Raising prices. Stool donors can now make $500 per donation.
Our stool donors can now make $180,000 per year if donating a daily stool.
I've been looking for a high-quality source of FMT for around a decade now. When I started out there were a few international clinics as the sole options, but they were unaffordable for me and many others, and there was no information about their results or donor quality [1]. So they were largely a shot in the dark, and could cost some people their life savings. In my own case, I was on disability, getting $700 from Social Security and paying $500 in rent.
Because of this history, I had every intention to keep costs as low as possible so I, and others like me, could afford high-quality FMT. A large percentage of people who desperately need FMT are in similar situations, where their health has limited their income. Low prices will therefore make FMT more widely accessible, and thus help us build a more resilient society less burdened with disease.
However, my experiences with the various FMT and disease-support communities over recent years [1] have gotten me to the point where I’ve lost the desire to provide FMT to any of them due to their irrationally selfish and harmful behavior. If our donors were unavailable, this would potentially leave them with only expensive, disreputable, low-quality sources of FMT [1]. Providers of FMT in this subset only desire to milk as much money as possible out of uninformed people; which at this point seems like an entirely deserved outcome.
But restricting our donor access would impair our primary goal of fixing society. I am desperately hoping FMT will be a major part of the solution because living in a world where the vast majority are this dysfunctional is agonizing [1].
Another reason for the low prices was that this was supposed to be a community-based project where everyone joins in to help and then shares in the benefits. The goal was never to make money off of people, but rather to solve the major issues with currently available FMT sources, and hopefully cure ourselves in the process. But virtually no one joined in. An example is the 2 years of free volunteer work (plus my own money) I put in with another project, and one of the reasons I left was their insistence on a large price increase [1].
But a large price increase seems necessary at this point. When we reach out to top young athletes — the demographic we think are the most likely candidates — most do not respond. There is a social stigma around stool as a waste product and most people have a hard time getting past this when considering donating. Most people don’t seem informed on the science surrounding the use of stool as a therapeutic to improve the health of sick people. With scams and gimmicks littering the web, many write off the idea of donating stool as logistically infeasible or otherwise too-good-to-be-true.
We’re doing our best to help people look past this initial reaction and understand the therapeutic potential stool has for sick patients. As a donor, you could potentially save the life of members of your community — someone’s father, someone’s wife, someone’s daughter — by donating your stool. Stool is currently being used to treat people with deadly infections such as C. Difficile [1], but the science suggests it has great potential for a wide range of other chronic conditions, such as IBS, IBD, eczema, autoimmune conditions like fibromyalgia, food intolerances, and much more [1].
But the field is still young, and we don’t have the quality of donors we need to test these theories. So to better appeal to the very rare, extremely healthy people we’re targeting, we’re increasing our compensation for each stool donation. We’re now paying $500 per stool donation. If you meet our stringent donor criteria, you can now expect to make around $15,000 per month, or $180,000 per year, if you donate at least one stool per day. We’re hoping that this level of compensation is enough to encourage the highest quality donors to come forward and consider donating their stool.
Donating stool is easy. Donors simply pass stool into a bag rather than a toilet, package it into a shipping box with dry ice, and ship it off to the recipient. Donors are paid upfront and receive a prepaid shipping label to streamline the process and protect their identity. If you think you have what it takes to be a donor, we encourage you to apply.
For recipients who are purchasing our stool, we can now state with confidence that we have the highest quality donor network in the world. We are also the only source that is systematically and publicly tracking & reporting results, and have the most donor transparency by far. We have the strictest donor standards and have screened the most donors by orders of magnitude.
To meet the higher compensation that donors are receiving, we are also now raising our cost to $100 per enema and $1000 per stool. The cost of capsules will remain at $10 each for now, since this is already close to the price of a few other options. And to simplify things, we'll drop the two-tiered "with and without antifreeze" pricing. And simply leave it up to donors whether or not they want to provide that option. If they do, they'll probably get more orders, so that should be enough incentive.
In addition, the fact that we sell whole stool means people can make their own capsules for a much lower cost. We'll still accept means testing, but we'll probably be stricter on that as well.
Prices (per enema) from a few other sources are: $80, $267, $500, $1500, $1700. With the $80 one being the highest quality. Yet the other 4 are vastly more popular.
Openbiome, the primary US stool bank, is charging $2050 for 30 capsules, which is $68 per capsule [1]. Though their intent is for it to be a one-time dose. Whereas, for conditions other than C. Difficile, it’s very likely to require ongoing daily/weekly doses for months.
Even after recently doubling our prices, before this latest change our prices were $150 for a whole stool without antifreeze, and $300 with antifreeze. The higher antifreeze price mostly serving as an incentive for donors to be willing to go through the extra hassle/work. Each stool is split up into multiple pieces (the amount varies depending on the size of the stool), with even the smaller stools being around 10 pieces. Thus $150/10 and $300/10 = $15 or $30 per enema. An extremely low price in comparison to the rest. And at $100 per enema, we’re still one of the most affordable, by far.
Even at $4,000/mo payout for donors I was getting remarks from some professional athletes along the lines of "this seems too good to be true". Hopefully this post helps to ease their minds. I would argue that when you look at the high costs of healthcare, the few people who qualify to be high-quality stool donors should probably be making more from their stool than any of their other activities. And this includes the elite tier of athletes who are making millions of dollars per year.
Overall, we are paying our donors much more than any other provider because we have a different goal than most. We are not set out to simply sell a product. We have the strictest donor quality standards that exist because our goal is to find an extremely effective donor (“super-donor”) for treating numerous conditions.
Based on the quality of our donor network, and the scientific veracity of our screening & results-tracking procedures, we believe that our stool is by far the best value for recipients. If you are interested in being a donor or recipient, we encourage you to get in touch!