The category is now crowded. Incogni, DeleteMe, Privacy Bee, Optery, Kanary, Aura — all of them will, for an annual fee, send legally-grounded deletion requests to the same broadly overlapping list of data brokers. The work itself is fairly mechanical. The pricing is not.
What you are quietly buying, when you sign up, is not really a service. It is a habit. The deletion happens in the first sixty to ninety days. Everything you pay after that is, charitably, monitoring. Less charitably, it is rent.
The headline numbers
Here is what the main UK-available services charge an individual per year, as of mid-2026. All figures are approximate and converted where needed.
| Service | Annual price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Incogni | ~£76 | Personal plan, billed yearly |
| DeleteMe | ~£115 | Individual, one-person plan |
| Privacy Bee | ~£197 | Personal, with extended broker list |
| Optery | ~£120 | Ultimate tier; lower tiers do less |
These are reasonable prices for a year of work. They are unreasonable prices for a service that, mechanically, finishes in the first quarter and then resends largely identical opt-out emails on a quarterly cron.
The unit economics, plainly
Subscription businesses do not value a customer by what that customer pays this month. They value the customer by lifetime revenue, and lifetime revenue is dominated by how slowly people cancel.
Take DeleteMe at £115 a year. If annual churn is roughly thirty per cent — a fairly generous figure for a consumer subscription — average customer lifetime is around three and a third years. Lifetime revenue per customer is therefore close to £380. A one-off purchase at £89 is worth, in lifetime terms, exactly £89.
That four-times multiple is not a rounding error. It is the entire business model. It is also why subscription services can afford to pay Google £40 to acquire a customer who only pays them £115 in year one — they are not pricing for year one.
A £115 subscription with thirty per cent churn is worth roughly £380 over its life. A £89 one-off is worth £89. That gap is not value to you. It is rent.
The friction nobody mentions
The other half of the trap is that cancellation, by design, is annoying. Dashboards are buried inside settings menus. The "cancel" button is two clicks deeper than the "upgrade" button. Mid-cycle refunds are rarely granted and almost never automatic. Several services downgrade you to a lesser tier and rebill rather than terminate cleanly, which means you can think you have cancelled and discover, a month later, that you have not.
None of this is illegal. Most of it is not even unusual. It is simply how recurring-revenue products are built — to make the path of least resistance the path that keeps charging you. Over three years, the average DeleteMe customer pays £345 for a job that, in pure broker-removal terms, was done by month three of year one.
The pattern is well-documented in other categories. The UK Competition and Markets Authority spent most of 2024 consulting on exactly this — silent auto-renewals, opaque cancellation flows, and the gap between what subscribers think they are buying and what the unit economics actually require them to be. Privacy is simply a newer aisle in the same supermarket.
Where subscriptions actually earn their fee
To be fair: subscriptions do one thing a one-off cannot. Brokers reappear. New ones launch. Aggregator sites scrape from sources you have already opted out of and republish your details under a new domain. A subscription catches that. A one-off does not.
This is the honest argument for recurring billing, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The dishonest argument is that you need to pay £115 every year forever to get the benefit. You do not. The actual annual maintenance work — re-scanning, re-issuing requests to any new broker that has surfaced, refreshing the proof file — is a few hours, not a relationship.
What we do instead
Nox Æterna runs the same first-year coverage as the subscription services: the deletion sweep, the legal-basis opt-outs under UK GDPR Article 17 and the relevant US state laws, the PDF proof at the end. £89 once. No auto-renewal, no card on file, no cancellation flow to navigate because there is nothing to cancel.
If, twelve months later, you want a fresh sweep to catch anything that has resurfaced or newly appeared, you start it yourself. It costs £29. We do not chase you, we do not bill you, we do not send "you might be exposed" emails to manufacture urgency. The decision sits with you, where it belongs.
It is a deliberately worse business than a subscription. The lifetime value is a fraction of what Incogni's spreadsheets show. We accept that, because the alternative — building a product that quietly depends on you forgetting it exists — is not a product we wanted to build.
If you would rather have this done for you, properly and once, Nox Æterna handles all 150+ brokers in a single £89 payment. No subscription, no renewal, no calendar reminder six months from now asking why you are still being charged.
Privacy should be a one-time decision. Not a recurring fee.