Otto Insurance Review [Looks Good, Works Horribly]

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If you’ve come across Otto Insurance, you may have been tempted to check it out. They’ve been advertising on YouTube quite a bit. However, if you haven’t yet, or you need to know what exactly it is that you’ve just experienced, you’ve come to the right place. Our goal is to save you time, because we’ve already spent the time on it.

Let’s find out if Otto Insurance is legit, and more importantly, whether it’s right for you. Let’s dive into it!

What is Otto Insurance?

That’s the big question, what exactly is Otto Insurance? Sure, it’s an insurance company that can match you up with quotes insurance coverage. But the important thing is:

1. How do they help you get quotes?
2. Is it effective in getting you a great insurance policy match?

When you’re looking at insurance sites online, you typically come across two models. One is a true insurance aggregator, in which they are able to collect your information and do the majority of the work for you so that at the end, all you really need to do is check the policy and make a choice as to which one you like the most. The other model is a lead generation or referral model, in which they also collect your information, but then basically sell it to various insurance companies. The first model (the insurance aggregator) may also get paid a small amount for giving your information, but ultimately, they’ll get a larger chunk of payment for having successfully hooked you up with an insurance plan that ultimately fit what you were looking for. With the lead generation or referral model, on the other hand, they couldn’t care less once they’ve gotten paid for selling your information. Their time is better spent on making money through volume of information sold, rather than the end result of having matched you effectively.

Otto Insurance, unfortunately, fits the second bill. You already know where I’m going with this. You can really just surmise what this implies to your user experience, but if you want to read ahead, we’ll explain exactly what working with a lead generator entails.

The Cons of Working with Otto Insurance

We’ll jump right into the cons of working with Otto Insurance, or really, any lead generator company that purports to help you get insurance.

1. You’ll get non-stop, numerous, back-to-back calls from various insurance companies

The problem with working with a lead generation model is that it’s very disorganized. Not so much for Otto Insurance or for the insurance company, but for you. Since your contact info has been dispersed to many different companies, they all have to call you one by one to try and get you a policy that you’ll want.

Not to mention it can happen for years after the fact. Even if you managed to get connected with an insurance broker and ultimately decided to go with them, Otto Insurance doesn’t follow up on that. If Otto Insurance finds another broker in the future that they’d like to make money off of, they still have all your initial information that you gave them. They can still sell your information months or years later, and many times at that. It’s irrelevant to them whether you’ve found a suitable policy already or not.

2. You’ll be repeating the same information over and over (and over and over)

Sure, the insurance companies have your basic information, and in that information may include some of the specifics that you’re looking for. However, they’ll still ask questions to further try and pinpoint a perfect fit for you based on what their company offers. Not all companies offer the same policies, so the broker calling you will still need to still talk with you and that takes time, which brings us to our next point.

3. Lead generation takes up a lot of your time, since they prioritize quantity over quality

You might realize that many of these brokers offer nothing close to what you were looking for, but it’s still their job to try and get you to go with them. They are paid via commission after all, so they can’t be faulted for trying to make more money off you. However, if there was a way to pre-screen offers that in no universe you would have considered in the first place (hint: there is), that could have saved you hours of your time.

4.  After the initial dispersal of your info, you won’t get much more help from Otto Insurance

It’s a numbers game when you make money off lead collections. They get your info, and for each broker they bring your information to, they can get paid $20 or so for it. If they spent 1 minute dispersing your info, they got paid $20 per minute (hypothetically). If they then spend 30 more minutes helping you after the fact, rather than letting you and the insurance company they refer you to deal with it directly, then they got paid $0.65 per minute instead. And this holds true even for Otto Insurance. Many users have complained about the customer service that Otto Insurance provides. For some, it borders on being very much like sell-and-dash scam.

5. If you’ve been marketed to by Otto Insurance, you’ll realize their user interface is nothing like they advertise

Users have noticed that screenshots of the Otto app don’t look anything like what they had to go through on the Otto Insurance site. The screenshots look much more advanced and appealing than the true reality of it.

Is Otto Insurance safe and legit?

The worst part about Otto Insurance is that it can make you feel like you’ve been scammed. However, having felt like you’ve been scammed and having truly been scammed are two very different scenarios.

Otto Insurance is safe. Other than having sold your information, they haven’t really stolen any money from you. They don’t take your payment information or anything like that. As far as we know, no one has ever had their money stolen in any way by Otto Insurance directly, nor has Otto been complicit in getting anyone’s money stolen after the fact.

Is Otto insurance legit? Now that is a nuanced question. Are they a legit lead generator? Yes, they are. Are they a legit insurance quote provider? Not really. They aren’t even an insurance company in any way, shape or form. They haven’t really even made the process of obtaining insurance any easier, other than the broker calling you instead of vice versa, and even that’s debatable. If anything, they’ve made the entire insurance-getting process much more disorganized. You could have better spent your time doing a little research on your own, narrowing it down to a few insurance providers, and calling each of them on your own time to fine-tune the details.

To be fair, Otto Insurance has stated on their Terms of Service, “We are not an insurance agent nor an insurance carrier and hence we do not issue any insurance contracts or supply coverage ourselves. We do not endorse or recommend any of the companies or a specific type of insurance policy. While we advertise such services, we don’t provide insurance, tax, or financial advice of any kind.” But really, how many of you read these Terms of Services in detail?

Otto Insurance reviews

Otto Insurance isn’t on the Better Business Bureau website as an accredited business. There’s no information on their BBB profile either, other than where they are headquartered.

They aren’t on Trustpilot either.

In short, there’s really not a lot of information on them floating around online.

In conclusion: Do we recommend Otto Insurance?

We can’t recommend Otto Insurance. They are basically a middleman, and provide very little to no value in your search for a great insurance policy fit. In fact, they can lead to months and years of unsolicited calls, emails, and headaches.

However, if you’ve already made the mistake of giving them your information and would like to redact yourself from their list, be sure to email requesttodelte@OttoInsurance.com. You’ll just need to provide your name and email address/phone number, and they’ll be bound by law to take you off their list, never to be sold to an insurance broker ever again.

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