Yes. I have a great mini series on my blog about credit scores. Check it out!

I have seen where there are big variances in credit scores between these credit services people subscribe to and an actual credit report run from a bank.

This is because the mortgage industry uses slightly different calculations for credit scores than the actual credit bureaus do. Lenders work with a third party vendor who pulls a "tri merge" credit report, gathering reporting info from all 3 credit bureaus. Then the information is plugged into the mortgage scoring formulas and a score is generated for all 3 bureaus.

In most cases I've seen the scores from the mortgage version come in lower, but I guess it's probably different from case to case depending on the information in the individual's credit file