What you actually get for $199 vs $499

The $199 Superpower subscription tests 130 biomarkers. The $589 InsideTracker Ultimate tests 30. If you ignore the branding and just count analytes per dollar, the gap between the cheapest and priciest DTC health panel isn’t 3× — it’s 13×.

Here is every comprehensive direct-to-consumer health panel we track, sorted by $/marker. This is what you actually get for the money before you factor in anything else (cadence, specimen type, whether the assay is clinical-grade).

The headline finding

HealthieOne is the raw winner — 288 markers for $420, at a lab that runs LC-MS/MS for most analytes. But it’s a one-shot panel (you get it once; you pay again next year), and the brand is thin enough that most buyers have never heard of it.

Superpower is the one most people should probably pick. $199 annually for 130 markers via venous draw at a real lab (Quest or LabCorp, depending on market) is the best per-marker number at a clinical-grade panel — and the subscription model means you can actually track change year over year.

Function comes with a big asterisk that this table finally surfaces. Their price-per-marker looks mediocre ($4.23), but ~63 of their 118 markers are retested twice a year — the “core” heart and metabolic set. On an annualized-per-test basis, that’s closer to $2.70/marker/visit, not $4.23. Nobody else matches that cadence at a clinical draw.

Where the cheap numbers lie

Three rows in the table look like bargains until you read the method column:

• TruHealth ($5.25/marker) — epigenetic. The “biomarkers” are inferred from DNA methylation patterns, not measured in your blood. Interpret differently.
• SpectraCell ($11.43/marker) — intracellular (white blood cell) measurements, not serum. Different reference ranges, different clinical meaning.
• Fingerstick panels (Hone, LGC, Everlywell) — usable for tracking trends, but small-sample capillary blood can read higher or lower than a venous draw for the same analyte. Useful if you’re comparing yourself-to-yourself; noisier if you’re trying to hit a reference range.

When the expensive panels are worth it

InsideTracker at $589 for 30 markers is the worst row in the table by raw price-per-marker. It also ships you a 40-page interpretive report, a dietitian conversation, and a supplement/diet action plan. You’re buying synthesis, not reagents. Whether that’s worth the premium depends on whether you’d otherwise do that synthesis yourself.

NutrEval (Genova Diagnostics) is a specialty nutrition assay. It’s not competing with Function or Superpower; it’s competing with your functional-medicine provider’s “advanced nutrition panel” order. For 91 markers at $449 — including 24-hour urine organic acids, plasma amino acids, intracellular minerals, and oxidative-stress markers — the number is good for what it is. Just don’t put it in the same bucket as a routine wellness panel.

Methodology

Prices and marker counts are scraped from each provider’s public catalog and verified against their sign-up flow. We use the panel each provider advertises as its flagship (Superpower Baseline + Advanced, Function’s core membership, Marek Total Health, Blueprint Protocol, etc.). Add-on tiers can push marker counts higher for most providers; we track those separately on the broad-panels matrix, where you can see every biomarker × every provider side-by-side.

$/marker is deliberately a blunt metric. It ignores cadence, method accuracy, specimen size, what each provider does with the results, and whether the provider has your state. Use it as one input, not the whole decision.

Disclosure: some outbound provider links in this post (marked with an underline) are affiliate links. If you sign up after clicking one, we may earn a commission — the ranking above is not influenced by which providers pay us.