DeleteMe Review 2026: 986 Brokers, 86 Covered

DeleteMe advertises removal from 986 data brokers. I counted the tier markers printed on that page: 86 of them carry the tag for the plan you get for $129. This DeleteMe review is built on numbers anyone can recount, and on one date that changed the math for millions of readers: August 1, 2026.

That is the day California’s free deletion platform became mandatory for registered data brokers. If you live there, part of what DeleteMe sells is now something the state does for you at no cost, under penalty of $200 per day per request. If you live anywhere else, the paid service still has a job, and the honest question is how well it does it. One independent measurement exists, and it puts DeleteMe in the middle of the field, behind a $19.99 competitor, and behind a control group of people who simply filled in the opt-out forms themselves.

I did not buy a subscription for this review. Everything below comes from public surfaces: the pricing page, the checkout up to the payment step, the terms of service, the privacy policy, the company’s own list of covered sites, the Consumer Reports test data, and California’s own regulator pages. Every number carries the date I read it, because in this category the numbers move.

What is DeleteMe and who runs it?

DeleteMe is a subscription service that sends opt-out requests to data brokers and people-search sites on your behalf, then repeats the process while your subscription is active. A data broker is a company that collects personal information and sells it on to third parties it has no relationship with; a people-search site is the retail version of that, the page carrying your address, phone number and relatives that surfaces when somebody types your name into Google. You hand over the personal details you want removed, the company matches those details against broker listings, and its staff submit the removals. That is the product. It is run by Abine, Inc., a Delaware corporation whose footer reads “© 2026 Abine, Inc.” and whose CEO is Rob Shavell.

The founding year depends on which of the company’s own pages you read. Its business help page says Abine is a “US-based Delaware Corporation founded in 2009.” Wikipedia dates DeleteMe to 2010. The pricing page markets the service as “The #1 personal data removal service since 2011.” Two addresses are in circulation as well: 18 Bow Street in Somerville, Massachusetts on the privacy policy, and 1 Marina Park Drive in Boston on the checkout page. None of this is disqualifying. It is the first sign that the details on this company’s pages are not kept in sync. That matters more once you reach the coverage numbers.

One piece of history belongs in any review of a privacy company, because it is the same operator. On December 31, 2018, Abine disclosed that a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket had exposed a file containing data on roughly 2.4 million users of Blur, its password manager product. The company said it learned of the exposure on December 13, 2018. The file held email addresses, some names, some password hints inherited from the older MaskMe product, the last two login IP addresses, and bcrypt-hashed passwords rather than plaintext ones. Abine said it found no evidence that stored credentials, masked emails, masked phone numbers, masked cards, or payment data were exposed. Its own statement at the time: “As a privacy and security focused company this incident is embarrassing and frustrating. These incidents should not happen and we let our users down.”

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That was a different product in 2018, and I found no security incident, regulatory action or lawsuit against the DeleteMe service itself. The reason it still belongs here is structural. To remove your data, this company first has to hold all of it in one place.

How much does DeleteMe cost in 2026?

DeleteMe costs $129 a year for one person, $229 for two people, and $329 for a family of four. On the company’s site list, the tier those plans buy is called Standard, and that word matters later. Two-year terms run $209, $349 and $499. Those are the prices on the plans page as of August 1, 2026, and the multi-person cards show a struck-through higher rate next to them, so the discount is applied by default rather than by code. There is no monthly option for consumers, which several currently ranking reviews get wrong. You pay for a year or two up front.

What the plan includes, in the company’s own words on that page: “Avg of 15 Public Google-able Listings removed within days,” which means broker pages that can be found through Google rather than results inside Google itself, quarterly privacy reports, a personal DeleteMe expert, new opt-outs added through the year at no extra cost, and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. The first privacy report arrives in about seven days. After that the cycle is quarterly.

The renewal language is where I would slow down. The checkout page states it plainly: “At the end of the initial one-year or multi-year term, your Agreement will automatically renew for a successive term at either the current or full retail rate and you authorize DeleteMe to charge your credit card now and upon each renewal.” Read the last part again. The rate you renew at is not promised to be the rate you paid. A discounted first year is a first year.

The refund terms are unusually good, and they deserve credit. The same page: “full refund no questions asked before your first report is complete and a pro-rated refund anytime after.” Cancelling is self-service, through Account then Billing, where you switch off auto-renew, and the checkout page also gives a phone line, 1-833-335-3836, a support email and a postal address for doing it that way. Compare it to the phone-only cancellation mazes documented in this category and this is a fair exit. One caveat on the wording: the plans page advertises a “100% satisfaction guarantee,” while the terms give a no-questions refund only until that first report is complete, which is roughly a week in. After that the guarantee means a pro-rated refund, not your money back.

How many data brokers does DeleteMe actually cover?

The headline on DeleteMe’s own list page reads “We Remove Private Information from 986 Data Brokers,” updated 07/30/26. That number is real, and it is also not the number that applies to the plan you are buying. Every domain on that list carries a small marker, and the legend for those markers is printed at the bottom of the same page. So on August 1, 2026 I extracted every domain line from the live page and tallied the markers. The tally came to 986 across seven marker types, matching the count in the headline above it, and the sum of the categories below is that same 986.

So the automatic core of the plan a US consumer buys is 86 sites, or 92 counting the six that also carry the international marker. The largest group on the page by far, 566 sites at 57%, is marked “Custom Requests,” and a custom request is a listing you find and submit. The company’s own FAQ describes what happens after that: “We verify the listing, submit the opt-out request, and track it until it’s gone… We keep monitoring after that, if it pops back up, we’ll act on it again.” Somebody does that work for you once you flag the listing. It is not the same as 986 brokers being handled while you sleep.

Two other slices are unreachable on a consumer plan at all. The 143 sites tagged “Exclusively in VIP Plan” and the 21 tagged for Business Gold, Diamond or Platinum sit behind business tiers, and the business pricing page publishes no prices, only a form promising that “a DeleteMe representative will get back to you.” The 153 international-only entries need a separate country plan. The US consumer plans page says it in one line: “U.S. residents only.”

92 of 986 entries carry Standard, including six with an international marker. The other 894 are not automatically covered by the 129 USD consumer plan. 566 require the subscriber to find and submit each listing. Original shares and conditions remain in the full table.

Three independent counts land in the same place, which is why I trust this one. Mine came to 86 automatic sites and 566 custom requests. DeleteMe’s own separate list, “Sites we remove from on the Standard US plan,” updated July 3, 2025, names about 88 sites. A competitor, Optery, audited the same page in July 2026 and reported roughly 85 automatic sites with 566 requiring manual submission. Optery sells a rival service and has every reason to make DeleteMe look small, so its numbers would normally deserve a discount. Its 566 is identical to mine, and its automatic count sits one site away from my 86.

The vendor’s research team has said something close to this out loud. Quoted by Security.org, DeleteMe stated that “90 percent of the sites listed on their ‘Sites We Remove From’ page are handled via something called ‘Custom Requests’ where the burden of finding and submitting profiles for removal is placed on the customer.” That is a secondhand quote of the company, so treat it as such, and my count does not reproduce it exactly: custom requests come to 57% of the list, not 90%. The 90% is only reachable if you also count the VIP-only, business-tier and international-only entries, which are not custom requests but are equally out of reach on a consumer plan. Counted that way, 894 of the 986, or 91%, sits outside what Standard handles on its own.

The number on the banner has also been moving. The help centre said “over 50 top data broker sites” for Standard in October 2022 and “850+ data broker sites” in August 2025. The same list page I read at 986 on August 1 read 976 the day before. The banner sells the list. The plan buys a slice of it. And directly underneath its own headline, DeleteMe prints the sentence its competitors would never print: “Is list size the best measure of a removal service? Not always.”

How does DeleteMe remove your data, and what does the law require?

DeleteMe acts as your agent. The mechanism is written into the terms of service you accept at checkout: “You grant Abine a Limited Power of Attorney to act on your behalf for the purposes of performing the DeleteMe service to control your personal information online, including submitting opt-out requests to and communicating with third-party websites like data brokers or aggregators or other parties who have control over this content, signing opt-out documents, creating accounts for you, and any other action Abine reasonably deems necessary.” That power of attorney stays in force until you cancel.

In California, that arrangement has a statutory home. Title 11 of the California Code of Regulations, section 7063(a), lets a business ask an authorized agent to “provide proof that the consumer gave the agent signed permission to submit the request,” and to require the consumer to verify their identity directly or confirm the agent’s authority. Subsection (d) binds the agent: it “shall not use a consumer’s personal information… for any purposes other than to fulfill the consumer’s requests, verification, or fraud prevention.” That is the legal spine under every paid removal service operating in California.

Outside the states that passed broad privacy laws, the spine is missing. Consumer Reports states it flatly: “No federal laws give consumers the right to ‘opt out’ of people-search sites.” Some sites honour requests voluntarily. Others decline, and the exemption they lean on is usually the one for public records, which is exactly what most people-search profiles are built from. Consumer Reports found the same: “only some sites offer mechanisms for consumers to exercise those rights, while others rely on loopholes in denying those rights.”

People-search sites also insist they are not credit bureaus, because being one would drag them under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. There is precedent for when that claim fails. In June 2012 the FTC settled with Spokeo for $800,000 over marketing consumer profiles to recruiters and background screeners “without taking steps to protect consumers required under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” The FTC called it the first case addressing the sale of internet and social media data in employment screening, and the disclaimer on Spokeo’s site did not save it. Sell the profile for hiring decisions and the law changes. Sell it to a stranger who typed in a name and it mostly does not.

Only four states currently require data brokers to register at all: California, Vermont, Texas and Oregon, with Connecticut’s law arriving on a later timetable. Analysis of those registries by Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in April 2025 identified 750 unique data broker groups registered in at least one state, and large gaps between them, with hundreds of companies registered in one state and absent from the next. A removal service is working a map with holes in it, and so is any regulator.

DeleteMe’s own terms say what none of the marketing does: “You recognize that DeleteMe will use good faith, reasonable efforts to help you submit these opt-out requests, but that we cannot guarantee that third parties will honor the requests or remove your data.” And further down: “DeleteMe will not remove all of your information from the Internet.” Both sentences are accurate. Both are worth more than any percentage in an advertisement.

Does DeleteMe actually work? What the only independent test found

One measurement of this category exists that was not produced by a company selling into it. Consumer Reports, working with the digital safety group Tall Poppy, signed 32 volunteers up to seven paid removal services and tracked 13 people-search sites for four months. The results were published on August 8, 2024. DeleteMe removed 27% of the listings found on its participants within four months. The manual control group, four volunteers filling in opt-out forms themselves at no cost, reached 70%.

Consumer Reports named DeleteMe, IDX and Kanary “midlevel performers,” put EasyOptOuts and Optery at the top, and left Confidently and ReputationDefender at the bottom. Across all 28 participants signed up to services, researchers found 332 exposed listings and saw 117 of them, 35%, removed within four months. Their summary sentence: “As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective.” The cheapest service in the test, at $19.99, beat DeleteMe by 38 percentage points for about a sixth of the price.

Annual prices recorded July 2024, in the same order: 0, 249, 19.99, 139.92, 179.88, 129, 99 and 120 USD. Tested May–September 2023: 32 volunteers, 13 people-search sites. Small, non-random sample; not statistically significant or nationally representative. Volunteers provided only name, address and birth date, used no dashboard and filed no custom requests. Original cost-versus-outcome relationship remains in the full numeric table.

Now the caveats, because a number this unflattering has to be handled honestly. Consumer Reports said its sample was small and non-random and that it does “not consider the results statistically significant or nationally representative.” Volunteers gave the services only a name, a current address and a date of birth, with no ID uploads and no relatives’ names. Nobody logged into a dashboard, answered a follow-up question, or filed a single custom request. That last one lands hardest on DeleteMe specifically, because custom requests are 57% of its list. The test measured what happens when you sign up and walk away.

There is a second reason that 27% is lower than it looks, and I found it by checking the test against the plan. I took the 13 people-search sites Consumer Reports used and looked up each one on DeleteMe’s live site list to see which tier it sits in today. Seven are in Standard: BeenVerified, ClustrMaps, MyLife, PeopleFinders, Spokeo, ThatsThem and Whitepages. Six are not. Intelius is a custom request you have to file. CheckPeople, Dataveria and Radaris are VIP-only. Nuwber sits in the Diamond tier and PublicDataUSA in Platinum, both business plans with no published price. Almost half the sites a national tester picked as the most widely used are outside the plan a consumer buys.

The overlap with the report’s own results is hard to ignore. Consumer Reports listed the three sites removal services struggled with most as CheckPeople at 16%, PublicDataUSA at 19% and Intelius at 20%. All three are outside Standard today. The three that complied most readily were PeopleFinders at 66%, ClustrMaps at 59% and ThatsThem at 58%. All three are inside it. The tiering is current as of August 1, 2026 and the test ran in 2023, so this explains part of the gap rather than excusing it. For a buyer it converts into one instruction: before you pay, check whether the sites carrying your details are the ones marked for Standard.

Optery, which came first among paid services, published a rebuttal arguing the manual control group was run by trained privacy professionals rather than ordinary consumers, and that its own 68% sits within reach of the 70% control. That is a vendor defending its category, not a second measurement. I found no formal response from DeleteMe to the study at all, and no newer independent test of these services from 2025 or 2026. The evidence base for a market this size is one four-month experiment run in 2023.

One more finding in that report belongs here. While performing opt-outs, researchers noticed removal services advertising on the very people-search sites they promise to clear you from: an ad for Onerep after a removal at ClustrMaps, and PeopleFinders promoting BrandYourself. Consumer Reports called it “an implicit endorsement of the inherently problematic people-search ecosystem.” Neither company is DeleteMe. The point is what the sentence says about the industry it sits in.

Does your data come back after DeleteMe removes it?

Yes, and the company says so first. Its FAQ, updated July 25, 2025: “yes, your info can come back. That’s just how data brokers work. They’re always on the hunt, scooping up your details from all over the web and reposting them, even after you’ve been removed… If you ever let your subscription lapse, there’s nothing stopping the data brokers from adding your details all over again.”

CEO Rob Shavell has put a figure on it in comments to CNBC: 42% of DeleteMe’s customers found their information back on data broker sites within six months, which he offers as the reason the product is an annual subscription rather than a one-time cleanup. He is being straight about the business model. Read it from the buyer’s side and it says something else too. Almost half of what you paid to remove comes back inside half a year, and the fix for that is next year’s payment.

August 1, 2026: California now does part of this for free

California residents can send one deletion request to every registered data broker in the state through a government platform called DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, run by the state privacy agency at privacy.ca.gov. It opened to consumers on January 1, 2026. As of August 1, 2026, brokers are legally required to process what people submitted. The state’s own page puts the price first: “Free, we will never charge you to use DROP.”

The scale is not small. DROP’s consumer page says a single request reaches “over 600 registered data brokers,” and CalPrivacy’s registry listed exactly 603 registered brokers when I checked it on August 1, 2026. The state also runs the enforcement side. Miss the registration deadline and the fine is $200 per day. Fail to delete as required and it is $200 per day per deletion request, plus the agency’s investigation costs. One broker, Accurate Append, was already fined $55,400 in July 2025 for failing to register.

Three details make DROP stronger than a one-off form, and they are the ones a paid service has to answer to.

• Your request follows the market. The state’s wording: “All current and future data brokers who register with our agency are included in your deletion request unless you narrow your request.” A broker that registers next year inherits your existing request.
• It repeats on a legal clock. From August 2026, brokers “process deletion requests at least every 45 days,” reporting the status of each batch they pull within 45 days, and the state tells consumers a broker may take up to 90 days to report back on a request.
• A partial match still costs the broker something. When a broker cannot match you exactly, your request comes back marked Opted-out, and the state spells out what that means: those brokers keep your data but can no longer sell it.

When a broker does find you, the deletion is broader than what you handed over. California’s description says brokers “delete all of the information they can about you,” which goes beyond the details you submitted and includes the inferences they have drawn about you. To file, you need a name, a date of birth and a ZIP code. Email addresses, phone numbers, maiden names, mobile advertising IDs, connected TV IDs and vehicle identification numbers are optional and improve your odds of being matched. A parent can file for a child, and a family member can file for an elderly relative.

Now the limits, because they are what keeps DeleteMe in business. DROP is for California residents, verified through the state’s identity gateway. It reaches registered brokers, not the whole internet, and only four states maintain registries at all. It does not touch Google’s search results, first-party data you handed a business yourself, publicly available data, or anything covered by the exemptions for credit, financial and health records. And it has no track record: brokers were not obliged to process a single request before August 1, 2026, so nobody can yet tell you what share of requests actually ends in deletion.

If you live anywhere else, none of that is yours yet. Vermont, Texas and Oregon make brokers register, which is a public list rather than a delete button, and no other state runs a one-stop platform. Deletion rights outside California depend on whether your state passed its own privacy law, and where none exists a people-search site can decline your request and keep the listing. Two things do work everywhere in the US: Google’s free removal tool for search results, and a credit freeze at the three bureaus. Everything past that is either manual opt-outs or a paid service, which is exactly why the rest of this review matters more outside California than inside it.

None of the pages currently ranking for this DeleteMe review query mention DROP at all. That silence is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when most of the pages answering a question earn a commission on one of the answers.

How to delete your personal information from the internet yourself

You can do this work by hand, and the Consumer Reports control group is the reason to take that seriously: 70% of listings gone, at no cost, better than every paid service in the test. The catch is time, and the honest version is that nobody has published a credible hours-per-year figure for it. DeleteMe says only that it “can take hours.” A competitor’s press release throws around 200 hours, which is marketing, not methodology. Nobody has counted it properly.

The company that sells the service also publishes the instructions for replacing it. DeleteMe’s opt-out guides section carries step-by-step removal walkthroughs for individual brokers, 34 pages of them, under this sentence: “We’ve compiled a list of data brokers, along with an opt-out guide for each data broker website. Doing this yourself won’t cost you anything. However, it can take hours to go through each website and remove the personal information for just one person, let alone an entire family.” That is the fairest summary of the value proposition anyone has written, and DeleteMe wrote it.

Google runs the other free tool. The tool is called “Results about you,” it lives in your Google account under that name, and it scans Google Search for pages containing your phone number, home address or email, lets you request their removal from results, and sends notifications when new ones appear. Since February 10, 2026 it also covers government ID numbers, including driver’s licence, passport and Social Security numbers, starting in the US. Google is explicit about the limit: “Removing this information from Google Search doesn’t remove it from the web entirely.” The page stays up. It just stops being findable by name in one search engine.

A workable free stack, then, looks like this: DROP if you are in California, Google’s tool for search results anywhere in the US, and manual opt-outs at the ten or fifteen people-search sites that show up when you search your own name. If your concern is identity theft rather than exposure, the free credit freeze does more than any of it, and I covered why in is identity theft protection worth it.

DeleteMe vs Incogni, Optery and EasyOptOuts

DeleteMe has no tier below $129 and no monthly option, which makes it the most expensive way into this category among the four. Optery and Incogni both run higher top tiers, at $249 and $179.88, but both also start lower. Optery is the only one with a free tier, and it is also the paid service that scored highest in the Consumer Reports test, though the free manual control group still beat it. EasyOptOuts costs $19.99 and finished second in that test, which makes it the value outlier of the category. Incogni sits in the middle on price and claims the broadest automated list. Price is not what separates these four. Coverage definitions are.

One competitor is gone, and how it went is the most useful story in this market. Mozilla sold Monitor Plus, an automated removal service powered by a vendor called Onerep. In March 2024, Brian Krebs reported that Onerep’s founder had spent years launching people-search sites, including one that was still live. Mozilla announced it was ending the partnership within days. It then spent nearly two years failing to find a replacement that met its privacy standards, and shut Monitor Plus down on December 17, 2025, refunding subscribers pro rata. Any 2026 buying guide still recommending it is telling you how old it is. The vendor was the risk, not the technology.

Who is answering “is DeleteMe worth it” in Google right now?

Before you weigh anyone’s verdict, including mine, look at who is holding the microphone. Check the disclosure line first. I checked the top results for this query on July 31 and August 1, 2026.

• The vendor reviews itself. A page on abine.com titled as a DeleteMe review, written by the company that owns DeleteMe, opens with the words “we dive into how our service operates.” It carries three different coverage numbers on one page: 56, 190+ and 750+.
• A competitor’s parent publishes a review. The DeleteMe review on surfshark.com comes from Surfshark, the company behind Incogni.
• Two more competitors do the same. CrabClear and EliminateMyData, both selling removal services, run their own DeleteMe reviews. Optery maintains a dedicated “vs DeleteMe” comparison page, updated in July 2026.
• Three of the independent-looking outlets share one owner. CNET, PCMag and ZDNet are all Ziff Davis properties. Security.org belongs to Centerfield, which also runs SafeHome.org.

Their verdicts also disagree, and the spread is wide. The New York Times Wirecutter named DeleteMe its top pick for data removal services, and the badge on DeleteMe’s checkout page is dated 2025. PCMag rates it 3.5 out of 5, “Good,” and places Optery and Incogni above it at 4.5. Consumer Reports measured it at 27%. DeleteMe’s own pricing page, meanwhile, still advertises that “PCMag.com names DeleteMe ‘Excellent’.”

All three can be true at once, because they measure different things: editorial experience, feature set, and raw removal rate on 13 people-search sites. Know which one you are buying.

What you hand over to have your data removed

To find your listings, DeleteMe needs the details that make them findable. Its privacy policy calls this Datasheet Data and lists what you may supply: “first name, middle name, last name or surname/family name, date of birth, gender, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, relatives’ names, employers, political affiliation, and ethnicity.” Supplying it is optional, and the policy is honest about the trade: “The more information you provide, the more data points we can search against and the more listings we can potentially find and have deleted.” The company asks you not to send Social Security numbers or government IDs.

Retention runs past the subscription. Identifying data from an active member is kept “for as long as the individual has a membership, plus 6 months.” Payment data is held “for at least 7 years in line with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) of the United States.” Datasheet Data goes to data brokers, which is the whole point, and the policy says it goes nowhere else. On security, the company claims SOC 2 Type 2 compliance since 2021, AES-256 and TLS 1.2. On tracking, it is blunt: “Do Not Track… We don’t respond to those right now.”

Then there is the clause Consumer Reports singled out, and it deserves its own paragraph. The terms of service promise that “Abine will never sell it,” meaning your personal information. The privacy policy adds what happens if the company itself changes hands: DeleteMe “may sell, transfer, or otherwise share some or all of our business or assets, including your personal information, in connection with a (potential) business transaction such as a corporate divestiture, merger, consolidation, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, or in the event of bankruptcy or dissolution.” The current plain-language version on the site says the same in fewer words: “If we ever sell or transfer our business, your info might be part of that deal.”

Both sentences are true together. The company will not sell your data. The company can be sold with your data inside it. Consumer Reports flagged exactly this and noted that “some privacy-minded subscribers might not want their information to be used this way,” and it applies to competitors too: Optery and IDX carry similar language. This is the shape of the whole category. You reduce your exposure at hundreds of brokers by concentrating it at one company.

Who should pay for DeleteMe, and who should not

The case for paying is strongest when the risk is a person rather than a marketer. If you have been doxxed, stalked or harassed, or your job puts your name in public (real estate, medicine, law, teaching, anything with a licence lookup), the value is not the removal percentage. It is that somebody else does the chasing, submits the custom requests you flag, and keeps doing it every quarter. The human-handled custom request is the part of this product that free tools do not replicate. Nobody else does that part for you.

• Pay if: you live outside California and want continuous removal without doing it yourself; you need a person to handle sites that block automated opt-outs; you want one dashboard for a family of four at $329 rather than four separate efforts.
• Do not pay if: you are a California resident whose main concern is registered brokers. File with DROP first, free, then decide in a few months whether anything is left worth $129.
• Do not pay if: price is the deciding factor. EasyOptOuts removed more listings for $19.99 in the only test we have, and Optery has a free tier that at least shows you where you are exposed.
• Do not pay if: what you actually fear is identity theft rather than exposure. A credit freeze is free at all three bureaus and stops new-account fraud, which no removal service does. The same math against a paid subscription is in is LifeLock worth it.
• Do not pay twice: some identity protection bundles already include broker removal. Aura is the obvious one, and I went through what its bundle is worth in the Aura review.

Live outside the United States and the consumer plans do not apply to you at all. There is no US plan that covers you. The plans page says “U.S. residents only,” and international coverage is sold as separate country plans.

Is DeleteMe legit, and is data removal worth it?

DeleteMe is legitimate. It has operated since 2010 or 2011, depending on which of its own pages you believe, holds an A+ rating and accreditation from the Better Business Bureau, publishes real removal instructions for free, refunds without argument before your first report, and lets you cancel from your own account page. On Trustpilot it holds a 3.8 TrustScore from 258 reviews as of August 1, 2026, and the company replies to about half of the negative ones. The distribution behind that score is unusual: 73% of reviewers gave five stars and 13% gave one, with almost nothing in between. A straight average of those stars would sit above four. Trustpilot’s own documentation explains the gap: a TrustScore “isn’t just a simple average of all the reviews on the profile,” newer reviews carry more weight than older ones, and how regularly a company collects reviews affects the result. DeleteMe’s profile also carries Trustpilot’s notice that the company “hasn’t invited customers recently, so reviews may not be representative.” The older run of five-star reviews counts for less, and this summer’s one-star reviews count for more. Note that several ranking reviews quote 4.4, and DeleteMe’s own pricing page advertises 4.7 from 400+ reviews, so check the live score rather than the quoted one.

Read the recent one-star reviews before you buy. I am quoting them as dated complaints rather than as proof of a systemic fault. On July 16, 2026 a reviewer wrote that a month in they had no report and that support was “admitting their platform is problematic right now,” with a full refund offered. On July 10 another described a profile “stuck on ‘Scanning’ for 2 months.” On July 24 a third said the support email bounced. Five-star reviewers in the same window describe thorough removals, useful reports, and spam dropping off after a few weeks.

Whether data removal itself is worth it depends on what you expected to buy. Judged as permanent erasure, no. Nothing in this category delivers that, brokers repopulate, and DeleteMe’s own CEO puts the return rate at 42% within six months. Judged as ongoing suppression with a person attached, it can be, and the price of that person is the $129. What has changed in 2026 is that the free half of the answer got substantially better: California’s platform for registered brokers, Google’s tool for search results, and the plain fact that hand-filed opt-outs outperformed every paid service in the only independent test anyone has run.

Frequently Asked Questions