Next Insurance

The four policies everyone assumes you already understand

Let's settle the legal question before any product talk. In Illinois, the state mostly does not require you to carry general business insurance. What the state requires is narrow: workers' compensation insurance the moment you have an employee, and auto liability insurance on any vehicle you drive. Everything else, including the coverage the property manager is asking about, is required by your clients through contracts, not by law. So the real reason to buy insurance is simpler than the law. It gets you the better jobs, and it keeps one bad afternoon from ending the business.

Next Insurance, which now operates as ERGO NEXT after being acquired by Munich Re's ERGO Group, is the vendor in this review because it's built for exactly the moment described above: you need a real policy and a certificate to show someone, fast, online, paid monthly. We'll get to whether it's good. Short version: solid, with caveats. But first, the vocabulary, because buying insurance you don't understand is how people end up "insured" for the wrong thing. This article is part of our resources directory, where we keep honest reviews of the tools and services our members ask about.

A quick word on how this article was made. Our team did the research, and we used AI to help organize what needed to be covered. Every note, opinion, and piece of advice in it comes from us directly.

Insurance people talk in abbreviations. Here is what the four you'll actually encounter mean, each with a deliberately made-up example. These are illustrations, not client stories.

### General liability (GL): you break their stuff, or they get hurt

General liability covers accidents that happen to other people and their property because your business exists. Per Next's own general liability page, that means things like slip-and-fall injuries, damage to property you don't own, the medical payments, and the legal defense costs when someone sues over any of it.

Hypothetical: you're cleaning a condo and your mop bucket tips over a $2,000 monitor. Or a client's visitor slips on the floor you just finished and breaks a wrist. GL is the policy that pays for the monitor, the medical bills, and the lawyer if it turns ugly.

Just as important is what GL does not cover, and Next's page is refreshingly plain about this: not your own property, not injuries to you or your employees, not professional mistakes, not vehicle accidents, not cyber attacks, not theft of your gear. GL is the "I physically damaged the world around me" policy. Nothing more.

When people say "liability insurance" or "are you insured," this is almost always the one they mean. It's the policy behind nearly every certificate request you'll ever get.

### Professional liability (PL): your advice or work product costs someone money

Also called errors & omissions (E&O). This one covers mistakes in the work itself: no broken objects, no bleeding, just money lost because you got something wrong. Per Next's professional liability page: business errors that cost clients money, claims of professional negligence, misrepresentation that causes financial harm, and the legal defense.

Hypothetical: you're a freelance bookkeeper and you misclassify a quarter's worth of transactions; your client eats a penalty and sends you the bill. GL shrugs, because nothing was physically damaged. PL is the policy built for that claim.

If you clean, detail, paint, or haul, you probably don't need PL. If your work is advice, design, calculations, or filings on other people's behalf, you probably do, and sophisticated clients will ask for it by name. Think bookkeepers, consultants, designers, anyone whose product is a decision.

### Business owner's policy (BOP): GL plus your own stuff

A BOP is a bundle: general liability plus commercial property coverage in one package, per Next's BOP page. The property half covers your things: inventory, equipment, the contents of a studio or shop. It matters once you own stuff worth losing, like a detailing rig, a rack of camera gear, or product inventory in a storage unit. If your business is you, a laptop, and a phone, plain GL usually comes first and a BOP can wait.

### Workers' compensation: your employee gets hurt

Workers' comp pays when an employee is injured on the job: medical expenses, lost wages, retraining, permanent-injury and survivor benefits, per Next's workers' comp page. It is not optional in Illinois once you have employees, and the penalties for skipping it are genuinely scary. More on that in the next section.

(There's a fifth product you'll see quoted for trades: tools and equipment coverage, often bolted onto GL. If your livelihood fits in a truck bed, it's worth a look while you're quoting.)

What Illinois actually requires vs. what clients require

Two different lists. Mixing them up costs money in both directions.

The state's list is short. Illinois law requires workers' compensation insurance for, in the Illinois Workers' Compensation Commission's words, "almost everyone who is hired, injured, or whose employment is localized in Illinois." One part-time employee triggers it. Sole proprietors, business partners, corporate officers, and LLC members may exempt themselves, so a true one-person business with zero employees can legally operate without workers' comp.

Don't test the penalties. Per the same IWCC page: an employer that knowingly and willfully fails to insure can be fined up to $500 for every day of noncompliance with a minimum fine of $10,000, and corporate officers can be held personally liable if the company doesn't pay. Negligent failure is a Class A misdemeanor; knowing failure is a Class 4 felony. The Commission can issue a work-stop order shutting you down until you show proof of coverage. And an uninsured employer loses its protections under the Act entirely. An injured employee can sue in civil court, where benefits are unlimited and the burden is on you to prove you weren't negligent. Of every insurance decision in this article, "my first hire starts Monday" is the one with a legal deadline attached.

The other state requirement: liability insurance on vehicles. Illinois requires it on every plated vehicle that's driven, with minimums of $25,000 for injury or death of one person and $50,000 for more than one, per the Illinois Secretary of State. If you drive to jobs, know that personal auto policies often have exclusions around business use. Ask whoever holds your auto policy before an adjuster asks for you. Some licensed trades also have insurance requirements written directly into their license. If your work is licensed, read the license application, not just this article.

The clients' list is longer, and it's where GL lives. No Illinois statute makes a solo cleaner carry general liability. But the property management company hiring cleaners requires it in the vendor contract, the commercial landlord requires it in the lease, and the event venue wants it before load-in. The most common ask, per Insureon's published customer data, is a policy with a $1 million per-occurrence limit and $2 million aggregate. Some 85% of their small business customers buy exactly those limits, which is why contract templates everywhere assume them. "Required by law" and "required to get paid" end in the same place: you're buying the policy either way, once the clients you want are big enough to have a vendor packet.

What a COI is, and why the property manager demands one

A certificate of insurance is a one-page summary of your policy: who's insured, which coverages, what limits, what dates. It is not the policy itself. It is the proof, standardized so that someone who processes forty of them a week can scan yours in ten seconds.

Property managers and commercial landlords demand COIs because they carry the downside of your accidents. If your hypothetical mop bucket floods a unit, the building's owner wants your insurer paying, not theirs. So no COI, no vendor approval, no job. It's a gate, enforced by people with no authority to waive it.

Two things about COIs surprise first-timers. One: the requester often asks to be named an additional insured, meaning your policy extends to protect them from claims arising out of your work. This is normal. Vendor contracts ask for it constantly, and insurers built for small business let you add one without drama. Two: the COI has your business name and address printed on it, and every property manager, landlord, and client who requests one sees it. If your business address is your apartment, that's your home address circulating through vendor files across the city. It's one more reason members use a business mailbox at a real street address, or a fuller virtual office setup, as part of the legitimacy layer that insurance applications, license forms, and COIs all draw from.

Next, now ERGO NEXT: who you're actually buying from

Next Insurance launched as an online-only insurer aimed squarely at small businesses. "100% dedicated to small business" is still the pitch on nextinsurance.com, which claims more than 750,000 customers across 1,300+ business types. In 2025, ERGO Group, the primary insurance arm of Munich Re, one of the largest reinsurers in the world, completed its acquisition of the company, and in January 2026 it rebranded as ERGO NEXT Insurance. Same product, same website, bigger balance sheet behind it. In September 2025 the company announced an A+ (Superior) financial strength rating from AM Best as part of the Munich Re rating unit. Translated, that means the raters think it can pay claims. For a buyer, the acquisition mostly answers the question you should ask any young insurer: will this company exist in five years? Backed by Munich Re, almost certainly.

The reviews are unusually good for an insurance company. A low bar, but a real one. In our own ratings sweep (checked September 2026), Next averages 4.3 out of 5 across 4,034 reviews on three independent platforms: Trustpilot 4.2 from 1,417 reviews, BBB customer reviews 4.37 from 945 (the profile now carries the ERGO NEXT name, same company), and WalletHub 4.3 from 1,672, though WalletHub's composite may lag a year or so. For context from the same sweep: another big-name online small-business insurer, Hiscox US, averaged 1.2 across the same kinds of platforms. Insurers usually get rated by their angriest customers. Scoring above 4 on three platforms at once is genuinely uncommon in this industry.

The pitch that matters: quote to COI, fast, paid monthly

This is why Next earns its place in this directory for someone staring down a vendor packet due Friday.

Speed. The homepage claims you can "get a quote and buy in less than 10 minutes," fully online. Answer questions about the business, see the price, pay, done. General liability coverage is effective immediately after payment per the GL page; workers' comp is effective the next day. No phone tag, no "an agent will contact you."

The certificate, instantly and free. This is the killer feature for the property-manager scenario. Per Next's COI page, policyholders get unlimited customized COIs 24/7 at no additional cost, generated from the website or the phone app and shared by email, link, download, or print, with additional insureds added from the same app. With a traditional agency, certificate requests can be an email-and-wait cycle; here it's self-serve. If a client springs a COI requirement on you at 9 p.m., that difference is the product.

Monthly payments, without financing games. You can pay monthly instead of annually, and Next's terms of service state it plainly: "You will not be charged any interest, finance fee, late payment fee, or other type of finance charge." For a business watching cash, that's the honest version of monthly billing. The flip side, from the same terms: miss a payment and they can move to cancel the policy, and a lapsed policy quietly invalidates every COI you've handed out. Put it on a card that doesn't expire soon.

What it costs. Next advertises general liability "starting at $19/month†" and that dagger is doing real work. It marks the price for some low-risk businesses, not a quote. Same with professional liability from $19/month†, workers' comp from $14/month†, and a BOP from $25/month†, all per the product pages linked above. For a realistic anchor, Insureon, an online insurance marketplace that publishes data from 100,000 customer policies, reports small businesses pay an average of $45 per month for general liability, with annual premiums running from roughly $265 to over $3,000 depending on industry and risk (figures updated March 2026). A solo organizer will land near the bottom of that range; a roofer won't. The only number that matters is the one on your actual quote, and getting it takes ten minutes and costs nothing.

The honest caveats

Buying is the fun part; claims are the product. Every insurer's reviews skew toward the purchase experience, because that's when most customers form an opinion, and buying from Next is deliberately pleasant. The moment of truth is a claim, and that's exactly what you can't test-drive. Before you buy from any insurer, filter its Trustpilot reviews for the word "claim" and read the one-star ones. Do the same for the competition. You're not looking for zero complaints, because no insurer has that. You're looking for patterns.

Read the coverage limits, not the checkout button. A 10-minute purchase makes it easy to buy without reading. Your policy documents list exclusions, per-occurrence limits, aggregate limits, and deductibles, and the cheap tier of anything is cheap for a reason. If a client's contract demands $2 million aggregate and you clicked through a $1 million policy, your COI will say so, and their compliance person will catch it. Ten minutes to buy; give the policy PDF thirty more.

Online-only means you're the broker. Next asks you questions and prices a policy; nobody is double-checking whether you described your own risk correctly. Misdescribe your work, say "cleaning" when half your revenue is post-construction cleanup, and you may find the gap at claim time. The questionnaire is only as good as your answers.

When a local independent broker is the better path

A fair word for the other route. An independent insurance broker, a human and often a small business themselves, quotes your risk across multiple carriers, tells you when a requirement in a client's contract is unusual and negotiable, structures coverage for messy situations, and gets on the phone when a claim goes sideways. If your business involves employees on ladders, commercial vehicles, food, or anything a client's lawyer would call "interesting," a broker's judgment is worth more than an online form's speed. Brokers are typically paid by commission from the carrier, so the advice usually costs nothing out of pocket. Ask how they're paid; good ones answer without flinching. Plenty of Chicago brokers work with one-person businesses, and that route sits in our resources directory alongside this review. The honest split: with simple, common risk and a deadline, online works beautifully. With complicated risk, or a nagging feeling that you don't know what you don't know, buy the human.

A note from Lobi Space management

Before you buy this policy or any other, do one thing on paper first. Write down every single process your business needs in order to succeed. Not just insurance. Filing, invoicing, who answers the phone, who keeps the books, all of it. Insurance is one line on that list, and the list is what tells you which coverage you actually need, because not every business is designed to be the same. In our community, people ask each other what they use and tend to jump right in on a neighbor's recommendation. That works fine for a lunch spot. It's a risky way to buy a policy, because the coverage that fits your neighbor's business may not fit yours. Shopping for this stuff takes a long time, and switching later is painful, so it's worth making the right decision the first time. Know what your business needs before you spend a dollar.

The short version

The law's list is short: workers' comp the day you have an employee (Illinois means it: up to $500/day in fines, personal liability, felony exposure), auto liability if you drive. Everything else is client-driven, which means the real trigger to buy general liability is the first contract or vendor packet that demands a COI. When that day comes, Next (now ERGO NEXT, with Munich Re behind it and a 4.3 average across 4,000+ independent reviews) can take you from quote to certificate in minutes, paid monthly with no finance charges. Read the policy anyway. And if your risk is complicated, spend the extra week and buy through a local independent broker instead.

Blunt questions, straight answers

Can I clean houses without insurance? In Illinois, if you're truly solo, with no employees, no state law forces you to carry general liability, so yes, legally you can. Practically, you're one tipped bucket away from personally owing for someone's floors, and the clients who pay best won't hire an uninsured cleaner anyway. Uninsured limits you to customers who don't ask, which is its own ceiling.

What happens if I say I'm insured and I'm not? If you just say it and nothing goes wrong, you've breached the contract you signed and you're betting your savings on nothing going wrong. Any accident lands on you personally, in full. If you fake a COI to back the claim up, you've crossed from lying into fraud on a document, which can end contracts, licenses, and worse. This is the one corner genuinely not worth cutting: a real GL quote is free and takes ten minutes.

I have no employees. Do I need workers' comp in Illinois? Generally no. Sole proprietors, partners, corporate officers, and LLC members can exempt themselves, per the IWCC. The rule flips the day you have even one part-time employee. And some clients or general contractors require workers' comp from vendors regardless of what the state says. The contract can always be stricter than the law.

My client wants to be an "additional insured." Is that bad for me? It's normal. It extends your policy to cover them for claims arising from your work. That's standard vendor-contract stuff, and insurers like Next let you add one from the app when you generate the COI. What it costs you is mostly nothing day-to-day; claims involving that client now touch your policy. Refusing it usually just costs you the client.

Is the $19-a-month price real? It's really on Next's site, with a dagger: it's the starting price for some low-risk businesses. Treat it as "quotes start somewhere near there," not as your price. Insureon's published average across 100,000 policies is $45/month for GL. Your number depends on your trade, revenue, and history, and takes about ten minutes to find out for real.

I have an LLC. Doesn't that protect me instead? Different jobs. An LLC can separate your personal assets from the business's debts. Worth having, and our LLC setup guide walks through it. But it doesn't stop the business from being sued, doesn't pay a judgment, and a lawsuit can still eat everything the business owns. Insurance is what actually writes the check. The boring truth: most real businesses end up with both.

Can I buy a policy for one job and cancel it after? Next advertises "cancel anytime," so mechanically, mostly yes. Two catches. Contracts often require coverage kept in force for the whole engagement, sometimes beyond it, and canceling early can breach that. And every COI you handed out becomes worthless the moment the policy lapses; certificate holders can find out. If you're doing client work regularly, treat insurance like the phone bill: a cost of being in business, not a per-job accessory.

Before you buy anything

One last thought from the Lobi Space team. A good policy, like good software or a good workshop, is a tool, and tools are great. But without a road map, a goal, and a plan behind them, you're shooting in the dark or chasing a dream. Write the plan first. Then buy the coverage that fits it.

Why it made our list

• You can quote and bind the same day online, with no week of broker back-and-forth before you are covered.
• Unlimited certificates of insurance are free, which matters every time a client or landlord asks for proof on short notice.
• Trade-specific policies for contractors and consultants mean you are not overpaying for coverage written for someone else's risk.