Start with the version nobody in this industry says out loud often enough: the worst reason to want a price to be lower is that you want the answer to be yes. If continued existence only mattered for people who can comfortably write a six-figure cheque, the whole project would be morally indefensible, and we would say so. It does not, and we do not. But wanting access to be wide is not the same as pretending the costs are small. The useful thing we can do here is be precise about the real prices. It also means being precise about the real ways a young or low-income person can reach them without quietly setting fire to their finances.
So this is the honest map: why the numbers are what they are, what we actually offer, and the specific cases where the smart move is to wait rather than to sign up.
The costs are high for reasons that do not compress
It helps to know that the price is not markup. A preservation depends on a standby team that can be ready around the clock. It needs specialised medical equipment for the perfusion and cryoprotection procedure. Then comes storage in liquid nitrogen at -196°C. That storage has to be maintained, refilled, and kept funded for decades or longer. On top of that sits legal infrastructure built to outlive everyone who set it up. None of those line items shrinks much with cleverness, which is why whole-body preservation sits around 200,000 EUR and brain-only around 75,000 EUR. The fuller accounting is in why cryonics costs so much.
The good news is that almost nobody pays those numbers directly. The standard route is a life insurance policy that names the provider as beneficiary, plus a membership. And membership is where the figures stop being intimidating: roughly 50 EUR a month, with reduced rates, on the order of 25 EUR, available to people who genuinely need them, alongside annual and lifetime options. The full picture is laid out in membership fees and Whole-body vs brain-only preservation cost.
The student paradox, stated plainly
Students sit in a genuinely awkward spot, and it cuts both ways. The case for starting young is real and mechanical. Insurance is priced on age and health. A 22-year-old locks in a term-life premium that a 45-year-old can only envy. The decades of runway that make the payments daunting are the same decades that make each individual payment tiny. Time is simultaneously the cost and the discount.
The case against starting young is just as real. Student finances are unstable by definition: debt, uncertain post-graduation income, and a limited ability to promise anything across decades. Say you take a cheap premium and cancel in year three because you could not sustain it. That is worse than no premium at all. You paid for coverage you never kept. You may also have spent down savings you needed elsewhere. Starting now is optimal only if you can realistically carry it through the financial turbulence of early adulthood. If you cannot, that is information, not failure.
What we actually offer
Concretely: there is a student discount that runs for three years. If you are a student, contact us directly rather than guessing from a table. We will walk through the current programs, look honestly at your situation, and see whether there is a structure that fits. We would rather tell you to wait than sell you something you will abandon.
The honest advice, including when to wait
This is the part that costs us a signup and is worth more than one, so here it is unhedged.
- Be realistic about the day the discount ends. The three-year rate is a bridge, not a destination. If you cannot see yourself sustaining the full premium afterwards, waiting for stable income is very likely the smarter call than starting coverage you will cancel.
- Consider term life insurance as a deliberate bridge. It is cheap while you are young, which is exactly its appeal. The catch we will not bury: term policies typically expire around 65 to 75, so you would need to convert, extend, or move to another funding method before then. The funding methods article covers the options and the trade-offs.
- Treat your career as the real lever. The most reliable way to make this affordable is the least glamorous one: increase your earning power. Nothing makes a six-figure preservation sum feel manageable like a stable income behind it.
- Do the probability honestly. You are young. The chance you will actually need preservation in the next few years is very low. Delaying coverage while you get financially stable barely moves your lifetime odds, which means waiting is a legitimate strategy and not a gamble with your life. The expected-value reasoning behind that is in why a small chance beats no chance.
There is also a tailwind worth naming without overselling it. As the field grows and procedures mature, the economics should improve through plain economy of scale, the same way every other complex medical service has fallen in real cost once volume arrived. That is a reason for patience, not a promise of a specific future price, and the current numbers are still the ones in Whole-body vs brain-only preservation cost.
The goal is not to get you signed up today. It is to get you signed up only if and when you can actually keep it, because cancelled coverage helps nobody.
If you are a student or on a low income and this matters to you, the door is genuinely open. Lower rates exist. The insurance route exists. We would rather find the version that survives your twenties than the version that looks good for three years and then lapses. Get in touch, tell us the real numbers, and we will tell you, honestly, whether now or later is the better move for you.