Best Data Broker Removal Service: Incogni vs DeleteMe

If you’ve read the explainer on why manual data broker opt-outs don’t stay done, you already know the part most comparisons skip. The real question with these services isn’t which one removes you from more sites. It’s which one comes back and does it again, and how often.

That sounds like a small distinction. It’s the whole thing.

Incogni and DeleteMe are the two services most people actually weigh against each other, and on paper they look like a coverage contest, one big number versus another big number. But your data doesn’t stay removed. Brokers relist it. So the service that wins isn’t the one that does the most thorough single sweep. It’s the one that keeps coming back fastest after the relisting starts. I spent two decades on the building side of identity protection, and this is the gap between the marketing and the mechanics I want you to see before you pick.

Why This Is a Subscription and Not a One-Time Fix

Here’s what the head terms gloss over. When a removal service gets your listing pulled from a broker, it almost never deletes the underlying data. It suppresses one broker’s copy. The supply is still out there.

The Federal Trade Commission studied nine major brokers and found they buy and sell data to each other constantly, to the point that tracing where any single record came from is, in the agency’s words, virtually impossible. Pull your profile off one site and the same address and phone number may still sit with another broker, a public records feed, or a commercial source that feeds the whole ecosystem. Some people-search brokers told the FTC outright that they don’t bother with real deletion, because their automated systems just crawl the public web and pull the same information back in. Researchers have a name for this. They call it whack-a-mole.

It gets worse from there. Even brokers that honor a removal can rebuild your profile from scratch. New public records get filed every week, and routine sign-ups, warranty cards, and address changes feed fresh data back into the pipeline. DeleteMe’s own support materials admit this, that new data keeps getting generated and can repopulate broker databases even after a clean removal. The FTC’s consumer guidance makes the same point. Opting out lowers your exposure. It doesn’t seal off the sources that future records get built from.

So the economically meaningful question isn’t “how many sites does this service hit.” It’s “how often does it check again and send the next request.” Hold onto that one. It’s the lens for everything below.

What You’re Actually Buying, and What You’re Not

Both of these are broker-listing removal services. Neither is an “erase me from the internet” button, no matter how the ads read.

Public records are the clearest example. Property and real estate records, marriage and business licenses, voter registration, court records, arrest records and mugshots are government-held or legally public, and no removal service can make them disappear. DeleteMe says so plainly in its own materials. Incogni says the same, and adds that it won’t touch social media accounts, blogs, forums, or the dark web, the part of the internet that isn’t indexed by normal search engines and where stolen data often circulates.

What both services do remove is the brokered, resold version of you. Name, current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, age, sometimes even a photo of your house, all packaged and sold by people-search and marketing brokers. That’s a real reduction in exposure. It just isn’t the same as vanishing, and any service that implies otherwise is overselling.

Worth knowing: even Incogni’s top Unlimited tier, the one that reaches 2,000-plus extra sites, draws the same line. It won’t process court records, records on government websites, or publications about criminal proceedings and convictions. Paying more buys broader broker coverage. It doesn’t buy a way around what’s legally public. That’s a limit of the law, not a flaw in either product.

Coverage, and Why the Site Counts Mislead

This is where the marketing gets slippery, so read the numbers slowly.

Incogni’s standard plan covers more than 420 data broker sites on an automated basis, and its help center puts the people-search subset at roughly 100 sites, with coverage still growing. Its top tier, Unlimited, layers on manually handled custom removals across 2,000 or more additional sites.

DeleteMe uses two numbers for two different things, and they get conflated constantly. Its standard consumer service actively works 85 or more major broker sites: finds you, removes you, monitors, and removes you again if you reappear. Separately, its “sites we remove from” page says the company has found and removed data across 976 brokers over thirteen years. Those are not the same claim. The 976 is a lifetime catalog, not your continuously monitored set.

So the real apples-to-apples isn’t 976 versus 420. It’s closer to “85-plus major sites under active standard service, plus custom requests where possible” against “420-plus automated brokers as standard, more if you pay for Unlimited.” DeleteMe concentrates on the high-visibility sites most likely to surface when someone searches your name. Incogni casts a wider automated net by default. Both framings are defensible. They’re answering different questions.

Cadence, the Part That Actually Decides This

Now bring back the lens from the top. If brokers relist, the service that matters most is the one that re-scans and re-files most aggressively.

Incogni is built around exactly that. It sends removal requests on repeat, re-scans on a regular cycle, and shows customers a running “days until next request” counter that runs on roughly a ten-day rhythm. It sends monthly progress reports. The whole product is a high-frequency maintenance loop.

DeleteMe treats privacy as ongoing too, but it frames the rhythm differently. It begins work within about a week of signup, keeps monitoring until removals confirm, and delivers four privacy reports a year, one each quarter. It describes its monitoring as a reliable cadence and re-removes data as it reappears. It also lets you file custom removal requests between reports when you spot new exposure yourself, which is a real and useful offset.

Line them up against the relisting problem, though, and the difference is clear. Incogni’s default is dense and automated. DeleteMe’s default is quarterly with a human in the loop. Neither company publishes enough back-end detail to prove an exact re-scan frequency, so this is a judgment from their published cadence claims, not a lab measurement. With that caveat stated honestly: if your whole concern is that brokers keep putting you back and you want the fastest, most frequent re-removal, Incogni’s model fits that concern better.

Price

Pricing is where the gap stops being subtle.

For a single person, Incogni’s entry plan runs $95.88 for the year and comes in well under DeleteMe’s $129, while delivering broader coverage and a faster default cadence. For families, Incogni stays cheaper and covers up to five people against DeleteMe’s four. Pricing alone leans hard toward Incogni. The honest question is whether DeleteMe’s advisor-led, highest-visibility workflow is worth paying more for a default cadence that’s less aggressive.

Here’s how the two stack up across the axes that matter.

The Free Option the Ads Won’t Mention

Before you subscribe to anything, know what you can do for nothing. This is the part I couldn’t always say plainly from inside the industry.

You can opt out of most major brokers yourself, by hand, for free. It’s tedious and it doesn’t stay done, which is the entire reason these services exist. But it works. Consumer Reports ran a small study a couple of years back testing several paid people-search removal services and found that doing the opt-outs manually beat every paid service in the test. The services as a group were, in its assessment, largely ineffective, and DeleteMe landed in the middle of the pack. That study didn’t include Incogni, so it isn’t a head-to-head, and it’s a few years old now. But the lesson holds. A coverage count is a claim about scope, not proof your profile actually disappeared.

If you live in California, you have a stronger free option as of this year. The state’s Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, called DROP, lets any California resident send a single deletion request to more than 500 registered brokers at once, at no cost. Starting August 1, 2026, those brokers have to check the platform at least every 45 days and delete within 90. That’s the closest thing in U.S. law to the recurring, scalable removal these paid services are selling, and it’s free for residents. It won’t catch everything and it’s state-specific, but if you qualify it changes the math.

The Honest Bottom Line

Strip away brand loyalty and it comes down to one question. What problem are you actually solving?

If your concern is the one this whole category is built on, that brokers relist and you want the service that re-scans and re-removes fastest, Incogni is the better fit. Broader standard coverage, a denser repeat-request cadence, and a lower entry price all line up with that goal. For most people weighing these two on the relisting problem, that’s the pick.

If you’d rather have a human expert managing the highest-visibility listings, prefer a quarterly report rhythm over constant automation, and want someone to handle custom requests when you find new exposure, DeleteMe earns its higher price. It’s a serious service. It’s just a different shape, concierge rather than conveyor belt.

Is either one actually worth it? That depends less on the brand and more on you. If you’d realistically keep doing manual opt-outs every month, neither is worth the money, the free route covers you. If you know you won’t, the right answer is the service that re-removes most aggressively for the least cost, and on the current evidence that’s Incogni for most single users and families. DeleteMe is worth the premium specifically when the human-managed workflow and the focus on the most visible sites matter more to you than raw cadence and price.

And if you want to spend nothing first, start with manual opt-outs, or DROP if you’re in California, then decide whether paying for the upkeep is worth it. A lot of people find that it is, for the simple reason that they won’t keep doing the manual work every month. That’s a fair reason to subscribe. Just subscribe knowing what the service does and doesn’t fix.

Either way, the mechanics matter more than the logo. Brokers relist. The service worth paying for is the one that keeps showing up to take you back down. If you’re still deciding whether to pay for any of this, it helps to understand exactly what identity protection services actually monitor and whether identity theft protection is worth it at all.

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Tom Reardon spent over 20 years in product and operations at major identity protection providers. He writes at MyScamGuide.com to give consumers the honest picture the industry’s marketing never did.

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Recommended resources:

• FTC: Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability: the federal study behind the relisting problem
• California Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP): free single-request deletion for California residents