Why Podium exists

The conversation changed

Every spring a group of us gets together for March Madness. For years the talk between games was relationships and upcoming trips. Nobody asked the data guy from the insurance company about work.

Somewhere in our mid-thirties, that changed. Between games it was mortgages, retirement accounts and, eventually, insurance. And nobody at the table could answer the simplest question: am I paying a fair price for what I have?

Everything they owned had been insured one piece at a time, each time because something forced it. Off a parent’s policy at 26. A renters policy, for about half of them. A homeowners policy because the lender required it before closing. An umbrella because a financial advisor mentioned it. A jewelry policy after the engagement. Nobody had ever looked at the whole thing at once. The few with an agent rarely heard from them; the rest had bought each policy on its own.

Pick two

Listening to them, it was clear you could have two of these three, never all three:

• A modern, easy experience.
• Prices from several carriers without doing the legwork.
• No flood of calls and emails afterward.

Go direct to a carrier and you get the first and the third, from one carrier. Use an online shopping site and you get the first two, and then the phone starts ringing. Use a traditional agency and you get the second and the third, with paperwork and a slice of the market.

Nobody offered all three, plus the part that matters most: someone who checks what you have, tells you plainly whether it’s fair, and keeps checking.

What I saw from the inside

From where I sat, the thing you’re actually paying for — the claim, the service, the people who pick up when something goes wrong — is more alike from company to company than the ads suggest. People move between carriers and bring their processes with them, and many run on the same vendors’ systems.

Where carriers really differ is price: how good a risk each one believes you are. That belief comes from pricing models built on each company’s own data, and those models are updated regularly. A carrier that didn’t want you a few years ago may want you now, because its model changed or because it decided to grow. Then there’s the mascot and the jingle, which are in your price too.

I’ve read the major Massachusetts carriers’ rate filings side by side. Massachusetts has every auto insurer price the same example households in its rate filings, so the differences are the carriers’, not the drivers’. Four things stood out:

1. A new driver. Add the same newly licensed driver to the same household in the typical town, and one carrier’s price goes up about 32% while another’s goes up about 118%.
2. Experience. Take a driver from 6 to 14 years licensed, with nothing else changed, and one carrier lowers its price by about 2% while another lowers it by about 45%.
3. Your town. At every major carrier I’ve read, the same household costs more than one and a half times as much in its most expensive Massachusetts town as in its least expensive, and the carriers don’t all agree on which towns those are.
4. A home policy. Each carrier’s filed rules also give the auto policy a credit for holding a home policy too, and the size of that credit varies a lot with the carrier, the coverage part and the kind of home policy.

Same household, same facts, very different answers. One carrier’s price tells you very little on its own.

See the details in the filings →

Three options, none of them good

As a customer, I had three ways to find out whether my price was fair:

1. Do the research myself, one direct carrier at a time.
2. Fill out paperwork with a local agency and see a slice of the market: the carriers that agency works with, which aren’t always the ones that would price me best.
3. Try an online insurance startup. I did. Ten minutes of forms. Then three phone calls. I picked up all three. All three dropped before I spoke to a person.

None of them let me check, decide, and get on with my year.

So I built the one I wanted

Podium is the service I wished existed: look at everything a household holds, put each policy in front of carriers that compete for it, and say plainly whether to switch or stay. Then do it again at every renewal, and send you the results whether or not anything changed.

I’m paid by the carrier you choose, and sometimes the one that’s right for you pays me less. I’ll never put you somewhere that’s better for me than for you. I’ll always review your whole profile, and if you’re already in good shape, I’ll tell you.

The Podium Standard → How we get paid →

Who I am

Outside Podium, I’m a husband and a father, and I coach cross country and track at the local high school.

— Podium’s founder