jasontraff

Hi Jon -- we work primarily with businesses, but if you're shipping freight and have questions, you can always email us at sales@shipwell.com -- thanks!

At your level, it sounds like you're past getting an MBA. You may find value in an Executive MBA, which are usually done part time and have an average age of ~40, later, but it would depend on a lot of factors.

Sorry; wasn't trying to make that point at all. Instead, I was agreeing that I also was surprised with how much bandwidth Twitch takes up.

I ran some tests a few months back on how much bandwidth I use up while watching Twitch. What I found is that if I streamed Twitch 24/7 that I'd hit something like 1.2 TB down in a month.

By that logic, even just 3 hours a day would be 150 GB down a month.

You are correct, and made me smile. Thank you.

This. Mostly.

The idea of comparing insurance isn't new, but I felt that no one had done it well. Generally, either the results are biased because someone is trying to encourage you to pick one company over the other. Or when an agency is able to show you accurate, official prices - they are not able to show it for all of the largest companies, which results in an incomplete comparison.

With Leaky, we've set out to change that by being as impartial and transparent as possible - because we think that people deserve to be able to compare and manage their insurance the way they want to.

I don't think it's currently possible to do entirely online at the moment. Your best chance would be with an independent agent at the moment (though we're trying to change that).

This is very true, and actually had a strong influence on Leaky - especially in the early days. I spent a lot of time in the UK (and actually spoke at a price aggregation conference in London), and there are a few structural reasons for why the markets evolved so differently and have made the US much more resilient to adopting comparison services. Suffice to say, we think that's changing.

My wife dragged me to an appliance shop in the Mission (SF) and they had a toilet like this in their bathroom. At first I was shocked and appalled at how forceful the stream of water was - especially as I had it on the 'low' setting. Then I became aware of how long it was spraying because after 30 seconds I had to turn it off. With the combination of these two (and the heated dryer), I didn't have any problems.

This is fantastic news! For too long have larger companies used the looming threat of legal action to discourage legitimate competition from smaller companies. I'd never heard of Chilling Effects before this, but now I'm tempted to put all of the C&D's we've collected (and will continue to collect) into it.

The inferences he makes about political and religious beliefs as a consequence of evolutionary psychology is pretty cool.

Gets a bit weird around here though: "Intelligent people are more likely to be nocturnal because humans are designed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down. They are more likely to be homosexual, because humans are evolutionarily designed to reproduce heterosexually. They are more likely to enjoy instrumental music because music in its evolutionary origin was vocal, and they are more likely to consume alcohol, cigarettes and drugs because all of these substances are evolutionarily novel."

Love these guys and the work they're doing!

This is absolutely true. The opportunity to disrupt insurance is massive, and at this point, almost a certainty.

Through Leaky, one of the things that we've always liked is that there's room for disruption in all parts of the spectrum. Customer acquisition, retention, quoting, pricing, binding, billing, etc ad nauseum. You can even decide if you want it to be B2C or B2B.

For us, we've focused on 1) simplifying the comparing and ultimately the purchasing of personal lines insurance (auto, home, life) and 2) creating a real-time (truly real-time; not the "we'll call you back in 5 minutes" model) commercial insurance comparison and purchasing platform.

There are a lot of headaches to disrupting insurance as an industry, namely there are a lot of regulations and a lot of litigious parties. However, our view is that mounting public frustration (for all forms of insurance) and the current lack of software-based solutions make insurance a ripe industry for disruption.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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)

Awesome job guys, it looks great!

either the link is broken or the post got removed

Thanks! We do a lot of internal testing, but I'm always really excited when I hear that we were close for an actual person!

Thanks for the feedback too, it sounds like something that we're working on to allow users to fold their information into our routine accuracy testing - which should be helpful for them and us.

sakai -- We take our accuracy very seriously; email us at sayhi@leaky.com and we'll look into it.

If you're in California (the only state that we officially support), we're within 1% in about 50% of cases and within 3% in about 80% of cases - and we're always getting better. However, there are still occasional outliers that we are always trying to identify and fix.

If you're outside California, well - the prices will be different. However, the magnitude changes (eg for switching cars) will be similar to what you would see in your state.

As for the occupation discounts - those come straight from the insurers' filed documents.

Thanks, we really appreciate the support!

I'd respond, but you look like a competitor! :)

Thanks, that's really helpful feedback

Some companies draw distinctions that sometimes seem arbitrary, which is another reason that we think Leaky is helpful.

However, there's almost always a statistical analysis for the decisions that they make and it may have nothing to do with driving record. It might be that one profession stays with the insurer longer or is a more profitable customer by allowing the insurer to insurer multiple-lines for them (house, life, etc.).

Great! We do a lot of testing, but it's always nice to hear that the prices we gave were accurate!

(Insurers shouldn't care if you had an accident and weren't at fault - their models say that should not affect your price, which is why we only ask for 'at-fault accidents')