Hi International. My reply may also apply to Svergie, who is also in the same boat.
What you need to do first is separate out what services a CMS gives, and then identify which ones are really important to you. As far as I can tell, there are three things:
Credit Reports
Credit Scores
ID Theft
Credit Reports
There are free tools out there for this. Karma will give you your TU and EQ reports weekly. WalletHub will give you your TU report daily. FreeCreditScore.com will give you your EX report monthly (along with a FICO 8 score). All that is free.
Credit Scores
You can get a free monthly FICO 8 score based on Experian data from FreeCreditScore.com. You can get free FICO scores from credit cards and a number of credit unions and banks.
ID Theft
Here the value of what is being delivered is a lot harder to assess. It's easy to see if a tool is in fact giving you a credit report or a credit score. With ID Theft we are closer to snake oil salesmen. Is it really true that Pirelli's Miracle Elixir will make you grow your hair back? Or even closer to the mark, that a certain cutting edge antioxidant pill will prevent you from getting cancer in 20 years? Could be! Or not. So you'll have to look at reviews of the various products and decide whether they tell you anything. And there are traditional methods of monitoring ID theft: reading your reports once in a while, or even freezing your reports.
I am aiming my reply toward the idea of ultra low cost or free solutions, because you have mentioned not wanting to spend $300 or more a year on this stuff. Personally, I spend almost nothing on it. I get all my scores at my FICO once every 18 months for $30. So that's an annual cost of $20. Then I use free tools. But my approach isn't "right" -- it's just what I do.
You can take my approach and make it even sweeter by using the $1 trial and Credit Check Total once a quarter. That's another $4, which even in my parsimonious world is not much.
PS. There are other free tools I haven't mentioned: Credit.com, Credit Sesame, etc. Almost all of the do some kinds of alerts if you like that as well.
PPS. A crucial step in this whole process is assessing where you are right now with your credit profile and then where you are trying to go (and why) in the short term (next three months), medium term (next 12 or 18 months), and long term (3-10 years). The answer to "which CMS solution is best" depends a ton on that.
