The cost of cryopreservation

I put together a spreadsheet for a couple of friends calculating how much cryonics costs, and I figured I'd publish it here in case it's useful for anyone else. I can't promise that these numbers are perfect, but this should help you get at least a rough handle on how much cryonics really costs.

Cryonics costs present value worksheet

Cryonics is usually funded by insurance. Two of the major cryonics companies in the US are Alcor and the Cryonics Institute (CI).

I assumed the annual insurance premium is 0.5% of the face value, which is about in line with what I was able to find in online illustrations for guaranteed universal life policies (a fairly cheap way to get an insurance policy guaranteed to stay in force, with a constant premium, as long as you make the payments), for young adults in excellent health. Quotes you receive may differ.

For any given plan, there's an up front fee and an annual fee. There's also an annual cost for maintaining a guaranteed life insurance policy. I calculated the total annual cost by adding a rough estimate of the annual life insurance premium to the annual fee. All these are in nominal terms. I used formulas so if you want to play around with the discount rate or expected # of years you'll be with CI you can see what that does to the cost estimates.

Cost estimates are all in present value terms (i.e. what it would be worth if you paid for it with a lump sum today). I don't try to take into account the possibility that membership costs might increase. The present values are for ease of direct comparison, and they're using an 8% annual discount rate - you can adjust it if you open the spreadsheet in Excel to see what the PV costs are like under different assumptions.

With CI, you can have either a lifetime membership (pay fees up front) or an annual membership (pay an application fee and then an annual fee). You can also choose to finance standby service (where they pick you up and transport you cold if you die unexpectedly) through Suspended Animation (SA) - this is done through insurance, and just means you need to take out more insurance. All CI cryopreservations are whole-body.

Alcor doesn't let you not get standby service, but you can either finance it through their annual CMS fee, or by adding $20k to your insurance coverage. For Alcor, you can choose between cheaper (and usually slightly more technically advanced) neuropreservation, or whole-body cryonics.

2 thoughts on “The cost of cryopreservation

    1. Benquo Post author

      The services provided appear pretty similar, but it's easy to imagine that even an apparently small difference in quality could matter quite a lot. Overall I'm pretty uncertain how to evaluate the different services.

      Reply

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