Incogni Review and Pricing 2024

Security.org’s Methodology

All of my reviews start with research. I spend hours looking into companies’ claims and compare them against customer experiences. I read reviews of their services and get an understanding of their overall reputation for context.

>> Learn More: We Don’t Use AI to Write

Next, I purchase the service without any sort of company intervention. No press passes, no preferential treatment. I use the service just like a normal customer would for a few weeks to measure their capabilities and test my experiences against their claims. Once I’m satisfied, I provide recommendations to our readers.

So now that you understand my methods, let’s get into my hands-on test of Incogni.

Incogni: The First Pass

So right off the bat, I learned from my research that Incogni was created and developed by Surfshark.1 And in case you’re not familiar, Surfshark is a leading VPN provider right now. Incogni was meant to be an add-on to premium VPN customers, but was later spun-off as an independent service for everyone, not just Surfshark users. In fact, NordVPN, also offers Incogni now as an add-on service.

What’s interesting about that is that Surfshark and NordVPN are currently two of the biggest names in the VPN industry. That gives me confidence in Incogni; if Surfshark and NordVPN offer it, I know I can entrust it with my data. VPNs are all about privacy, after all.

Incogni’s detailed website gave me even more confidence in the service. For example, the homepage explains what the service does outright in a five-step protection plan. Data removal services are new and still a mystery to many, so I commend the transparency.

That said, I would love to see more guides and resources from Incogni. I’ve followed Surfshark for years and I’ve always admired the company’s effort in educating the public about online privacy and security. Incogni, on the other hand, is still building up its library of resources. There are a few guides about avoiding scams, online privacy, opt-out procedures, and spam prevention, but they’re still limited. The service is barely two years old, after all.

After checking all those out, I decided to push through and purchase a plan.

Incogni Pricing

Incogni only offers one tier of service, and unlike what I saw when I reviewed Kanary, there is no free trial period. You can choose between a monthly and an annual plan, though. Plus, if there are going to be multiple users, you can opt for the Family and Friends plan. It includes the same features as the individual plan, but can cover up to five individuals. Here’s a breakdown of the prices:

Now there’s something worth pointing out here. Legally, most data brokers have between 30 and 45 days to comply with opt-out requests, meaning that if you’re really interested in scrubbing the internet of information about you, it’s probably going to take more than a month. I’ve come to find that these removals are a little like playing whack-a-mole. Once one is removed, two others pop up in their place. If this is something you really want to do right, I’d recommend signing up for the annual service.

Also keep in mind that regardless of the plan you sign up for, Incogni offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee. Good to know. Now with that context, I went ahead and purchased my plan.

Setting Up Incogni

Once you purchase the plan you selected by entering your credit card information, you’re sent a verification email. Once you click on that link, you’ll set up a password and create your profile.

From there, you’ll start entering your personal information. That includes:

• Full name
• Address
• City
• State
• Zip Code
• Country

Next, you’re asked to sign an authorization form that essentially allows Incogni to act as a proxy to delete your data for you. Here’s a look at the fine print:

I, XXXXXX, residing at XXXXXXX, email address XXXXXX, hereby appoint Incogni Inc., with registered address at 506 S Spring St #13308, Los Angeles, California, 90013, (the ‘Agent’), to act as an authorized agent and perform all lawful actions that are necessary to exercise, on my behalf, my following rights under applicable privacy legislation, including (but not limited to) the California Consumer Privacy Act (‘CCPA’) and the California Privacy Right Act (CPRA) (‘Privacy Laws’) and submit requests for implementation of these rights to any legal and natural persons governed by the Privacy Laws:

1. To obtain erasure (deletion) of my personal data (information);
2. To withdraw any consent I have given to the processing of my personal data (information);
3. To object to processing of personal data (information) concerning me, including but not limited to profiling and direct marketing.

I agree and acknowledge that:

• the Agent may withdraw from this limited representation at its sole discretion;
• this Authorization form will terminate automatically with respect to any particular natural or legal person against which my rights under the Privacy Laws are being exercised, once that particular legal or natural person satisfied the request under the Privacy Laws submitted by the Agent.

In reviews of similar services this type of agreement form never came up, but I didn’t see anything here that raised any red flags. I went ahead and digitally signed, confirmed the data I entered was accurate, and clicked “Start Data Removal.”

From there, you’re taken to your dashboard. Here’s what that looks like:

Pretty simple, but also effective. As you can see, right off the bat there were 79 files found, but I expected that number to increase as time went on.

There was also a prompt at the top of the screen to provide additional information that data brokers might need to fulfill removal requests, namely my phone number and date of birth.

Once I’d filled that out, I tried poking around under the hood to see what else I could do. The “detailed view” is where I went first:

This is a pretty interesting dashboard, where you can see the company name, the status of your request, how compliant or resistant they are to complying with removal requests, and the risk each company poses. Censia had the highest level of risk, so I decided to investigate them a little further by clicking on their dropdown tab.

Now this is really interesting information. You can see the average time it takes for a resolution to take effect, you can view your request history, you can learn more about the database itself, and you can see all of the associated risks that come with having your information show up there. This is by far the most detailed reporting I’ve seen with one of these services, and I was really impressed with how granular Incogni is able to get here.

So far so good, but as I mentioned above, these services take some time to do their thing. I decided to check back in a week and see what progress had been made.

Incogni at One Week

At one week, Incogni’s progress was pretty impressive — 100 total profiles removed. At this point Kanary had only removed three profiles, and Onerep had nabbed 16. It’s also worth pointing out that Incogni has suppressed 28 profiles, meaning that the organization would not create a new profile on me in the future. This is a pretty unique feature that really improves your long-term success in scrubbing the internet of your personal information.

Now you might be wondering — like I was — why Incogni’s one-week accomplishments are so much more impressive than their competitors. It has a little to do with the way it counts “completed” removals.

When you first start up the service, it sends out a bunch of automated emails to sites that it knows has information on you, and some it assumes probably do. If it gets a response back from those sites saying they don’t have a file on you, it counts those as “complete.”

>> Learn More: Five Ways to Opt-Out of Personal Data Collection

While it seems a little less-than-transparent, it’s still clear that Incogni is extremely effective at what it does. Given how quickly it worked in just seven days, I’m excited to see the progress after two weeks.

My Overall Impressions of Incogni

Overall, I’d say that Incogni does a great job of what it says it will do. It gets to work right away and appears to be very effective in a short amount of time. Take their removal statistics with a grain of salt, but at the end of the day this system was able to remove — and suppress — an impressive number of files. It’s easy to use and very affordable, to boot.