What a $199 annual biomarker membership actually earns, what it costs to acquire the member, and why every strategic question follows from the gap between those two numbers. Public sources only. August 2026.
Twelve months in which the company cut its price by 60%, bet the balance sheet on peptides, and got sued over how it counts biomarkers.
The most interesting thing about that lawsuit is what hasn't happened. After two stipulated extensions, no responsive pleading appears on the public docket past April 2026 — no motion to dismiss, no answer, no ruling. A defendant intending to fight normally files a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. That pattern reads like settlement or standstill negotiations. Paid docket services were inaccessible to me, so treat this as "nothing found in public sources" rather than confirmed docket silence. Note also that as of this writing the company still advertises the challenged "3,000+ locations" claim, which bears on willfulness if the case is litigated.
The competitive and capital context moved faster than the company did.
Wearables — Oura at $99 for 50 markers, Whoop at $299 per panel — also entered this window and are commoditising the panel from below. They sit outside the scope of this piece and are covered separately.
The demand story is genuinely strong. The supply and margin story is not, and the two are usually discussed as if they were the same thing.
Broad annual screening of asymptomatic adults is not a neutral act in mainstream clinical practice — it is something most guideline bodies actively advise against. That matters commercially, because it is the theory an FTC action or a consumer class action would be built on.
The mechanism critics describe is the cascade. An abnormal flag on an asymptomatic patient triggers repeat testing, referrals, and occasionally invasive workup — one cited study found 33% of cascade-initiating tests were clinically inappropriate. Linder's example is that age-related shifts within a normal complete blood count range can end in a bone marrow biopsy. His benchmark for a healthy adult is cholesterol screening every five years, not annually.
A cardiologist who reviewed Superpower personally had ten biomarkers flagged abnormal and judged that "each one was not of clinical concern", and separately estimated that about a third of the markers are ratios generated from other markers. That independently echoes Function's litigation allegation from someone with no commercial stake in the outcome, which is what makes it the more damaging version. One product review estimated broad panels generate close to ten false positives per healthy consumer.
I found no randomised or prospective evidence that annual broad biomarker panels improve mortality or morbidity in asymptomatic adults. That absence is itself the finding, and it is the answer to the question a regulator would ask first.
The commercial reading is the part that belongs in a model: the algorithm that flags abnormalities is the same algorithm that drives add-on attach, and the resulting action plan reportedly recommends supplements the company sells. Optimising attach and managing regulatory exposure are the same dial turned in opposite directions. Worth noting too that roughly 40% of Function's members come from ZIP codes below $95K median household income — the cascade cost lands hardest on the people least able to absorb it.
Restricted to lab-based testing businesses — the companies selling the same underlying product. The panel itself is undifferentiated: Superpower and Function both route to Quest, and Function's own complaint concedes it.
| Company | Price / yr | Markers & cadence | Scale | Capital | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superpower | $199 | 100+ claimed, ~55 direct alleged · 1× / yr | "Tens of thousands" | ~$47–51M · ~$500M val | Cheapest full membership. The price is the brand, which is exactly why raising it is hard |
| Function Health the direct comparison | $365 | 160+ lab tests · 2× / yr + on-demand | 500,000+ members 100M+ tests logged | $800M+ · $2.5B val | 16× the capital. Owns the draw via Getlabs; twice-yearly testing is a retention mechanism, not a feature |
| Mito Health | $108 | not disclosed · labs at cost | not found | not found | $9/month with labs passed through at cost — the price floor, and proof the wrapper alone is worth little |
| InsideTracker | $149–1,781 | 43–54 · flexible | per-kit, not subscription | not found | The pre-longevity incumbent, out of MIT/Harvard research. Never converted to a membership model |
| Everlywell | ~$449 | small single-condition panels | not found | $50M (2019) | Broad catalog, shallow panels. Sells the test, not the interpretation |
| Lifeforce | ~$1,897 | 40+ · quarterly | not found | $12M Series A | Clinician-led with prescribing — hormones, peptides, GLP-1s. Fewer markers, ten times the price. This is where Superpower's peptide bet is heading |
| Marek Health | ~$2,500–5,400 | pay-per-panel, $150–1,950 | not found | not found | No membership at all; coaching plus labs billed separately. The unbundled version |
| Thorne | not disclosed | testing + supplements | ~$500M revenue | Sold to P&G, $3.8B | The exit comp. Testing attached to a consumables business is what a strategic buyer paid 7.6× revenue for |
| Quest · Labcorp | $89 / $65 panels | direct consumer panels | Q2 2026: $3.04B / $3.73B rev | public | The supplier. Both now sell direct to consumers while taking their wrapper customers' volume |
Two adjacent tiers, deliberately excluded. Imaging-led players (Neko at £299 a scan, Prenuvo $1,199–5,000, Biograph $7,500–15,000) compete for the same wallet but sell a different cost structure. Wearables adding blood panels (Oura, Whoop) are commoditising from below and are covered in a separate piece.
Superpower at $199 for "100+" markers is about $1.99 per marker — but roughly $3.62 per marker on the ~55 direct measurements Function alleges. Function at $365 for 160+ across two draws is about $2.28 per marker, or roughly $1.14 per marker-observation per year. On a per-direct-measurement, per-draw basis Superpower is not the cheap option. That gap is precisely the wedge the lawsuit is engineered to expose, and it is why the litigation is a pricing problem rather than a legal one.
Quest posted 10.2% revenue growth in Q2 2026 and raised guidance, explicitly crediting "robust revenue growth through questhealth.com and our consumer, wearable and wellness partners." It is simultaneously supplier to, and competitor of, its own wrapper customers — and it is booking growth on their marketing spend. Neither wrapper has pricing power over its single largest cost line. The lab is the toll road.
The most useful thing you can do with two companies selling the same product at different prices is hold the cost structure constant and see what the price difference buys. Both panels below use the same per-panel lab cost, the same draw cost and the same clinician cost — the only differences are the ones that are actually reported: price, testing frequency, and add-on revenue. These update live with the model in Section 8.
Function's add-on revenue of about $39 per subscriber per year is a reported figure derived from roughly $8M of add-on revenue across its base. Superpower's add-on revenue is a modelled assumption — which is why the comparison flatters Superpower by default. Set Superpower's attach rate to match Function's actual $39 and the gap widens considerably.
This comes before the model deliberately. Nothing downstream is more reliable than what is in this table, and roughly half of it is mine rather than the company's.
| Input | Basis | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Membership $199/yr | Reported | Company pricing page. $399 in NY/NJ, a $499 two-panel tier, and $179 through the Thatch employer channel |
| Add-on catalog prices | Reported | Company site: Lp(a) $39 · thyroid antibodies $49 · extended metabolic $99 · organ age $99 · women's hormones $119 · at-home draw $119 · heavy metals $129 · extended heart $139 · microbiome $239 · mold $289 · environmental toxins $299 · Galleri $849 |
| Function $365/yr, 160+ tests, 2×/yr | Reported | Function pricing page; cut from $499 in November 2025 |
| Function add-on revenue ~$39/member/yr | Reported | Roughly $8M of add-on revenue across the member base, per third-party research |
| Lab panel COGS $50 | Estimated | Triangulated from Quest-network reseller retail — a full wellness panel sells at $55–65 while the reseller still earns a margin — and from Medicare clinical lab fee schedule rates. Actual negotiated wholesale contracts are not public |
| Draw cost $35 | Estimated | Bounded above by the $119 Superpower charges for an at-home draw. Function's purchase of Getlabs signals the line is material enough to vertically integrate |
| CAC $250 | Estimated | Anchored to third-party estimates for Function of $75–175 and $300–600, adjusted upward for Superpower's shift from organic and waitlist growth to paid acquisition — it has hired a Director of Influencer Marketing and a Performance Creative Strategist |
| Annual renewal 50% | Assumption | Not disclosed by any player in the category. The only adjacent hard number is Neko's 75% follow-up prepay rate, on a different product. This is the single most consequential unknown in the model |
| Add-on attach 25% at $220 | Assumption | Not disclosed. Function's reported ~$39 per member per year is the only adjacent datapoint, and it implies this assumption is optimistic |
| Clinician review $14, platform $18 | Assumption | Not disclosed. Function's complaint alleges Superpower's clinical layer is dieticians and coaches rather than physicians, which would make the real figure lower than modelled |
| Fixed operating cost $30M/yr | Assumption | Scaled loosely to a reported headcount around 80. Used only for the company-level bridge in Section 8 |
| Gross-profit sanity check | Estimated | An independent analyst estimates Function's gross profit at $75–145 per member per year on a $365 price — a 20–40% margin, CAC $75–175, payback 6–28 months, first-year retention 60–75%. Applying that structure to $199 implies $40–80, which brackets what this model produces |
Not found, and therefore not estimated: Superpower's member count, revenue, ARR, churn, CAC and add-on attach — none are disclosed. Whether the March 2026 "$42M" was a new round or a cumulative-to-date figure is unresolved; sources variously report $34M, $42M, $47M, $50M+ and $51M. Whether the $500M valuation reflects a priced round is unclear. Function's gross margin, COGS and retention are likewise undisclosed, as is any docket activity after March 24, 2026.
Toggle any line item off to remove it from the calculation, or drag to change it. The presets load the strategic cases discussed in Section 9, and the Function comparison in Section 6 updates with every change.
Read down the ladder. Each line is live.
The distinction that matters. Gross profit is revenue minus the cost of delivering the service to that member — the panel, the draw, the review, the payment fee. Contribution goes one step further and subtracts the cost of getting that member, so it answers a different question: not "do we make money on the service" but "is a new customer worth acquiring at all." In a subscription business the first is almost always positive and the second frequently is not, which is exactly the situation here.
What contribution is not. It is not EBITDA. Everything below the contribution line — engineering, brand, leadership, compliance, office — is fixed and does not scale with one more member. So contribution per member is only meaningful multiplied by the member count and compared against that fixed base, which is what the bottom two rows do. A company can have healthy contribution per member and still lose money because it has too few members; it can also have thin contribution and be profitable at sufficient scale. Superpower, at "tens of thousands" of members, is in the first situation.
One modelling caveat. CAC is charged entirely to year one, which is the conservative treatment. Spread it across the member's expected life and the first-year figure improves while lifetime value does not change — which is why lifetime value against CAC, not year-one profit, is the number to judge the business on.
Judge each against one fact established above: the base membership does not pay for the customer. That makes the consumer P&L a funnel, and a funnel is only worth building if what it feeds is high-margin and durable. Click "Model this" to load any case into the calculator.
The catalog is already built and priced, from a $39 Lp(a) test to an $849 Galleri cancer screen. Drag the attach slider and watch lifetime value against CAC move more than any other input — a single $99 add-on roughly doubles gross profit per member. The cost is that this is precisely the conflict-of-interest structure an FTC action or consumer class action would target: the algorithm that flags abnormalities drives the attach, and the company is already defending a false-advertising suit over its marketing claims. It is the cheapest option and the one that most increases the correlation between commercial success and legal exposure.
Corporate wellness is the fastest-growing end use in direct-to-consumer testing, and Superpower already has a live proof point — a Thatch partnership at $179 a year. The preset drops price to $179, collapses CAC toward $40, largely kills add-on attach because benefits channels do not upsell, and raises renewal to 80% on annual contract mechanics. Watch what happens: a lower price and almost no attach still produce far better economics, because the two things actually breaking the consumer model are acquisition cost and churn, and the employer channel fixes both. The low price point that hurts consumer unit economics becomes the winning feature in a benefits RFP. What it needs is an enterprise sales motion the company does not visibly have, and patience for longer cycles.
This is not hypothetical. $42M was raised for it, the Tetratherix nasal-delivery agreement is signed, and IP is being acquired around BPC-157 and TB-500. The logic is sound: prescription margins are multiples of lab-panel margins, and a biomarker panel is a near-perfect qualification funnel for a script. It is the only path to a genuinely differentiated P&L, and it is what justifies a $500M mark on tens of thousands of members. It is also a levered call option on a single FDA advisory committee, taken by a company already defending a false-advertising suit, in the same enforcement lane where the agency is issuing warning letters to peptide sellers. The risks are correlated rather than diversifying — the same regulator, the same claims-substantiation exposure, the same litigation posture, all moving together.
From January 1, 2026, direct primary care membership fees became HSA-qualified up to $150 a month for an individual — $1,800 a year of pre-tax headroom against a $199 product. Adding genuine physician-delivered primary care would do three things simultaneously: unlock a large expansion in revenue per member paid with pre-tax dollars, cure the exact deficiency Function's complaint alleges about the clinical team, and answer the criticism that results arrive without a clinical relationship to interpret them. The preset models $1,500 a year with real clinician payroll at $240 and two panels. It is the only option that converts the company's biggest legal liability into pricing power. The costs are real and not modelled here: state-by-state licensure, corporate-practice-of-medicine structuring, malpractice exposure, and tax treatment that is untested and needs counsel.
The cut from $499 to $199 was the founding growth act, and the entire brand is built on it. The company itself reported that cutting price dropped CAC materially while lifetime value held. Meanwhile Function moved down to $365 and Mito sits below at $108. Raising price into a deflating market with an undifferentiated Quest-sourced panel is the weakest available move — unless bundled with the primary-care restructure above, which changes what is being sold rather than just what it costs.
Function paid to own this in April 2026 and the best asset in the category is now taken. With roughly $50M against Function's $800M, Superpower cannot win an infrastructure race. The better framing is that it does not need to own phlebotomy, it needs to stop leaking the margin — a negotiated volume contract with Quest captures most of the benefit at a fraction of the cost. The trap is that this deepens dependence on a supplier which is simultaneously building a consumer business of its own.
Superpower cannot out-capitalise Function or Neko and should stop trying. Three realistic paths: a peptide-contingent priced round after the FDA decision, where a favourable outcome supports a differentiated-margin story rather than a cheaper-Function one; a Customer Value Fund-style revenue-linked facility, which requires the disclosable cohort retention the company does not appear to have; or a strategic sale, which P&G's $3.8B purchase of Thorne just proved is available for this asset class. Unresolved false-advertising litigation over your core marketing claim is a diligence blocker and a price discount — one more reason the docket silence since March may be deliberate.