

Leaky adds Esurance to auto insurance comparisons - jasontraff
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/05/22/leaky-a-tool-for-comparing-car-insurance-costs-adds-esurance/

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ajays
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).

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jasontraff
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.

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debacle
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?

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computerbob
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".

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jasontraff
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!)

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thawy
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.

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Davey
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.

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asdf333
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.

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jasontraff
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)

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maxerickson
Is it reasonable to consider them separately from Allstate?

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jasontraff
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.

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

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jasontraff
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.

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bs0101
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.

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

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misterbwong
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

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geoffry
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.

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r00fus
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.

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

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

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qeorge
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.

~~~
jasontraff
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.

