[ywain]

Out of curiosity I tried a few of the services on this list. They all follow the same textbook dark pattern, with fake progress bars, making the process of looking up someone artificially take several minutes, then only at the end do they ask for your email and payment information.

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

There's a few actually free sites that give you most of the info that the others charge you for. All the good ones I'm aware of are listed here. Free, no signup, instant search results.

The truly free ones tend to have a tab to search by just a phone number, and you'll never get a fake loading bar.

At one point they accurately listed every address I've ever lived at, relations, phone numbers, email addresses, and even some usernames I can only assume were linked to me as part of some database breach. A few years ago I went through and "opted out" of a bunch of these services for myself and a few of my family members. Looks like I'm still unlisted/removed 2-3 years later.

[ironSkillet]

Can you specify which ones you think are good?