Optery if you want to see exactly what's happening every month, you like the free-tier audit before committing, or you're a privacy power-user who wants the most data.
- Add Privacy Guardian as a layered tracker-blocker on top of any of the three, especially if you already use iolo products.
What none of these services can do
Important context: data broker removal is one layer of a multi-layer privacy problem. None of these services touch:
- Information already on social media (you control that — see how to remove personal info from the internet)
- Information in court records, news articles, or government databases
- Information leaked in past data breaches (see what to do after a data breach)
- Information shared by people who know you
If you want the manual playbook for the broker side without paying anyone, our data broker opt-out guide walks through the top 10 brokers with direct opt-out URLs. Most readers, after seeing how long that takes, end up paying for one of the services above. That's a rational choice — the math on your time vs $77–$129/year is not close.
The bottom line
If we had to pick one for a friend who asked tonight, with no follow-up questions allowed, it would be DeleteMe — because the audit trail and family-plan economics make it the safest default for people who don't want to think about this again. Incogni is the right answer if Surfshark is already in your stack or price is the dealbreaker. Optery is the right answer for anyone who wants to actually see the work happen, and its free tier is worth running before you pay anyone for anything. The best privacy stack uses one of these plus a separate identity monitoring service for the breach-response layer they don't cover.