Optery review

Optery is the data removal service for people who want receipts. Its paid plans deliver removals reports with before-and-after screenshots — visual proof that your listings actually came down — and its Free Basic tier shows you your exposure, with screenshots, before you spend a dollar. No other major service offers either of those things, let alone both.

Pricing starts lower than the big names too. The Core plan runs $3.25/mo billed yearly — $39/yr — for automated removal from 375+ sites, rising through Extended at $149/yr to Ultimate at $249/yr with unlimited custom removal requests. The free tier means you can verify the problem is real before paying to fix it, which is how this category should work everywhere.

The caveat is complexity. Optery’s coverage numbers come with asterisks — each tier’s headline count assumes a setting called Expanded Reach is enabled, and the numbers drop sharply without it. And while Core is cheap, the features that make Optery distinctive — screenshot reports, a human privacy agent — only arrive at Extended, where the price is no longer budget territory.

What does Optery actually do?

Optery scans data broker and people-search sites for your personal information, then removes it — automatically on paid plans, or via guided self-service tools on the free tier. The company describes its approach as “Humans + Machines”: automated scanning and opt-outs at scale, with assigned human privacy agents on the Extended and Ultimate plans for the brokers that resist automation.

The free tier deserves specific attention because it is unusually substantive. Free Basic includes a personalized exposure report with screenshots of where your data appears, scans of Google and Bing search results, self-service removal tools, and support for unlimited name variations and past cities or states. No credit card is required. Even if you ultimately buy a competitor, running Optery’s free scan first is a rational move — it shows you the size of your problem.

Beyond removals, the upper tiers add unusual extras: Ultimate submits outdated-content removal requests to Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo, and Extended and above can request blurring of your home on Google and Apple Maps. The company holds two US patents on its search technology and SOC 2 Type II attestation. The service is currently available to US customers only.

How much does Optery cost in 2026?

Optery publishes every price in plain text — a courtesy not all rivals extend. Yearly billing saves 17 percent.

All paid plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee — 100 percent refunded, no questions asked, per the pricing page. Families get a tiered discount through Optery for Family: invite unlimited family members and friends under one account, with discounts scaling up to 30 percent off all plans as the member count grows, and per-member plan management so each person can sit on a different tier.

In market context, Core’s $39/yr is the cheapest broad automated-removal plan from a major vendor — well under Incogni’s $95.88/yr and DeleteMe’s $129/yr — though EasyOptOuts undercuts everyone at $19.99/yr with a lighter cadence. Ultimate’s $249/yr, by contrast, is the most expensive individual plan among the specialists. Optery spans the whole price spectrum; the question is which tier you actually need. Our best data removal services guide places each tier against the field.

How many data brokers does Optery cover, really?

This is where you need to read the footnotes. Each tier’s headline number assumes the Expanded Reach setting is enabled. Without it, Core covers 145+ sites rather than 375+, Extended covers 325+ rather than 560+, and Ultimate covers 400+ rather than 635+. The gap between the headline and the base figure is large enough to change tier decisions, so check your settings after signup.

Ultimate adds the real ceiling-breaker: unlimited custom removal requests, eligible after 30 days of membership, extending total reach to 950+ sites. That is comparable in spirit to DeleteMe’s custom-request model and Incogni Unlimited’s any-site removals, and it brings Optery’s top end near DeleteMe’s 976-site published list — see DeleteMe vs Optery for the direct matchup, and Incogni vs DeleteMe for how the third player in that triangle prices the same job.

As always, raw counts are directional. What distinguishes Optery is not the count but the verification: you can see, in screenshots, which sites had your data and which listings came down.

Is the free plan enough on its own?

For some people, yes — with effort. Free Basic gives you the exposure report with screenshots, Google and Bing scans, and self-service removal tools, plus unlimited name variations and past cities or states for those tools. If your footprint turns out to be small and you are willing to work through the opt-outs yourself, the free tier plus patience genuinely substitutes for a paid plan.

The honest accounting is time. Manual opt-outs are tedious, brokers re-list people, and the free tier does not re-do the work for you — ongoing monitoring tells you when data reappears, but the removal labor stays yours. Paid plans exist because most people abandon that loop within a few months. The free tier’s real role is diagnostic: it converts “should I pay for this?” from speculation into a decision made while looking at your own listings.

How fast are removals, and do they recur?

All paid plans run monthly automated scans and removals — the tightest published scan cadence of the specialist services. As Optery adds support for new data brokers, existing customers are opted out of them automatically.

On Extended and Ultimate, removals reports with before-and-after screenshots arrive roughly every 90 days. Optery does not publish a fixed all-removals-complete timeline, and no honest vendor can — individual brokers respond at their own pace. But the monthly re-scan cycle means reappearing data gets caught and re-targeted quickly, which is the property that actually protects you over a multi-year horizon.

Where Optery falls short

The tier architecture works against the buyer. Between four plans, a coverage-doubling settings toggle, and signature features gated to the upper tiers, working out what you will actually get for your money takes more effort than at any competitor. Incogni sells essentially one decision; Optery sells a decision tree.

Core, the headline $39/yr price, is also less than it appears. It lacks the screenshot removal reports and the human privacy agent — the two features that define Optery — and its base coverage is 145+ sites until Expanded Reach is on. It is a fine budget plan, but it is not the Optery the marketing describes. That Optery starts at $149/yr.

At the top, $249/yr for Ultimate is a serious ask — nearly double DeleteMe’s Solo plan and two and a half times Incogni Standard. The custom-removal entitlement and search-engine cleanup tools justify it for high-exposure individuals, but most people will not need that tier. And like its specialist rivals, Optery is US-only, which rules it out entirely for international readers.

Who should pick something else

If you want one simple plan at a fair price and don’t care about screenshots, Incogni Standard at $95.88/yr covers 420+ brokers with continuous re-removal and no settings to second-guess.

If you want maximum human involvement and the largest total broker list, DeleteMe at $129/yr assigns a personal privacy expert and takes custom requests on its standard plan — the DeleteMe vs Optery comparison is the full treatment.

If you want data removal bundled with identity-theft insurance, credit monitoring, and device security, Aura’s suite starts at $12/mo billed annually and includes 200+ broker removals among much else.

If you want the absolute minimum spend, EasyOptOuts covers 200+ brokers for $19.99/yr with scans every four months — less thorough than Optery’s monthly cycle, at half the price of Core.

How does the family pricing work?

Optery for Family takes a different shape from the fixed family bundles elsewhere. You invite family members — and friends — under one account, with no member cap, and a tiered discount applies to everyone: the more members, the bigger the cut, scaling up to 30 percent off all plans. Each member can sit on a different tier, managed per person from the main account.

That flexibility suits mixed households well. A parent with real exposure can hold Extended while everyone else sits on Core or even Free Basic, all under one bill. Fixed bundles like Incogni’s five-member family plans can still win on raw per-person price, but none of them lets you mix tiers per member the way Optery does.

Bottom line

Optery’s free tier and screenshot verification make it the most transparent service in the category, and its $39/yr entry price is hard to argue with. The rational path is obvious: run the free exposure report, see what is out there, and decide with evidence whether Core’s automation or Extended’s documented removals fit your situation.

Its flaws are real but navigable — a confusing tier ladder, headline coverage numbers that depend on a toggle, and a top tier priced for people with genuine exposure problems rather than general unease. Go in with the footnotes read via Optery’s pricing page, and it is one of the strongest choices in our data removal rankings.