Employee Data Broker Removal 2026: Verified Pricing and the Per-Head Math for Teams

Data broker removal started as a consumer privacy purchase. It is becoming a security control, and security budgets are where it now sits.

The reasoning is straightforward. Brokers publish home addresses, personal phone numbers, relatives and historical addresses for your executives and staff. That is the raw material for executive impersonation, SIM-swap attacks, spear-phishing with convincing personal detail, and physical security risk for senior people.

Removing it is cheap relative to almost any other control. What is not obvious is how to buy it for a workforce, because the vendors that publish pricing publish consumer pricing, and the business tiers are quote-only.

We checked vendor pricing pages in October 2026 and worked out the per-head arithmetic.

Verified pricing, from vendor pages

Vendor	Plan	Monthly	Annual
Optery	Free Basic	Free	Free
Optery	Core	$3.99	$39
Optery	Extended	$14.99	$149
Optery	Ultimate	$24.99	$249
Incogni	Standard	$7.99	$95.88
Incogni	Unlimited	$14.99	$179.88
Incogni	Family, up to 5	$15.99	$191.88
Incogni	Family Unlimited, up to 5	$22.99	$275.88

Both vendors reference a business offering. Neither publishes business rates. That is the central practical problem for anyone budgeting this for a workforce rather than a household.

It is the same transparency split we found in identity verification software pricing and in employment background check software: published consumer or self-serve rates, quote-only above.

Coverage is the variable that justifies the price gap

Optery prices by how many broker sites it covers:

• Core, $39 a year — removal from 380+ sites
• Extended, $149 a year — removal from 560+ sites
• Ultimate, $249 a year — removal from 635+ sites

Going from Core to Ultimate costs 6.4 times as much for roughly 1.7 times the site coverage. That is not automatically bad value, because the sites added at higher tiers are generally the harder ones, but it does mean the decision deserves more thought than picking the top tier by default.

The useful question is not how many sites a plan covers in total. It is whether it covers the specific brokers that currently expose your people. Optery’s free tier produces an exposure report, which lets you answer that before paying anything.

Run the free scan on a handful of representative staff first. If the exposures concentrate in brokers Core already covers, the higher tiers are buying coverage you do not need.

Not all brokers matter equally

Broker site counts are a marketing metric, and they flatten a real difference in risk.

A people-search site that publishes a home address, phone number and list of relatives is a materially different exposure from a marketing list that holds an email and a purchase category. Both count as one site in a coverage total.

When you read an exposure report, sort by what is actually published rather than by count. Home address and phone number for a finance director is the exposure that enables a convincing impersonation. An email address on a marketing list is noise by comparison.

That prioritisation also tells you whether a higher tier is worth buying, because it reveals whether the additional 255 sites at Ultimate hold anything that matters for your people.

Per-head cost at 10, 50 and 200 people

Using published annual rates, with no business discount applied:

Plan	Per person	10 people	50 people	200 people
Optery Core	$39	$390	$1,950	$7,800
Incogni Standard	$95.88	$959	$4,794	$19,176
Optery Extended	$149	$1,490	$7,450	$29,800
Incogni Unlimited	$179.88	$1,799	$8,994	$35,976
Optery Ultimate	$249	$2,490	$12,450	$49,800

At 200 people the spread between the cheapest and most expensive published option is $42,000 a year. That is a real budget decision, not a rounding error, and it is decided almost entirely by broker coverage rather than by service quality.

The family-plan arbitrage, and why to be careful with it

Incogni Family covers up to five people for $191.88 a year. That is $38.38 per person, against $95.88 for a single Standard subscription.

Per head, the family plan is 60% cheaper than the individual plan for identical coverage.

Incogni route	Per person	50 people
Standard, individual	$95.88	$4,794
Family, 10 plans of 5	$38.38	$1,919

The arithmetic is real. Whether you may do it is a different question.

Family plans are generally licensed for household members, not colleagues. Buying ten family plans to cover fifty employees is likely to breach the terms of service, and a privacy vendor is exactly the wrong supplier to have a licensing dispute with.

The legitimate use of this number is as a negotiating anchor. It demonstrates the vendor can deliver the service profitably at around $38 per head. When you request business pricing, that is the figure to have in mind rather than the $95.88 list rate.

There is a secondary use that is entirely legitimate. Offering staff a family plan as a benefit, which they administer themselves for their own household, costs you $38 per head and covers the employee’s spouse and children too. For executives whose family members are also exposed, that is often the more complete control.

Deciding who to cover

Covering everyone is the simplest policy and rarely the right first move. Exposure risk is not evenly distributed.

Tier one, cover first. Anyone who can move money or change access: finance and payroll staff, the executive team, IT administrators with privileged access, and anyone named publicly as a company contact. These are the targets of business email compromise and SIM-swap attacks, and the people whose home addresses carry physical risk.

Tier two. Anyone customer-facing or publicly listed, including sales leadership and recruiters, whose details are already semi-public and easily cross-referenced.

Tier three. The wider workforce, as a benefit rather than a control.

A common approach is a higher-coverage plan for tier one and a cheaper tier for everyone else:

Approach, 200 staff with 20 in tier one	Annual cost
Optery Ultimate for all 200	$49,800
Ultimate for 20, Core for 180	$12,000
Ultimate for 20, Extended for 180	$31,800
Core for all 200	$7,800

Tiering gives the twenty highest-risk people deeper coverage than a blanket mid-tier policy, at a quarter of the cost of a blanket top-tier one.

Where this meets CCPA, CPRA and GDPR

There is a compliance dimension as well as a security one, and it is often what unlocks the budget.

Under California law, employees are covered by consumer privacy rights, which means your own staff can exercise access and deletion rights regarding their personal information. Under GDPR, employee personal data is personal data like any other, and the duty of care extends to data processed about staff.

Broker-held data is not usually data you control, so removing it is not strictly a compliance obligation in most jurisdictions. But funding removal is a defensible demonstration of duty of care, and it reduces the surface available to an attacker impersonating your organisation.

If you are building a wider programme, the related tooling sits in GDPR compliance software, and the employment-screening side of the same surface is covered in our FCRA and EEOC compliance guide.

Treat removal as a security control with a privacy benefit, rather than as a compliance line item. That framing survives scrutiny better, and it is also the accurate one.

Removal is a subscription because re-listing is constant

The most misunderstood thing about this category is that removal is not a one-time event.

Brokers re-acquire data continuously from public records, marketing lists and each other. A record removed in January frequently reappears by the summer, sourced from a different upstream supplier.

That is why these services are sold as subscriptions rather than projects, and why a cheap one-off removal exercise by your own team tends not to hold. The recurring work is the product.

It also means you should judge a vendor on re-removal behaviour, not just initial removal counts. Ask how often they re-scan and whether re-listed records are handled automatically within the subscription.

A useful diagnostic when evaluating: ask what the vendor’s average time-to-removal is, and separately what their re-listing detection interval is. A service that removes quickly but re-scans quarterly leaves a long window open.

Doing it in-house

Every broker is legally required to honour opt-out requests in many jurisdictions, and you can submit them yourself at no cost. Optery’s free tier even provides self-service opt-out tools and an exposure report.

The reason organisations pay is volume. Several hundred brokers, each with its own process, multiplied by every employee, repeated continuously.

For a tier-one group of twenty people across 380 brokers that is 7,600 individual requests, before any re-listing. At a conservative five minutes per request, that is over 630 hours of work, against $780 a year for Optery Core across the same twenty people.

In-house is defensible for a very small executive group where you want full control of the process. Beyond roughly ten people it stops being economic against a $39-per-head service.

Nine questions to ask before buying

1. What is the business rate per seat? Neither Incogni nor Optery publishes one. Ask directly, and anchor on the family-plan per-head figure of about $38.
2. Which specific brokers are covered at each tier? Total site counts matter less than whether your actual exposures are covered. Run a free scan first.
3. How often are re-listings detected and re-removed? Re-listing is the norm, so cadence is the service.
4. Is there centralised administration? Consumer plans are managed per account. Managing 200 individual logins is an operational cost that can exceed the licence saving.
5. What reporting is available to security leadership? You will need evidence of coverage and exposure reduction to justify renewal.
6. How are joiners and leavers handled? Can seats be reassigned, and what happens to a leaver’s removals?
7. Is coverage limited by region? Optery lists separate pricing for Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Confirm what applies to staff outside the United States.
8. What happens to the data you must hand over? Removal services need personal details to find records. Ask how that data is stored, for how long, and under what certification.
9. Is there a trial or money-back period? Both vendors publish a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is long enough to measure exposure reduction on a sample group.

How to approach the purchase

Start with a free exposure scan on five to ten representative people across different seniority levels. This tells you how bad the problem actually is in your organisation rather than in a vendor case study.

Cover tier one first at a higher coverage tier, and measure exposure reduction over 60 to 90 days.

Then negotiate business pricing for the wider rollout, with a measured result and a per-head anchor in hand. Going to a vendor with your own exposure data and a target rate is a materially stronger position than asking for a quote cold.

Budget it as recurring, because re-listing makes it recurring whether or not you plan for it.

Frequently asked questions

How much does data broker removal cost per employee?

Published consumer rates in October 2026 run from $39 a year for Optery Core to $249 for Optery Ultimate, with Incogni Standard at $95.88 and Unlimited at $179.88. Incogni’s family plan works out at about $38.38 per person for up to five people. Neither vendor publishes a business rate.

Do Incogni and Optery have business plans?

Both reference a business offering, and neither publishes rates for it. You have to request a quote. Use the per-head family-plan figure of roughly $38 as a reference point when you do.

Can we just use a family plan to cover employees?

The arithmetic works out about 60% cheaper per head, but family plans are generally licensed for household members rather than colleagues, so using one for staff is likely to breach the terms of service. Offering a family plan as a staff benefit that employees administer for their own household is the legitimate version of the same spend.

Is data broker removal permanent?

No. Brokers continuously re-acquire personal data from public records and from each other, so records removed once commonly reappear within months. This is why the category is sold as a subscription rather than a one-off project.

Can we do data broker removal ourselves for free?

Yes in principle. Brokers are required to honour opt-out requests in many jurisdictions and Optery’s free tier provides self-service tools and an exposure report. The constraint is volume: for twenty people across 380 brokers that is 7,600 requests before any re-listing, which is hundreds of hours against $780 a year for a paid service.

Which employees should we cover first?

Anyone who can move money or change access: finance and payroll staff, executives, and administrators with privileged access. These are the targets of business email compromise and SIM-swap attacks, and the people for whom a published home address carries physical risk.

Is employee data removal a GDPR or CCPA requirement?

Broker-held data is generally not data you control, so removal is not usually a direct obligation. It is better understood as a security control that reduces the material available for impersonation and social engineering, with a demonstrable duty-of-care benefit alongside it.

Pricing verified against incogni.com/pricing and optery.com/pricing on 2 October 2026. Per-head, multi-seat and in-house effort figures are our own calculations from those published rates. Rates change, so confirm current figures with the vendor before you commit.