Most people asking what this costs get handed one large number and stop there. The number is real, and it is the least useful way to look at the bill.
There are two separate charges. They behave nothing alike, and only one of them is ever paid out of pocket.
Here is what each one is, what the whole-body and brain-only figures cover, and why brain-only costs so much less.
Two bills, not one
The first is membership. It costs 50 euros a month, 500 euros a year, or 15,000 euros once, and it runs for as long as you are a member.
The lifetime option is not a separate product. That 15,000 is later subtracted from your preservation fee, so a lifetime member with whole-body preservation nets out at 185,000 rather than 200,000.
Membership buys readiness. It keeps standby teams trained and on call, covers the contract and funding administration, and unlocks the lower preservation price.
The second charge is the preservation fee itself. It is large, it is paid once, and it falls due at the end rather than now.
Keeping the two apart matters, because the cost of being a member and the cost of being preserved get quoted as though they were the same commitment. The membership breakdown covers the first in detail.
The two preservation prices
Whole-body preservation is 200,000 euros for members and 230,000 for non-members.
Brain-only preservation is 75,000 euros for members and 115,000 for non-members.
Both run the same procedure up to the point where they diverge. Standby, stabilization and cryoprotective perfusion are the same work either way.
Members pay less because a member has years of readiness already paid for. Somebody arriving at the last minute is asking the system to start from a standing stop.
All of it is itemised line by line on the public cost page.
Why brain-only costs less
Every preservation fee is two things stacked together: the procedure, and the storage that follows it.
Whole-body is 80,000 euros of procedure plus 120,000 of storage. That is the 200,000.
Brain-only is 60,000 euros of procedure plus 15,000 of storage. That is the 75,000.
The procedure side is close: 80,000 against 60,000. The storage side is not: 120,000 against 15,000.
On the procedure side only four lines move at all: transport, cooldown, quality assurance, and the labour attached to them. Materials, cryoprotection labour and the equipment share cost the same either way.
Storage is a different matter. A brain takes up a small fraction of the space a body does, liquid nitrogen is bought by volume, and that bill runs for decades.
Which makes this mostly a storage decision rather than a quality decision, and it is rarely framed that way.
What makes brain-only defensible at all is the claim the whole field rests on: that you are the structure of your brain rather than the body carrying it around. If that claim fails, the cheaper option fails with it.
The storage money is not ours to spend
The 120,000 and 15,000 lines do not go to Tomorrow.bio. They go to the foundation that holds long-term patient care, kept separate from the operating company.
The separation is the point. A storage fund sitting inside the company that earns the revenue is exposed to that company's fortunes.
It is also why there are no further payments after preservation. Storage is settled in full up front rather than billed to anyone afterwards.
The patients themselves are held at the European Biostasis Foundation facility in Switzerland, in dewars filled with liquid nitrogen.
How the large number actually gets paid
Almost nobody pays 200,000 euros out of savings, and the model does not assume you can.
Most members use term life insurance, assigned so the payout goes straight to the provider rather than passing through an estate.
For somebody healthy who signs up young, the premium is a modest monthly figure rather than a life-changing one.
Term cover expires, and that is the thing to plan around rather than discover late. The trade-off against whole-life cover is worth understanding before choosing one.
Insurance is not the only route. Savings, a will or a trust all work, and the options are laid out plainly.
Leaving it to relatives is the one route we advise against, because family-funded arrangements fail in predictable ways.
Whichever route you pick, the setup happens while you are alive. Both charges are arranged in advance, not settled afterwards by whoever is left dealing with it.
What moves the number
The preservation fee is fixed. What varies is what it costs you to fund it.
Insurance is priced on age and health, so the same cover gets steadily more expensive the longer you leave it, and past a certain point insurers decline outright.
Membership status moves it too. Staying a member is what holds the fee at 200,000 rather than 230,000, and 75,000 rather than 115,000.
There is a reduced rate for students and low-income members, because a flat fee is not flat if there is no margin behind it.
Our stated aim is for these figures to fall rather than rise. Storage, equipment and standby costs are largely fixed, so a larger member base spreads them across more people.
The one variable working against you is time, and it is the only one you control. Waiting raises the premium and narrows the set of policies still open to you.
None of this is meant to make the number feel small. It is a serious commitment, and it should be weighed against the real figures rather than the imagined ones.
If the price still looks like the obstacle, the arithmetic behind it and the assumption that this is a rich person's option are both worth reading before you decide.
TL;DR: Cryopreservation usually involves recurring membership costs and separate funding for the procedure and storage. Brain-only preservation costs less mainly because it requires much less long-term storage capacity.
Further reading