How much is my personal information worth?

You’ve seen the statistic. Your data is worth less than a penny. It gets quoted constantly, usually as a punchline about how cheaply we sell ourselves.

It’s measuring the wrong product.

That number prices bulk demographic files—millions of rows of people who did nothing in particular, sold by the pound. And for that product, cheap is the right description. But the industry doesn’t make its money buying identity.

It buys intent.

Intent Is The Whole Game

A record saying “this person exists and lives at this address” is nearly worthless. There are hundreds of millions of those and they’re a commodity.

A record saying “this person requested a mortgage refinance quote eleven minutes ago” is something else entirely. It converts. And the going rates are no secret—they’re published in trade benchmarks every year:

• Insurance: roughly $25–75 per lead
• Mortgage: $15–75, with shared refinance leads around $20–30 and exclusive purchase leads above $60
• Medicare: $35–50 off-season, spiking past $150 during annual enrollment
• Legal: $200–500, the most expensive mainstream vertical there is

For one form submission. From one person who thought they were comparison shopping.

What Moves The Number

Recency decays brutally. Aged insurance leads sell for $1.25–$5.00 within about 90 days, then under $0.75 after. Compare that to $25–75 fresh. Your record can lose 95% of its value in three months—which is exactly why nobody waits to call you.

Exclusivity multiplies. A shared refinance lead runs $20–30; an exclusive purchase lead clears $60. Same person, double the price, for the promise that nobody else gets you. Which is precisely why non-exclusive selling dominates, and precisely why one form produces four callers.

Qualification adds a lot. A lead with verified answers—coverage type, loan amount, homeowner status, age band—outperforms a bare name and number, so it prices higher. Every extra question on that form was a pricing decision.

Your attributes matter, unromantically. ZIP code, homeownership, estimated income. They change expected policy size and loan value, so they change what you’re worth—leads from high-cost states like California or New York carry a 20–30% premium over national averages. There’s a market price attached to your postal code and nobody consulted you about it.

The Uncomfortable Symmetry

Here’s the part worth sitting with.

The more genuinely useful something was to you, the more your participation in it was worth to somebody else.

The quote form you filled out because you actually wanted a quote—real need, real intent—is exactly the interaction that carries real market value. Your sincerity is the asset. The moment you needed something is the moment you were worth the most.

That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what an efficient market does with a signal.

Why This Reframes Everything

It explains why they won’t stop calling. Nobody is spending money to annoy you out of spite—they paid for the right to reach you, and they intend to recover the cost. Twelve voicemails isn’t malice. It’s amortization.

It explains resale. A record that cost real money gets monetized until it stops earning.

And it explains why deletion beats unsubscribing every time. Unsubscribing stops one sender. Deletion removes the asset.

If you’d rather stop being free inventory, PRYVC runs the opposite model: businesses pay for accurate, consented, current data, and you keep the receipt and the ability to take it back.

Same market. You’re just on the other side of the table.