Recently, MyHeritage quietly announced that all new DNA kits will be processed using low-pass whole-genome sequencing (WGS) instead of traditional genotyping arrays, for just $30 per kit. The coverage depth will be roughly 2x (as announced in their blog post), compared to the 30x used in clinical sequencing. It’s nowhere near diagnostic quality, but it is whole-genome data nevertheless.
The surprising part isn’t the technology, it’s the price. Getting an entire genome, even at shallow depth, for less than what MyHeritage charges to “unlock” an uploaded SNP file (~$35) seems almost too cheap to be real. Below are a few of the issues I see: technical, economic, and data-security related.
A History of Security Concerns
Before examining the technical implications of this WGS announcement, it’s worth remembering MyHeritage’s track record with data protection. In June 2018, the company disclosed that ~92 million user accounts were compromised in a breach that occurred on October 26, 2017 MyHeritage, a breach they only learned about seven months later when a security researcher contacted them.
The breach exposed email addresses and passwords for every user who had signed up before the breach date. While MyHeritage publicly stated that the passwords were salted and hashed, some users later reported finding their MyHeritage credentials in third-party breach compilations or OSINT tools, possibly due to post-breach password cracking or data merging. Although the original MyHeritage disclosure referred only to salted hashes, these later appearances reinforced public doubts about the company’s earlier security practices.
The company failed to detect the intrusion on their own, relying instead on external notification after a seven-month delay. This raises a critical question: if MyHeritage couldn’t detect unauthorized access to email and password databases for over half a year, what confidence should users have in the security of far more sensitive whole-genome sequence data? The 2018 breach involved relatively low-value account credentials. The new WGS data represents something fundamentally different: immutable biometric information that, once leaked, cannot be changed like a password.
The Economics Don’t Add up
MyHeritage is using Ultima Genomics platform, which can sequence human genomes for as little as $100 at 30x coverage and with the newer Solaris chemistry, that cost has dropped to $80 per genome at 30x. But there’s a critical detail: those prices are for 30x coverage. MyHeritage is offering 2x coverage.
At first glance, this seems like it would make things cheaper—less sequencing means lower costs, right? Let’s do the math.
Breaking Down the Real Costs
With the UG100 Solaris figures quoted, a 30x run corresponds to ~333 million reads. That scales to ~11 million reads per 1x and ~22 million reads for 2x. At $0.24 per million reads, the raw sequencing cost (reagents + instrument time) for 2x coverage is roughly $5–6 per sample. But that’s only the starting point. Once you factor in the rest of the pipeline, even at massive scale, the total cost rises quickly:
- Library preparation: Even with simplified workflows, prep kits and labor add $10-20 per sample
- Sample handling and logistics: Receiving kits, DNA extraction, quality control
- Data storage: Even at wholesale cloud storage rates, storing whole-genome data for millions of users isn’t trivial
- Bioinformatics processing: Alignment, variant calling, quality metrics
- Customer service, shipping, marketing, platform maintenance
Even under generous assumptions, a lean 2x workflow still totals around $25–45 per kit. At a $30 retail price, MyHeritage is operating on razor-thin margins, or absorbing a loss in exchange for building a large-scale genomic dataset.
The Comparison That Gives It Away
Here’s what really exposes the offer: MyHeritage charges approximately $35 to “unlock” analysis features for DNA data you upload from another testing service. You’ve already paid for the sequencing elsewhere, extracted your own DNA, shipped it to another company, and downloaded your raw data file. All MyHeritage has to do is run your existing SNP data through their algorithms and database. They charge $35 for that.
But they charge only $30 to:
- Ship you a kit
- Extract and sequence your entire genome (even at low coverage)
- Store terabytes (at scale) of WGS data indefinitely
- Process it through their matching algorithms
- Provide all the same features as the $35 upload unlock
The most plausible explanation: your genome data is worth more to them than the $30 you’re paying.
What Are They Really Selling?
It’s worth noting that MyHeritage publicly commits to not selling or licensing individual genomic data and claims to operate under GDPR-aligned standards. Whether those safeguards will hold as the dataset expands remains to be seen. From a business perspective, though, the pricing still looks like a classic loss-leader strategy. The $30 kit isn’t likely profitable on its own, it’s the cost of acquiring large-scale genomic data. The real products lie elsewhere:
- Pharmaceutical partnerships and research licensing:
Companies like 23andMe have secured deals worth hundreds of millions with pharmaceutical giants like GSK Twingate. “De-identified” genomic data is extraordinarily valuable for drug development, population genetics research, and biomarker discovery.
- Aggregate data sales:
Even if individual genomes are “anonymized,” aggregated WGS data has immense commercial value. Genomics companies are increasingly positioning themselves not as sequencing providers, but as data companies, the Facebooks and Googles of genetic data.
- Lifetime monetization:
A microarray test gives MyHeritage ~700,000 data points about you. Whole-genome sequencing gives them 3 billion. Even at 2x coverage, that’s dramatically more information about:
- Rare genetic variants
- Structural variations
- Ancestry-informative markers
- Health-related associations
- Drug metabolism genes
- Future research applications we haven’t even invented yet
You pay once. They own your complete genome forever. The lifetime value of that data, through research partnerships, database licensing, and future applications, far exceeds $30.
If their goal is just ancestry inferring and genealogy matching (which works perfectly fine with SNP arrays), why go through the expense of whole-genome sequencing at all?
In 10 years, when precision medicine takes off and rare variant databases become commercially viable, MyHeritage will have whole genomes on file, not just the SNPs that were relevant in 2024. They’re not optimizing for your needs today. They’re building a genomic data empire for their needs tomorrow. The $30 genome isn’t innovation for consumers, it’s a data land grab with a 92-million-account track record of security failures.
Note: This post reflects my personal analysis based on publicly available information and does not represent any official or commercial affiliation.