Posted on by Jon Colgan
CellBreaker.com–it’s a simple idea. Who has time to sit around looking for incremental changes every month in consumer service contracts? Basically no one, and this costs consumers big time.
The traditional law firm model isn’t designed to serve this type of low-dollar, decentralized pain. Certainly, attorneys have the skills to help consumers with consumer contract disputes, but consumers can’t afford attorneys’ hourly rates.
Yet one of the biggest black-holes of unnecessary spending lies in the incremental changes to consumer service contracts such as cell phones, TV, internet, gym contracts, etc.–services that most of us need just to survive in a modern economy. Consumers aren’t obligated to pay unilateral price increases, but we do since no one hardly ever notices. As an example, one major US cell phone carrier overcharged its customers an average of $12/line in 2014. If you’re a family with four lines, you over-paid $48. How many PBJ sandwiches could $48 buy (and that’s just cell phone contracts)?
One problem is that these contracts are long, dense, and non-negotiated to begin with. So, consumers seldom know what their rights and obligations are at the outset and thus have no chance of detecting incremental contact changes that cost them more money over time. But the bigger problem is that the amount of money typically at stake doesn’t justify the expense of hiring an attorney to assert your rights. Attorneys can’t afford to help, because it’s too costly in time, and consumers can’t afford to be helped, because it’s too costly in dollars.
CellBreaker solves this problem by automating management of consumer service contracts and detecting changes. CellBreaker’s contract monitoring is free for consumers, and all the consumer must do is provide their login credentials for the contracts they wish CellBreaker to monitor. Then CellBreaker’s technology handles the rest, automating the monthly analysis and sending consumers the analysis findings once per month in a single email.
We were featured on ABC World News in September on a Real Money segment in which we saved a family of three almost $2,000/year by plugging their contracts into our technology. CellBreaker.com has saved US consumers over $125K since January 2014
But what does this mean for attorneys?
Attorney Josh Kubicki posits that the US legal market is worth more than $400 billion, if you include the legal areas that tech startups like CellBreaker are attacking, areas that the legal industry had not previously figured out how to serve. Given that the usual market valuation is about $275 billion, there’s a lot of value for attorneys to capture by joining CellBreaker’s mission to empower consumers with innovative technology.