I can't remember the exact reasons since it was something I was researching a couple years ago. I saw a few competing services that offered annual plans in the $50-$100 range and I think I divided that by 12 and then imagined what would happen when people got most of the value out of the service on first use. It seems to be a very niche market and I'm not sure how much of a pain point it really is to that niche.

I had some other ideas to differentiate, which were a bit of a gray-area hack. This included pulling from the same data sources that Spokeo and similar services use to be able to search for that data. That way, the user wouldn't have to enter any personal information other than say an email address.

You could then offer a free service that let users enter their email address and they would find all the sites you've crawled where you found their information (similar to haveibeenpwned.com), with an upsell to automatically remove it.

Once a subscriber was signed up or previously had used the free service and hadn't opted out, I would keep crawling services for additional data and then give them a warning email when their data popped up again.

It seemed like a semi-reasonable business model at the time, but just a really small market, and I had other business ideas I wanted to pursue.

Interesting points. I wonder if giving the customer visibility into events like "you data was successfully removed from X" would make a difference? Similar to peeking at your Spam folder now and again to see that it is working for you.

Also about the market size I imagine the market is just US? It seems other places, at leas Europe anyway has better laws to protect against these kinds of invasive services.