The big longevity clinics are not competing with each other

A person with €10,000 and a vague sense that they should get checked out will, within about twenty minutes of searching, be shown a Swiss lakeside clinic founded in 1931, a Bavarian resort with a fasting protocol, a Florida membership with a concierge, and a Berlin clinic that does everything in one day. All four will be described as longevity clinics. Only two of them are selling anything resembling the same product.

The label has become useless, so here is a more useful division.

Four businesses wearing one label

Residential method clinics. Lanserhof, Clinique La Prairie, Chenot Palace Weggis, SHA Wellness Clinic and Palazzo Fiuggi sell a stay. Seven nights minimum, usually longer, organised around a proprietary method: the Lanserhof Energy Cure with modified fasting and gut treatment, the Chenot Method, macrobiotic nutrition at SHA, CLP Extract at Clinique La Prairie. Diagnostics exist to shape the stay rather than to be the deliverable. You leave rested, lighter, and with a plan built mostly around how you eat and sleep.

Diagnostic day programmes. YEARS in Berlin, Preventicum in Essen, Q Bio in San Francisco. One visit, a defined test list, a physician review, a risk picture. You leave the same day with data.

Annual diagnostic memberships. Biograph and Fountain Life. The same assessment logic as above, restructured as a yearly relationship with check-ins, and in Fountain Life’s case with treatment inside the same organisation.

Imaging subscriptions. Prenuvo and Function Health, covered separately.

Confusing the first two categories is the single most common expensive mistake in this market. Somebody who wants to know whether they have a problem books a week in the mountains and comes home relaxed and none the wiser. Somebody who wants to change how they live books a diagnostic day and comes home with a PDF.

What the money buys

Figure 1

Read the chart with the categories in mind and something awkward appears. The residential clinics occupy the upper half of the price range while publishing the least about what they diagnose. Clinique La Prairie’s Revitalisation Premium is reported at CHF 50,250 for seven nights.3 For that money you get accommodation, medical consultations and the proprietary CLP Extract, and the workup around it is conventional. The signature treatment, the part the price is really attached to, has the least published evidence behind it of anything in this article.

Lanserhof is the most interesting case, because it is genuinely good at what it does and its pricing is nearly impossible to establish. Reported entry points for seven nights including the Classic medical programme and the cheapest room run from about €5,390 at Lans, €6,480 at Sylt and €8,435 at Tegernsee.1 We say reported because Lanserhof publishes prices only inside downloadable PDF brochures,2 and figures vary with room category and season. Very few guests stay on Classic alone; physicians typically recommend additional treatments after the initial consultation, and the final invoice moves accordingly.

None of this makes Lanserhof a bad institution. Its medical staffing is serious, its method has a century of institutional practice behind it, and the outpatient arms at LANS Medicum in Hamburg and Lanserhof at The Arts Club in London do conventional check-ups and concierge medicine competently. It does mean that comparing Lanserhof to a diagnostic clinic on price is comparing a hotel bill with a laboratory invoice.

The diagnostic comparison, which is comparable

Within the diagnostic group the numbers line up properly, and the result is lopsided.

Biograph publishes cleanly: $7,500 for Core, $15,000 for Black, with the difference being a multi-cancer blood test and additional check-ins through the year.4 The bundle includes MRI, DEXA, VO₂ max and genetic testing, with CT coronary angiography available. Fountain Life sells CORE, APEX and APEX Family, with APEX reported at roughly $19,500 to $21,500 annually for the widest diagnostic bundle in the Index.5

YEARS tiers by modality rather than by depth alone, which makes the comparison sharper than a single entry price allows. Core at €1,900 is a functional and laboratory day: 87 biomarkers, spiroergometry, echocardiography, vascular ultrasound, cognition, lung function and body composition, with no imaging, no liquid biopsy and no genetics. Evolve at €7,600 adds 3T whole-body MRI and a multi-cancer liquid biopsy at 120-plus biomarkers. Ultimate at €16,900 adds genome sequencing, epigenetic clocks and microbiome analysis at 230-plus, with three annual check-ins.9

Compare like with like and one figure stands out. For a programme containing both whole-body MRI and a multi-cancer blood test, Evolve costs €7,600. The nearest American equivalent is Biograph Black at $15,000, because Biograph Core at $7,500 withholds the blood test. On that specific bundle, and it is the bundle most buyers of these programmes think they are purchasing, Berlin is roughly half the American price for a comparable modality set delivered in a single supervised day.

The entry tiers are not comparable at all, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than letting the price range imply otherwise. €1,900 in Berlin buys no imaging. $7,500 in San Francisco does.

The residential clinics charge the most and publish the least. The diagnostic clinics publish the most and, in Europe, charge the least.

Two caveats belong with that finding, because a modality count is not a quality measure. More tests mean more chances of an incidental finding, and our assessment of whole-body MRI screening remains grade C on the evidence, meaning no trial has shown net benefit in asymptomatic adults. A programme that includes a modality is not thereby vindicated for including it. What the comparison establishes is price per modality, which is the question buyers actually ask, not whether every modality earns its place.

Price transparency, ranked

Since none of these organisations will publish a comparative table, here is the one they collectively imply.

Fully published and checkable on the provider’s own site: YEARS, Biograph, Prenuvo, Neko Health. You can establish before contact what you will pay and what you will get.

YEARS goes further than price. Its site carries a Radical transparency section stating that whole-body MRI finds abnormalities in many healthy people which would never have caused symptoms, disclosing sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value for its screening methods, and noting that the widely quoted prevention statistics support prevention in general rather than each individual test. The German version, asked whether the programme is evidence-backed, answers only partly and undertakes to say where the study evidence is thin.10 We have not found an equivalent disclosure from any other provider in this article, and it is the single clearest signal of good faith available to a prospective patient.

Published in a form that requires work: Lanserhof, whose figures sit in PDF brochures rather than on a page.2

Not published: Clinique La Prairie, Chenot Palace, SHA Wellness, Palazzo Fiuggi, Fountain Life’s lower tiers and Q Bio. Every figure available for these comes from third parties, and reported ranges are wide enough that the number you are eventually quoted may differ substantially.

We treat non-disclosure as a finding rather than a neutral fact. A clinic that will not tell you the price before a consultation has decided the consultation is where the price gets decided, and that is a decision about your negotiating position.

Choosing between them

If you want to know whether something is wrong with you, book a diagnostic programme, and buy the one whose published modality list covers what your history warrants. In Europe that argument currently points to Berlin on both breadth and price.

If you want to change how you eat, sleep and move, and you will do that better away from your own kitchen, book a residential stay. Lanserhof Lans is the least expensive credible entry, SHA the cheapest overall, and you should read what the base programme includes before assuming the diagnostics are meaningful.

If you want a team that owns your health for a year and you are in the United States, that is what the memberships are for. Compare Biograph’s published tiers against Fountain Life’s reported ones, and ask both what happens when a finding points somewhere they do not treat.

What nobody should do is buy a €25,000 week expecting the diagnostic output of a €1,900 day. The two products are priced as though they compete. They do not.