Leaky adds Esurance to auto insurance comparisons | Hacker News Reader

Leaky adds Esurance to auto insurance comparisons

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34 pointsjasontraff25 comments

I just tried them. They said the best quote was Geico, for $410/six months. I went to Geico's site, and it came to more than $600/six months.

This much discrepancy doesn't bode well.

What I would love to see is a button, so that it'll take me to Geico's site with the exact same quote (all the information filled in).

Hehe, we'd love to see that button too, but that's what we got in trouble for the first time!

Also, _please_ email us at sayhi at leaky dot com with the email address you used on the site so that we can look into it; that difference is well outside of the norm.

EDIT: Thanks for emailing us and including screenshots. As discussed, we've already identified a few issues (we blame Geico's website), and have added it to the list of test cases for further testing.

I don't mean to be a downer, but this just isn't going to work. Insurance companies are very covetous of their models and I don't think Leaky really has much to offer to suppliers.

I realize that admitted carrier information is publicly available, but I'm not sure how Leaky could ever be profitable. The commission on an auto policy is almost nil (the common mantra is "If you touch it, you lose money."). Insureds will gain, but trying to create a race to the bottom with suppliers is a recipe for disaster in the insurance industry. Being a broker is about providing a service to insureds and suppliers, not merely one or the other.

What's the end goal, besides potentially disrupting the auto insurance industry in the short term?

The interface is awesome and really fun to use...however I found the results to be higher than when I manually went to the companies websites.

Has anyone else found this to be true. I am currently looking for car insurance so this website is awesome for a quick snapshot.

EDIT: I also got an error on the "Drivers" section when I entered my occupation as a "Computer Programmer".

Thanks! Who'd have thought someone would say that an insurance comparison site has a 'fun to use' interface!

We run lots of randomized test cases for our accuracy, if your prices have been off by more than 3% - please email us at sayhi@leaky.com with the email address you used on the site. We'll (anonymously) add you to our test cases.

Accuracy is a big focus for us; for example, when we added Esurance, it tested within a 1% margin of error in 87% of cases, and within a 2% margin in most of the rest. (We'll be releasing our accuracy data in a later post!)

I can't wait to see the accuracy data. As an insurance industry veteran, it's frankly shocking to me that you could average better than +/- 20% using filed rates.

I'm especially curious how you are getting within 1-3% on Progressive's rates without running their proprietary credit model.

I would guess they are really +/- 50% for Progressive because credit really does play a large part. I can't imagine they won't get sued again by these companies for falsely posting their rates as higher, so that they can sell more policies with the companies that actually pay them.

I would assume that they are testing their accuracy only via these insurers websites, not real policies. Going through geico's site, it doesn't seem to need any credit/real identification, so they probably aren't running a credit model (at least to get to an estimated quote).

What sort of data are you looking for if I was to email the prices. My old insurance is through progressive and leaky was around $350 more than what I am currently paying. While geico was much closer. Is there a form? Or just use what I got on the other sites and paste them accordingly to to leaky's estimated prices?

We'll check your entries to make sure that we've mapped everything correctly (zip code, vehicles, etc.). If there are any date-related fields (like speeding tickets) or discounts, we'll check those to make sure we've correctly applied each carrier's rules. We do this all anonymously, of course.

The only thing we need to do this is just to have the e-mail address that you used on leaky.com and we'll do the rest. So _please_ email us at sayhi at leaky dot com so that we can correct your results.

Awesome news! They do alot of insurance business online (they're #1 i think) so they're a great company to have in a auto insurance comparison site.

Thanks! (and I think they're #3, but considering how much smaller they are than most of the insurance companies - they're doing a pretty good job)

Is it reasonable to consider them separately from Allstate?

I think so - at least for now. Heck, I'd imagine that's a significant reason that Allstate ended up acquiring them. In any event, the pricing structures are different so it still makes sense to compare them separately.

Sorry, I was talking more about calling them a relatively small company. Considering the products separately makes sense.

Ah, hehe, yeah. That comes from comments I've heard from some of their employees about how well they've done against their competitors given their 'relatively smaller' resources/teams/ad spend.

Hybrid. Appears they'll operate separately but All State will play a big role in improving their pricing and claims process.

Should be interesting to see how Allstate balances Esurance pricing versus pricing through their traditional captive agent base.

Jason. Happy to hear you were able to push through the initial issues that appeared. Hoping you could clarify something for me. I know company / process you are using for the historical data, but is this article saying that are you pinging esurance's API directly for quotes? Thanks, and congratulations again.

Thanks! And no, we aren't using an API for these prices; they are just our own unendorsed/unaffiliated estimations :)

Great news and a market niche that needs innovation. Nice, clean interface though I'm getting 500 errors posting /api/getrate/ while trying to get a quote. Chrome ver 19.0.1084.46 on Win7 x64

Thanks for the help, if you let us know the email address you used (by emailing sayhi@leaky.com) we'll be able to better hunt down the problem.

Edit: We've found the problem, let us know if you encounter anymore difficulties, thanks again for the heads-up.

Love the idea. One minor quibble so far - the email field on your main page should b html5 email so mobile browsers can ignore initial caps and show an email oriented keyboard.

site:leaky.com only returns a couple hundred results.

99% of your success depends on search engine love, not buzz.

To that end, you guys may want to try creating some evergreen content pages that are accessible to the search engines. Right now there's only 3 pages (other than your blog) which can be reached by a crawler: home, about, & contact.

Mint.com does a great job with this, if you need inspiration.

All very true and good points from both of you all - we're currently working through a site redesign, and this'll be a big part of it.

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