Here is a fair and pointed question, and one worth answering head-on rather than dodging: is it moral to sell people a service that might never work? A cryonics provider takes real money to preserve someone on the strength of a future that may never arrive. That has the shape of something that should make you suspicious, and you are right to interrogate it. The honest answer is that offering cryonics now is defensible, but only under a strict condition, and that condition is the whole point.
The alternative is not "nothing"
Start with what the choice actually is. The objection imagines the options are "pay for an uncertain procedure" versus "keep your money and lose nothing." But that is not the real pair. The real alternatives at the end of life are preservation, which keeps a chance open, or burial and cremation, which close the chance permanently. The real alternatives at the end of life are preservation, which keeps a chance open, or burial and cremation, which end in information-theoretic death: the brain structures that encode memory and personality are destroyed, and there is nothing left for a future technology to read. Declining to offer cryonics does not protect anyone from a bad outcome. It just removes the one option on the menu that does not end in certain, irreversible loss. A provider who offers that option, honestly, is widening the choice, not exploiting it.
The condition: radical honesty about the odds
Everything moral about offering cryonics now hangs on one requirement: you must tell people the truth about how uncertain it is. The line between a legitimate service and a scam is not whether revival is guaranteed, because nobody can guarantee it. The line is whether the seller pretends to know things they do not.
That is why we state, in plain language and repeatedly, that revival is currently not possible, that we cannot quote you odds, and that the bet may lose. A provider who instead promises a date, implies certainty, or hides the failure modes has crossed from offering a chance to selling a fantasy. The first is ethical. The second is the thing critics are right to condemn, and it is addressed directly in is this a scam that exploits desperate people.
Why "wait until it works" is not an option
A tempting response is: fine, but do not sell it until you can prove it works. The problem is that this is not a coherent timeline. Cryopreservation has to happen at the moment of legal death, now, for the people dying now. You cannot preserve someone retroactively once the science matures. If providers waited for proof of revival before offering preservation, then every single person alive during the decades of waiting would be guaranteed to lose, with no chance at all. Offering it now is the only way the option exists for anyone currently alive. The choice to build the bridge has to be made before the far bank is finished, or no one ever gets to cross.
The duty that comes with offering it
Taking money for a long-shot future also creates obligations that a serious provider has to take seriously: doing the preservation to the highest standard the circumstances allow, structuring the organization to last for the long term, funding storage so it does not depend on the company's quarterly fortunes, and never letting marketing outrun the science. The morality is not in the offering alone. It is in offering it responsibly, and in continuing to earn the trust after the signature.
Offering cryonics now is moral for the same reason offering any honest long-shot is moral: it widens a dying person's options instead of narrowing them. It stops being moral the instant the seller pretends the long shot is a sure thing.
So the answer to the pointed question is yes, with a condition that does real work. It is defensible to offer this, today, to people for whom the alternative is certain loss, as long as you are relentlessly honest about what they are buying. Strip out the honesty and the whole thing collapses into exactly what the critics fear. Keep it, and you are doing something closer to medicine than to salesmanship.