DeleteMe vs Incogni in an Honest 2026 Comparison

DeleteMe and Incogni are the two names people compare most when they finally decide to get their home address off the internet. Both are real, working services you can pay for today. They take almost opposite approaches to the same job, and the right pick depends on your budget, how complicated your history is, and whether you want a human in the loop. Prices below were checked on their own sites in July 2026; both companies change them, so confirm before you buy.

Full disclosure, because it matters when you read a comparison: we run a data removal service of our own. We have no reason to push you toward either of these, and every reason to describe them accurately, since anyone who buys on a claim we made up will remember it. What follows is how they actually differ.

The short version

DeleteMe is the older, human-assisted option. A person reviews and files your removals, you get a report every quarter, and it costs $129 a year for one person, billed annually. Incogni is the cheaper, fully automated option from Surfshark. Software sends the opt-out requests, a dashboard shows their status, and it costs $7.99 a month billed annually, which works out to $95.88 a year, with a month-to-month choice DeleteMe does not offer. Incogni reaches more brokers out of the box; DeleteMe puts a human on the awkward ones.

Pricing compared

DeleteMe vs Incogni: pricing and plans, checked July 2026

	DeleteMe	Incogni
Entry price	$129 / year (about $10.75 / month)	$7.99 / month billed annually ($95.88 / year)
Month-to-month	Not offered, annual only	Yes, at a higher monthly rate
Higher tier	2 people $229 / yr; family of 4 $329 / yr	Unlimited $14.99 / mo billed annually ($179.88 / yr)
Family plan	Up to 4 people, $329 / year	Up to 5 people, from $15.99 / mo billed annually

The headline gap is real: Incogni is roughly 25 to 40 percent cheaper for one person, depending on how you count DeleteMe's annual-only billing. If price is the deciding factor, that is the number that decides it. DeleteMe's family plan is the better value once you are covering four people, because Incogni's per-person cost stays closer to its single rate.

How many brokers each service covers, and which ones

This is where the marketing numbers get slippery, so read them carefully. DeleteMe states on its own sites page that it removes private information from 986 data brokers, though that figure is the cumulative list it has found and removed data from, not a per-plan coverage promise. Incogni sends deletion requests to a network of more than 420 brokers, including marketing aggregators, and its standard plan reaches all of them automatically rather than holding some back for an upsell.

For most people the practical result is that Incogni hits more brokers on day one, while DeleteMe's human team is better at the specific sites that reject automated requests. Neither covers every broker in existence, and no service does. If you want to see the full landscape they are working against, our data broker opt-out list names every major one, what it exposes, and how hard its form is.

Human verified vs fully automated

DeleteMe's pitch is that a real person handles your case, checks that a removal actually took, and re-files when a broker pushes back. That is genuinely valuable for the brokers that make opt-out deliberately painful, the ones that demand a notarized form or a phone call. The cost of that human work is the price and the cadence: you hear from them on a schedule, not the moment something changes.

Incogni's pitch is scale and speed through automation. It fires opt-out requests across its whole roster, invokes your rights under laws like CCPA on your behalf, and shows each request's status in a dashboard. The trade is that a request a broker rejects, or a site outside the roster, is where a purely automated pipeline runs out of road unless you are on the Unlimited tier, which adds custom removal requests. For a straightforward footprint that is a fine trade. For someone with five past addresses and two former names, the human review starts to earn its price.

Is Incogni or DeleteMe better?

Neither is better in the abstract; they are built for different buyers. Incogni is the better pick for most people who want the widest automated coverage at the lowest price and are comfortable reading a status dashboard. DeleteMe is the better pick if you specifically want a human managing the removals, you have a complicated history with many old names or addresses, or you value a written quarterly report you can hand to a spouse or a security team.

Is DeleteMe worth the money?

DeleteMe is worth $129 a year if your exposure is high or messy and you would rather a person owned the problem than manage it yourself. It has removed data for real customers since 2011, which is a longer track record than almost anyone in the category. If your footprint is simple and price is your main concern, you are paying a premium over Incogni for the human touch, and that premium is only worth it if you will actually use the reassurance it buys.

Does Incogni really work?

Yes, within the limits of any removal service. Incogni's automated requests do get listings taken down across its broker network, and independent 2026 testing generally credits it with broad reach and quick first results. What it cannot do, and does not claim to do, is guarantee a broker never re-lists you. Data brokers rebuild from fresh public records, so any service, Incogni included, is a subscription precisely because the work never finishes.

Can I just remove myself for free?

You can. Every broker these services use has a free opt-out form, and you are allowed to file them yourself. Budget around 20 hours for a thorough first pass across the major brokers, then a few hours every one to three months to catch reappearances. The reason people pay is not that the forms are secret; it is that filing and re-filing them across a hundred brokers, forever, is tedious in a way most people quit after the first afternoon. If you want to try, start with the free opt-out list and work top to bottom.

Which should you choose

Pick Incogni if you want the lowest price, the widest automated broker reach, a month-to-month option, or you are covering yourself and do not need a human reviewing each removal. Pick DeleteMe if you want a person managing a complex footprint, a written quarterly report, or the strongest track record in the category, and the higher annual price does not put you off. If you are protecting a whole family, price out DeleteMe's four-person plan against Incogni's five-person one with your actual numbers, because that is where the value flips.

We wrote longer, honest breakdowns of each service on their own: how we compare to DeleteMe and to Incogni, including where each of them beats what we do. And if you want to understand what any of these services is actually doing on your behalf before you pay for it, our pricing page lays out the continuous-scanning approach we take and why the monitoring, not the first cleanup, is the part that earns the subscription.

If DeleteMe and Incogni are not the only two on your list, our roundup of the best data removal services covers the wider field, and the DeleteMe vs Optery vs PrivacyDuck comparison goes deeper on the other three names that come up most. If screenshot proof of each removal is what you are after, the Optery alternative write-up is the one to read next.

One correction worth making to the price comparison above, because it works in DeleteMe's favour and most write-ups miss it. The $129 is the one-year rate. DeleteMe also sells two-year terms billed once at $209 for one person, $349 for two and $499 for four, and that last one is $62.38 per person per year, which undercuts Incogni's Standard plan on a per-seat basis while still including a human queue. Whether that is worth committing two years to is a separate question, and a term that long is worth tracking as a renewal you will be reminded about, because nobody logs in to a removal service often enough to notice one. Every tier on both terms is laid out in what DeleteMe costs. The wider verdict, including the gap between DeleteMe's own 4.7 rating and its 3.7 on Trustpilot, is in our DeleteMe review. If OneRep has also made your shortlist, read whether OneRep is legit before you compare it on price alone.

The same correction applies to Incogni in the other direction. The $7.99 a month quoted above, here and in essentially every comparison of these two, is an annual plan billed once at $95.88. Month to month the Standard plan is $15.98, exactly double, which Incogni states in the FAQ on its own pricing page. It only changes the answer in one situation, when you want to run a service for a month or two before committing, and in that situation Incogni costs $15.98 a month while DeleteMe sells no month-to-month plan at all. The full rate card on both terms is in our Incogni review.