A number as large as 200,000 euros invites two quick reactions. Either it is a markup on something simple, or it is the natural price of something exotic.
Neither survives contact with the invoice, which is published line by line.
Here is what the fee is actually made of, which part of it is the largest, and why it does not come down easily.
The fee splits in two, and not evenly
Whole-body preservation is 200,000 euros for members. That divides into 80,000 euros of procedure and 120,000 euros of storage.
Brain-only is 75,000 euros for members: 60,000 of procedure and 15,000 of storage.
So for a whole-body case, most of the bill is not the medical work. It is the century that follows it.
Non-members pay 230,000 and 115,000 respectively. The comparison between the two options sets out both prices in full.
The procedure side, line by line
The 80,000 euros of whole-body procedure is seven items, and every one of them is published on the public cost page.
- Materials and consumables: 8,000
- Labour for cryoprotection: 22,000
- Equipment, fractional share: 10,000
- Transport: 10,000
- Cooldown: 10,000
- Quality assurance: 7,500
- Labour for cooldown, quality assurance and storage: 12,500
The largest single item is labour for cryoprotective perfusion, which is surgical work performed by a trained team under time pressure.
Four of the seven items are cheaper for a brain-only case: transport, cooldown, quality assurance, and the labour attached to them. The other three cost the same either way.
Storage is the part that never ends
The 120,000 euro storage line is the one that is hard to price, because it is not buying a service that finishes.
After vitrification, a patient is held at -196°C for as long as it takes. Liquid nitrogen is topped up, dewars are monitored, the facility is maintained.
That money is paid once, in full, at the time of preservation. It is not billed annually afterwards, and it does not stay with the operating company.
It transfers to the Patient Care Foundation in Basel, a separate entity from the operating company, which holds the money for long-term patient care. The fund is invested conservatively and the returns cover the upkeep.
The money and the patients sit in different places. The funds are held in Basel; the patients are stored at the European Biostasis Foundation facility in Rafz, Switzerland.
The separation is the whole design. A storage fund held inside the company that earns the revenue would rise and fall with that company, which is why what happens if the provider fails has an answer rather than a shrug, and why the organisation has to be built to outlive everyone in it.
Readiness is paid for separately
One cost people expect to find in this fee is not in it.
A standby team has to be deployable at any hour, because death does not schedule itself. Teams are based in Berlin and in Rafz, and in the United States in the New York metro area, Florida and California. France, Texas and Portland are coming. Coverage is mainland EU and mainland US.
In Europe the biostasis ambulance is registered as a funeral vehicle, so it can cross borders without being stopped at each one.
That readiness is funded by the membership fee, not the preservation fee. It is why membership costs 50 euros a month whether or not a team is ever called for you.
It also explains the member and non-member gap. Somebody who was never a member is asking the system to start from a standing stop, and the higher fee is the cost of that.
Why it does not come down easily
The procedure has no second attempt. Ischemic injury accumulates from the moment the heart stops, so the work is done once, quickly, and correctly or not at all. That is the constraint behind the race against cellular decay and behind ischemia being the thing the whole protocol is built to outrun.
Most of the cost base is fixed rather than per-patient. A trained team, a stocked ambulance, a perfusion suite and a storage facility cost close to the same whether they serve fifty patients or five hundred.
Which means the number falls with scale rather than with cost-cutting. A larger member base spreads the same fixed costs across more people, and that is our stated aim.
Important disclaimer: simplified growth model. This visualization demonstrates economies of scale concepts for Tomorrow.bio in a simplified, visual way. It does not account for operational complexities, regulatory changes, technological developments, market dynamics, or detailed engineering constraints. This is not a business plan or engineering roadmap.
The minimum funding required for each option is set out in the cryopreservation funding minimums policy.
What you actually pay from your own money
Almost nobody pays 200,000 euros out of savings, and the model does not assume you can.
What leaves your account each month is the membership fee and an insurance premium. Most members assign a term life policy so the payout goes straight to the provider.
Other routes work too, and the options are laid out plainly. The one we advise against is leaving it to relatives, because family-funded arrangements fail in predictable ways.
None of this makes the figure small. It is a serious commitment, and it is worth weighing against the real breakdown rather than the imagined one.
If the price still looks like the obstacle, the assumption that this is a rich person's option is worth reading next.
TL;DR: The price covers specialist response, cryoprotection, transport and long-term cryogenic care. A large part of whole-body funding supports storage and patient care rather than company revenue.
Further reading