Show HN: Software to give insurance advice like an agent would

Chris, Dan, and the team at Goodcover here. Goodcover is building a new home and renters insurance co that tries to fix the insurance incentives by returning any unclaimed premium back to customers, keeping a fee instead. Goodcover was YC S17, but off the record due to discussions with the CA government. And we’re still “pre-launch” - starting a new insurance co is hard as it turns out!

Part of the technical challenge we deal with is, how do we build software that can scale what an agent does? Although we can’t offer a full insurance experience yet, we thought we’d roll out an advice app (https://app.goodcover.com/advice) that makes a stab at giving advice like an agent might, but using software. By analyzing your current insurance docs, we can:

- Benchmark the coverage you have against what is “normal”.

- Provide advice about some specific things that you can fix or at least consider fixing.

- Arm you with information on things you can push back on with your insurer.

Technically, the way it works is we’ve generalized some gotchas, manually looked over a bunch of Home/Renters policies, and built a workflow for us to select where we think you are in the homeowners/renters spectrum. So it’s really just workflow automation, however, it requires obviously being able to translate insurance constructs to user things, but most of it is pretty simple from an automation standpoint. Most of our time is generally spent on building out insurance functions, but it’s been a great experiment in information hierarchy to try and reduce complex concepts and insurance-speak down to actionable pieces of information for customers.

No obligation, and feel free to take our advice back to your current provider and get stuff fixed. Goodcover Insurance Solutions LLC is licensed in California (0M20813) so if you are not in CA we can still have a look, but you should definitely review our advice with a pro in your state.

Hi Chris, This is a great service for almost 70% of the population who don't know what events are not covered and the fine print gotchas from the insurance companies.

This should be a really helpful service, kudos on the idea.

The only concern I have here is, privacy. Most of the home owners are not comfortable to upload docs that includes their names or property details (easy to know their net worth) from this. Also, how are you managing data security?

Do you have any plans to address these concerns?

Man, I bet it's even higher than 70%.

I was in the hospital in February, and I asked the nurse how much it would cost to drain a subungual hematoma. Nobody knew!

Maybe it would've been free; maybe it would've cost $1,000 - it definitely doesn't feel good to decline a procedure because you have no idea how much it'll cost.

Thanks - and good luck with your renters insurance search. You're right we don't currently give advice for comparing through the tool - but I've written about it on our blog, and have a even more low tech comparison tool there (google sheet!). https://blog.goodcover.com/save-time-and-buy-home-condo-rent...

Hopefully that could help you out in the mean time.

Regarding returning unclaimed premium - good question. The way insurers make money is by 1) collecting premiums and holding on to them, generating some interest, and 2) keeping more premium than they need to pay out in losses and expenses, which is called "Underwriting Profit."

Typically Home/Renters insurance is written in such a way that a company tries to keep 5-15% of premiums as Underwriting Profit.

We think that the conflict over underwriting profit is at the heart of why the insurance experience is bad - there's not much incentive in improving a user experience that you don't want users to use... So we want to give that 5-15% back in the good years where we don't need it to pay claims. So, what you would see is a dividend at the end of the insurance year. It's not going to be much, but it is "putting our money where our mouth is" on our commitment to policyholders.

Turns out that's really hard to do legally and financially - mutual insurers would technically do this, but starting one is a hugely capital intensive process. We're on the path, and hope to be able to share more about the process soon!