Here is the question people are usually too polite to ask first, so we will ask it for you: what does this actually cost? Not the philosophy, not the science, the invoice. Money is where good intentions quietly go to die, and a preservation plan that is not funded is not a plan, it is a wish. So before anything else, here are the real numbers.
There are two prices to keep separate in your head, because conflating them is what makes the whole thing feel more expensive and more intimidating than it is. There is the recurring membership fee, a small ongoing cost that keeps a standby team ready for you. And there is the one-time cryopreservation fee, the large number that is paid once, at the end, and almost never out of pocket. Most members never write a personal cheque for that second number at all, which we will get to.
Two procedures, two prices
Cryopreservation comes in two forms, both running the identical medical protocol up to the point where they diverge: whole-body and brain-only. The difference in price is not a difference in care, it is a difference in how much there is to store, indefinitely, in liquid nitrogen for what may be a very long time.
Whole-body preservation, which includes standby and stabilization and indefinite storage at the European Biostasis Foundation facility in Switzerland, costs 200,000 EUR for members and 230,000 EUR for non-members. It preserves the entire body and is chosen by people who want full biological preservation.
Brain-only preservation follows the same protocol but the patient takes far less space in the long-term dewars and costs less to maintain over the decades. It runs 75,000 EUR for members and 115,000 EUR for non-members. The logic behind preserving the brain alone is not squeamishness about cost, it is the load-bearing claim of the whole field: that you are the structure of your brain, not the body that carries it around.
Membership is the cheap part
Membership is the small, recurring number, and it does the unglamorous work: it keeps standby teams trained and on call 24/7, so that when your time comes the response begins immediately rather than from a cold start. It also unlocks the lower preservation prices above, plus administrative support for contracts, insurance, and logistics. You can pay it three ways:
- Monthly: 50 EUR per month
- Yearly: 500 EUR per year
- Lifetime: 15,000 EUR, paid once
The gap between member and non-member pricing is not a penalty, it is arithmetic. A member has years of readiness already paid for; a non-member who joins at the last minute is asking the system to spin up from nothing, which costs more. The full breakdown of what each component covers is in membership fees.
You almost certainly will not pay the big number yourself
The 200,000 EUR figure is the part that makes people flinch, so here is the reframe that defuses it: most members never pay it from savings. They fund it through term life insurance , which pays the full preservation cost directly to the provider if death falls within the policy term. You pay a modest monthly premium while the cover runs, and if you outlive the term you renew or replace it, or fund the preservation another way. For a healthy person who signs up young, that premium is small enough to disappear into a streaming-subscription budget.
This is the single most important thing to understand about the economics of biostasis, and it is why we treat the sticker price and the monthly reality as two different conversations. The mechanics of the funding paths, and why insurance beats leaning on relatives, live in general funding methods and why family-funded preservation at death is risky.
The intimidating number is paid once, at the end, and usually by an insurance policy. The number you actually live with is the price of a modest monthly habit.
None of this is hidden, and none of it is meant to pressure you. It is simply the cost of keeping a person from being thrown away while the question of whether they can be restored is still open. Whether that price is worth it is a personal judgment, but it should at least be made with the real figures in front of you, not the inflated ones you imagined.