Unimpressed with CreditSesame.com - A Review

After listening to Marketplace Money on NPR this morning, I decided to try CreditSesame.com after they discussed tools to managing your finances. I decided on CreditSesame because I've tried Credit Karma and I don't like to use anything Intuit (i.e. Mint.com) if possible. After 15 minutes, I'm thoroughly unimpressed.

Thoughts

• During the registration process, there is a place to set your financial goals.  CreditSesame seems to forget that I just want to sign-up.  I don't want to have to set goals to just get in for the first time.  The only way I could proceed was to make some dummy goals (which defeats the point).  This needs to be rethought!


• The UI of the website is less than impressive.  For example, entering or confirming expenses like PMI on our mortgage is very unclear -- do you want the monthly or annual amount?


• On my Dashboard, it recommends that I enroll in their free credit monitoring despite the fact that I enrolled during registration.  Why must you nag more about something I already did?


• On the My Credit page, I get a badge for using my credit wisely and then a warning that "Your credit card balances may be getting close to your credit limits".  Strange warning when the same page reports my credit usage at only 2%.  I guess that is too much!


• It seems the main point of anything I do is to sell me a $9.95 credit report.  Yes, I know their service is free however


• I get random errors using the site like this.  One thing that bothered me was that the Java stacktrace is publicly visible.  This is a security no-no in the web world and this place has my SSN!

My Rating: I deleted my account!