Superpower.

What Superpower actually is

The most aggressively priced direct-to-consumer biomarker membership currently in market. $199 a year buys 100+ blood markers, a personalised AI-driven dashboard, and 24/7 chat access to a care team. It is, in business-model terms, a mass-market version of Function Health: same proposition, half the price, lighter clinical wrapper.

The proposition is access. Biomarker testing has historically been gated by clinical relationship, by insurance contracts, and by the executive-medicine pricing structure. Superpower is part of a category move to commodity-price the bloodwork itself. We credit the directional shift even where we have specific reservations about this implementation.

What you get

A 100+ marker annual panel covering cardiovascular, metabolic, hormonal, inflammation, biological-age, and several specialist axes. An AI-driven dashboard that scores results, flags anomalies, and generates a personalised protocol — lifestyle, supplementation suggestions, retesting schedule. A 24/7 chat care team for questions on results.

For an additional fee, an Advanced Panel ($359) and a follow-up panel ($179) are available.

Where it does not equal a clinical relationship

Three honest reservations.

Care depth. The 24/7 chat care team is a useful asset but is not, in our reading, a substitute for the structured physician relationship the upper-tier clinics provide. The first responder may not be a physician; the response time is fast but the depth is constrained by chat as a medium and by the need to scale across thousands of members.

AI-driven protocol generation. This is positioned as a personalisation feature. The underlying claim — that AI-prescribed lifestyle protocols outperform a thoughtful generalist clinician’s design — has very limited published evidence in healthspan outcomes. The protocol is internally consistent; whether it is clinically superior to the same advice from a doctor is an open question.

NY/NJ pricing. State regulatory differences mean $399 for 90+ markers in those states; this is a meaningful step away from the headline $199, and the marketing copy is less prominent than the asterisk warrants.

Where Superpower sits

For a specific reader profile, Superpower is the right purchase: someone in the early stages of engaging with personal health data, on a tight budget, willing to do the interpretive work themselves, and not yet ready to commit to a clinical relationship.

For that reader, $199 buys a usable annual baseline that did not exist at this price two years ago. We rate the proposition fairly.

For the reader who wants clinician-led longitudinal care, who wants imaging in the workup, who wants the depth that decides borderline findings — Superpower is a substantially lighter product than the rest of the directory. It is honest about being lighter; the marketing copy occasionally is not.

The verdict

Cheap, scaled, structurally clean on the conflict question, structurally light on the medical-supervision question. A useful market entrant rather than a clinical destination.

A $199 product cannot be the same as a $19,500 product. Both can be honest about what they are; the rest is reader judgement.