Quizzle

» see quizzle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Quizzle launched in 2008 in Detroit, inside the group of companies owned by Dan Gilbert, whose main asset was the mortgage lender then called Quicken Loans. Its offer was a credit score and a credit report at no charge, at a moment when getting either one usually meant a subscription with a bureau or a trial that renewed into a subscription with a bureau. It arrived alongside Credit Karma and Credit Sesame, and between them those three normalized something that had been a paid product.

The mechanics changed over the years in the way they do when a site depends on bureau agreements it does not control. It used Equifax data first and moved to TransUnion, and by 2016 what it showed was a VantageScore 3.0 with a full report refreshed every three months. None of that mattered to the average user, who wanted a number and a rough sense of which direction it was going.

Bankrate acquired it in April 2015. That is where the ending was written, because Bankrate was a personal finance publisher with its own free credit monitoring product powered by the same bureau. For three years it ran both. In late 2018 the accounts got an email saying Quizzle would be shut down permanently on 16 November, and after that the domain sent visitors to Bankrate's version of the same thing.

This is a product that could only have existed in America, and specifically inside American credit law. A system built on three competing bureaus, with an annual free report that Congress had to mandate, is not how consumer credit works here, and neither is the culture of one number following a person around for life. Turkey's equivalent score came later and came out of the banks' own credit bureau rather than from a startup, which is a difference in origin that shows up in what the thing is for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why it was free ~

Nobody in this category was giving anything away. A person who logs in to check their credit score is, with high probability, a person thinking about borrowing money in the next few months, and that intent is the most valuable signal in consumer finance. The score is the bait and the referral is the business.

Quizzle was unusually direct about this by construction rather than by disclosure, because it sat in the same corporate family as a mortgage lender. The site did not have to sell its leads to a network. It was already standing inside the buyer.

~ what killed it ~

Duplicate products do not survive an acquisition for long, and three years is roughly the standard grace period. Bankrate bought a brand, a user base and a set of bureau relationships, and then had to justify running two front ends that pulled the same TransUnion data and monetized through the same referrals.

By 2018 the wider fight was also over. Credit Karma had taken the category by a wide margin and was on its way to being worth billions to Intuit. A second-tier free-score site owned by a publisher was not going to win that back, so the sensible move was to keep the users and drop the second brand.

~ who won instead ~

The idea won completely. A free credit score is now a checkbox feature inside every American banking app, offered by institutions that would have charged for it in 2007, and nobody under thirty remembers it being otherwise. That is a total victory for the argument Quizzle was making, and it is also exactly why Quizzle had no reason to exist by the end.

The pattern is worth keeping. If your product is a wedge, something you give away to reach the transaction behind it, then success means everyone copies the giveaway and the wedge stops being a reason to visit you. The companies that survived that were the ones that turned the free thing into a place people stayed.

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