DeleteMe vs Incogni: Which Data Removal Service Actually Works

Search for this comparison and you will find page after page declaring a winner in the first paragraph. Read closely and the winner usually correlates with which affiliate program pays more. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is how the category is monetized: both companies run referral programs, the commission rates differ, and the reviews drift accordingly.

This page takes a different approach. Everything below was checked against joindeleteme.com, incogni.com and their help centers in September 2026. Figures from a vendor’s own page are attributed and dated. Claims that could not be confirmed are described rather than quoted. And there is no single winner at the end, because the honest answer depends on what you are buying the service for.

One thing to settle first. Both are subscriptions, not a one-time cleanup, and both rent you a process that runs continuously. Neither can guarantee removal, and neither claims it can. For the wider context of how removal fits with suppression and monitoring, see our reputation management hub.

Contents

• What both services are actually selling
• DeleteMe: who runs it and how it works
• Incogni: who runs it and how it works
• Head to head comparison
• Coverage claims and what they really mean
• Pricing shape and what you are committing to
• Reporting and the evidence you get back
• Cancellation, refunds and what happens when you stop
• What neither service can do
• The honest use case for each
• When neither one is the right purchase
• Frequently asked questions
• Conclusion

What both services are actually selling

Strip away the branding and both companies do the same three things on repeat. They look for records that match your identity across data broker and people-search databases. They submit opt-out or deletion requests wherever they find you, using whatever route each broker offers. Then they scan again, because brokers re-list. That third step is the reason this is sold as a subscription rather than a service call.

The re-listing problem is not a marketing invention. Brokers refresh their feeds from voter files, property records, court filings and licensed third-party sets, so a profile deleted in March can reappear in July with no malice involved. Both vendors acknowledge this on their own support pages. DeleteMe’s help center describes watching for reappearing listings and removing them again. Incogni’s dashboard carries a status called Monitoring, defined as brokers it will keep sending recurring requests to because many re-list after the initial removal.

That shared foundation matters because it sets the ceiling on what either product can achieve. Neither one deletes your information from the internet. Both reduce how much of it is trivially purchasable or free to look up, for as long as you keep paying. If you want the fuller map of what can and cannot be pulled down, our guide to deleting your personal information from the internet covers the categories these subscriptions never touch.

Where the two diverge is in method, in how coverage is defined, in what evidence you get back, and in the commitment you sign up for. Those four differences are the whole comparison.

DeleteMe: who runs it and how it works

DeleteMe is built and run by Abine, Inc., which describes itself on its own about page as The Online Privacy Company. That page dates the business to 2010 and names Rob Shavell, Eugene Kuznetsov and Andrew Sudbury as the founders, with Shavell listed as co-founder and chief executive. DeleteMe is the oldest consumer data removal service still operating at scale, and it predates most of the privacy laws its competitors now cite.

Method is where DeleteMe differentiates. The company describes a hybrid model: its own technology finds the records, and human privacy advisors handle the submissions and the awkward cases. Broker opt-out routes are not uniform. Some accept a web form, some require an emailed request from a matching address, some send a verification link that expires, and a few still want a mailed request or a phone call. Automation handles the easy category well and degrades from there. Humans absorb the rest.

The customer-facing rhythm is a privacy report. DeleteMe’s homepage promises a detailed report within seven days of signup, and the service then issues reports on a recurring basis through the subscription, with a named point of contact available by email, chat or phone. Custom removal requests are included, meaning you can point the team at a site outside the standard list and ask them to try.

DeleteMe also handles identity variants natively, advertising removal of unlimited aliases, previous names, email addresses and phone numbers. That is less trivial than it sounds: brokers index maiden names, misspellings and every address you have lived at as separate records.

On self-reported scale, DeleteMe’s homepage claimed more than 141 million successful opt-out removals when checked in September 2026, and stated that over a two-year subscription customers averaged more than 2,389 items of exposed personal information found. Both are the company’s own numbers with no external audit described, so treat them as a measure of activity rather than of outcome.

Incogni: who runs it and how it works

Incogni is a Surfshark product. Its own about page states the service was created within Surfshark in September 2021 and that the company is now part of one group together with NordVPN. The footer lists Incogni Inc. at an address in Mission Viejo, California. Darius Belejevas is named as the person heading the service. If you already hold a Surfshark subscription, that ownership explains why Incogni keeps appearing in your account dashboard.

The method is fundamentally different from DeleteMe’s, and this is the single most useful fact in the whole comparison. Incogni is built around automated statutory requests. Rather than working each broker’s bespoke opt-out route by hand, it sends removal demands that invoke the legal right to deletion under laws including the GDPR and the CCPA, then tracks the statutory clock. Its own help center cites a 30-day compliance window under the GDPR and a 45-day window for CCPA deletion requests, and says that when brokers miss those deadlines Incogni follows up, which extends the overall timeline.

That design has a real advantage. A statutory request is a legal obligation rather than a courtesy, so a broker that ignores it is exposed in a way a broker ignoring a form submission is not. It also scales cheaply, which is why Incogni undercuts almost everything else in the category. The trade-off is that automation cannot improvise: where a process is deliberately awkward or needs a judgment call, the standard plan has no analyst to make it.

Incogni’s dashboard is unusually specific, and the statuses are published in its help center: Total Sent, In Progress, Completed, Scheduled, Monitoring and Suppressed. Completed is defined carefully as brokers that either removed your data or confirmed they did not hold any, an honest distinction most competitors blur. Suppressed means brokers that will no longer collect, trade or store information about you. Incogni also grades brokers as compliant, inconsistent, resistant or undetermined.

On categories, Incogni’s help center states it covers most data broker types including marketing, recruitment, risk mitigation and people search sites. The marketing and recruitment categories are worth noting, because plenty of competitors focus almost entirely on the people-search layer that shows up in a vanity search.

Head to head comparison

All figures below were read on the vendors’ own sites in September 2026. Coverage counts are self-reported by each company and are not independently verified counts.

Coverage claims and what they really mean

Coverage counts are the most misused number in this category, and both companies illustrate why.

DeleteMe’s dedicated sites page carried the heading that it removes private information from 986 data brokers when we checked it in September 2026. On the same day, a different page on the same domain described the service as removing you from more than 750 data brokers. Neither figure is dishonest, they are almost certainly snapshots taken at different times, but the gap is a useful reminder that these are marketing counts maintained by hand, not audited inventories.

More important is what sits behind that master list. DeleteMe annotates it with symbols marking which plans include which sites, with separate markers for the standard plan, for business tiers named Gold, Diamond, Platinum and VIP, for international plans and for custom requests. The headline number is therefore the union of every plan the company sells, not what an individual consumer receives. DeleteMe’s help center publishes a separate article listing the sites covered on the Standard US plan, and that enumerated list is substantially shorter, running to roughly a hundred and thirty named sites by our own manual count. DeleteMe publishes no total for that article, so treat the number as an approximation. To its credit, the company asks on its own list page whether list size is the best measure of a removal service and answers, not always.

Incogni’s numbers are structured more clearly. Its homepage claimed 420 or more brokers covered by automated removals, described as verified by Deloitte, and 3,420 or more sites in total, the difference being roughly 3,000 sites reachable through Custom Removals. The distinction matters: the 420 are worked automatically on every plan, while the 3,000 require an Unlimited tier and you submitting the links yourself. We could not confirm the scope of the Deloitte verification, so read it as a vendor claim about a vendor-commissioned exercise.

The practical takeaway is that a bigger number does not mean a cleaner search result. Most of the exposure that bothers people comes from a few dozen high-visibility people-search sites that both services cover. Our roster of personal data removal services goes further into why coverage counts are a poor basis for choosing.

Pricing shape and what you are committing to

Prices move constantly and both vendors run rolling discounts, so re-check anything quoted here before you buy.

Incogni’s pricing page, read on 13 September 2026, showed four tiers. Standard was 7.99 US dollars a month, or 95.88 dollars billed annually, struck through from 191.76. Unlimited was 14.99 a month, or 179.88 annually. Family was 15.99 a month, or 191.88 annually, covering up to five members. Family Unlimited was 22.99 a month, or 275.88 annually. The page labeled the annual saving as 50 percent. On the same day, Incogni’s homepage advertised a different set of discounted annual totals against a 55 percent headline. That inconsistency is the point: these are promotional rates that shift, and the struck-through figures are the list rate you would revert to.

DeleteMe’s live pricing page renders its figures in JavaScript and did not expose them to us, so we cannot quote the current tiers from it. DeleteMe’s own help center, checked the same day, described its Solo plan as covering one person for one year at about 11 dollars a month, billed annually at 129 dollars, and stated that per-person cost falls as you add people and that longer subscriptions save more. The plans page itself confirms the structure without prices: one person, two people or four people, on either a one-year or a two-year term.

The shape difference is more durable than the numbers. Incogni sells monthly or annual, and its family tier covers up to five people at a low per-seat cost, making it the cheaper household option almost regardless of the promotion running. DeleteMe sells by the year or two years, in blocks of one, two or four people, with no monthly option. With Incogni you can test for a month. With DeleteMe you are buying a year and relying on the refund policy if it disappoints.

One more structural note. Incogni gates its most expansive coverage behind the Unlimited tiers, so the cheap entry price buys the 420-broker automated service and nothing more. DeleteMe includes custom requests at the consumer level but reserves large parts of its master site list for business plans. In both cases the advertised ceiling costs more than the advertised floor.

Reporting and the evidence you get back

You cannot realistically audit this work yourself, so what the vendor shows you is most of what you have to go on.

DeleteMe’s model is the periodic privacy report: a first report promised within seven days, then recurring reports through the term, backed by a named contact you can question. The strength is interpretation, since a person can tell you why a site is being stubborn. The weakness is that a report is a point-in-time document, and between reports you are waiting.

Incogni’s model is the live dashboard, and its published status definitions are the most precise in the category. Completed explicitly bundles brokers that removed your data with brokers that confirmed they never held it, exactly the nuance a marketing team would normally hide. Scheduled and Monitoring show the work is recurring rather than finished, and you can see an expected removal time per broker.

Neither service, on the evidence of its own public pages, routinely hands consumers dated before-and-after screenshots of each profile. Some competitors do, so if documented proof is what you need, look wider than these two. The more useful question is whether the reporting tells you what is still outstanding or only what has been done. Incogni’s dashboard answers that better. DeleteMe answers your follow-up questions better.

Cancellation, refunds and what happens when you stop

Both let you cancel automatic renewal at any time in the account area, and both publish refund terms in their help centers.

DeleteMe’s stated policy is that if you have not yet received your first privacy report you can request a full refund, no questions asked, and that once it has been delivered you can get a prorated refund covering the unused remainder of the term. No fixed deadline applies beyond that first-report milestone, and the prorating is more generous than most.

Incogni’s stated policy is a 30-day money-back guarantee from the initial purchase, requested through customer support, limited to one refund per customer. Refunds beyond 30 days are discretionary and framed around the service having been genuinely unavailable or unusable. Purchases made through resellers other than its payment processor are excluded and must go back to the reseller, and accounts terminated for terms violations are not refunded.

Now the part the sales pages do not lead with. When you stop paying either service, the removal work stops. Existing deletions are not reversed by the vendor, but nothing is watching your name any more, and brokers keep refreshing their feeds from the same sources they always did. Over the following months your profiles will reappear on some of the sites you were removed from. Neither company hides this, but it does mean a subscription cancelled after a year is not a permanent purchase, it is a year of maintained cleanliness that then decays.

That is the honest economics of the category, and it is the single biggest thing affiliate reviews leave out.

What neither service can do

Both vendors are clear about their limits in support documentation, even where the marketing pages are quieter.

DeleteMe’s help center states plainly that it does not remove your name from the internet, and lists categories that are public by law and will remain searchable: property and real estate records, marriage and business licenses, voter registrations and certain court records. It states separately that arrest records, mugshots and court records sit in the public record, are governed by courts rather than brokers, and that an expunged or sealed case gives you leverage to ask sites to update or remove. It also says it cannot remove you from sites offering no opt-out route, mostly non-US aggregators that scrape the open web.

Incogni’s help center lists the categories its Custom Removals feature will not touch, citing technical or legal limitations: court records, records on government websites, publications about criminal proceedings and convictions, and social media accounts, blogs and forums.

Notice how closely those two lists overlap. Public records, news and court material, and anything hosted on a platform where a third party published it are outside the scope of a data removal subscription by design. So are your own old accounts, which only you can close.

Search engines are the other common misunderstanding. DeleteMe’s help center is blunt about it: Google is not the source of what you see, it is a directory. Remove the underlying page and the result eventually drops. Neither service deletes search results directly, and neither can suppress a news article, a review, a court docket or a social post. If that is your actual problem, you want the removal and suppression side of reputation work instead.

The honest use case for each

When DeleteMe is the better fit

Choose DeleteMe when the human layer is worth paying for. If you have a messy identity footprint, several former names, a decade of addresses, a common name that collides with other people, or a site that resists standard opt-out routes, an analyst who can escalate is worth more than a lower monthly price.

It also suits people who want the longest track record in the category. Abine has done this since 2010, through several waves of privacy legislation, without pivoting or rebranding. For a household willing to commit to a year or two rather than testing monthly, and for anyone whose case involves unusual requests, DeleteMe is the stronger buy.

When Incogni is the better fit

Choose Incogni when you want broad automated coverage at the lowest sensible cost and want to see the machinery working. The statutory-request model suits the large, compliant brokers that generate most visible exposure, and the dashboard is more granular than any periodic report.

The family tier is the strongest argument. Five people covered under one subscription, at a per-seat cost well below individual pricing anywhere else, is genuinely good value for a household that wants the basic job done. The monthly option also means you can try it for a month, look at what the dashboard surfaces about your own exposure, and decide from evidence rather than from a review page.

When neither one is the right purchase

There are three situations where the honest recommendation is to keep your money.

The first is when your exposure is concentrated. If a search for your name turns up profiles on five or six of the well-known people-search sites and nothing else that bothers you, you can remove them yourself in an afternoon, for free, and the result is identical to what you would pay for. The opt-out forms are public and most take a few minutes each. Our step-by-step guides cover the major sites, including TruePeopleSearch and Whitepages. The catch is that you have to redo it periodically, which is precisely what the subscription is selling. If you are disciplined enough to diary a check twice a year, DIY wins on cost and loses nothing on quality.

The second is when your problem is not a broker problem. A negative news article, a defamatory post, a bad review, a court docket, a photograph on someone else’s social account: none of these are affected by a data removal subscription, and paying for one will feel like nothing happened, because nothing did.

The third is when you are in an urgent safety situation. If you are being stalked or harassed and your address is the immediate risk, a subscription that grinds through statutory deadlines over 30 to 45 days per broker is not a fast enough response on its own. Prioritize the specific sites exposing your location, work them directly and immediately, and use the guidance in our piece on removing your address from the internet. A subscription is a reasonable thing to run alongside that, but it is not the emergency measure.

Frequently asked questions

Is Incogni worth it?

It is worth it if you value the automation and the dashboard and accept that the standard tier covers the automated broker list only. It is not worth it if you expect your name to vanish from search, or if your exposure is a handful of sites you could opt out of yourself. The monthly option makes it cheap to find out which camp you are in.

Which one removes more data?

Nobody can answer that honestly, including us. The two companies count coverage differently, neither publishes audited outcome data, and results vary enormously by how common your name is and how many addresses you have held. Anyone who tells you one service removes more is either extrapolating from a single anecdote or has an affiliate link.

Do either of them guarantee removal?

No, and neither claims to. A broker can refuse, stall, or comply and then re-list from a fresh data feed a few months later. What both offer is a process that keeps asking, plus a refund policy if you are unhappy early on.

What happens if I cancel?

Removals already achieved are not undone by the vendor, but monitoring stops, and brokers gradually re-list from ongoing public and commercial data feeds. Expect your exposure to creep back over the following months. This applies to both services and to every competitor in the category.

Can I run both at once?

You can, and the coverage lists do not fully overlap, but for most people the marginal benefit does not justify two subscriptions. Doing the top sites by hand as a cross-check is a better use of the money.

What about Optery and the other alternatives?

Optery is the most frequently cited alternative, largely because its higher tiers provide before-and-after screenshots of removed profiles, which neither DeleteMe nor Incogni routinely gives consumers. There are also flat-rate budget services that do the core people-search job for less than either. The category is wider than this matchup suggests.

Conclusion

There is no winner here, and any page that names one without disclosing how it earns money should be read with that in mind. DeleteMe and Incogni are built on genuinely different bets. DeleteMe bets that people and judgment beat volume, sells in yearly blocks, and gives you a human to ask. Incogni bets that statutory rights and automation scale better than analysts, sells cheaply by the month, and gives you a dashboard precise enough to see what is stuck.

Pick DeleteMe if your identity footprint is messy or you want someone accountable to speak to. Pick Incogni if you want broad automated coverage, household pricing, or the ability to test before committing. Pick neither if your exposure is small enough to clear by hand, if your real problem is content rather than broker records, or if you need something removed today.

Whichever way you go, hold on to the two facts that survive every price change and every rebrand. These are subscriptions, and the cleanliness they buy lasts about as long as the billing does. And neither one, nor anything else on the market, can promise your information will stay gone.