As egg freezing becomes increasingly popular, more and more patients are coming to a harsh realization: It’s not cheap.
A single cycle including medications can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 according to drug discount company GoodRx, plus between $300 to $1,000 a year for storage. In most circumstances, it’s also not covered by insurance.
Enter Cofertility. The 2022 startup offers a unique trade: freeze your eggs for free when you donate half to a family who wouldn’t otherwise be able to conceive.
Lauren Makler—who previously worked at Uber and founded Uber Health—co-founded Cofertility with entrepreneur Halle Tecco after looking into egg donation for herself several years ago. After Makler conceived a daughter unassisted in 2021, she said she built the service she would have wanted if she had gone the egg donation route.
“I really wanted to do something about access, and then at the same time, I felt intended parents deserved more options and deserved options that felt more in alignment with the way they wanted to grow their family,” she said.
The deets. The startup finished its nearly $7.3 million Series A funding round in April, and though she declined to give exact numbers, Makler said the program has matched intended parents with donors “well into the quadruple digits.”There are some caveats, however. Not everyone who’s interested in what the company calls the “split” program qualifies. Makler said Cofertility limits participation in the program to criteria recommended by the FDA and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, such as limiting egg donors to ages to 21–34 and barring people with certain genetic conditions. All donors must also have an anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) level above 2.0, which is associated with successful retrievals.
Those who don’t qualify for the split program can still freeze their eggs through the startup, Makler said. A single cycle and 10 years of storage with Cofertility costs about $16,000 for patients in New York City, compared to an industry average of $17,773 for a single cycle and five years of storage in the same location, according to FertilityIQ.
Cofertility also prioritizes transparency in egg donation. The majority of Cofertility’s egg donors and recipients so far have chosen to disclose their identities, meet each other, and exchange contact information, Makler said, though a small number still choose not to.
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“One of the biggest stigmas around egg donation is this idea that you could be walking down the street someday and see someone who looks like you and wonder if that’s the child born from the donation. And with a disclosed donation, that fear entirely evaporates,” Makler said.
She made it clear that donors who don’t exchange info aren’t promised complete anonymity, because, let’s face it—with consumer genetic testing, there’s no way to guarantee your biological kid won’t do a DNA swab and find you one day through a random cousin.
Expert weighs in. Colleen Denny, a New York-based ob-gyn, told Healthcare Brew she thinks it’s a promising concept but what really defines the quality of models like this is whether they’re transparent with their donors about what happens if things don’t go according to plan, who pays in the case of multiple cycles or medical complications, and what the realistic chances of conceiving with egg donation are.
“You really want to understand what it means to ‘split your eggs,’” she said.
Nearly 40,000 people froze their eggs in 2023, according to preliminary data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. But there’s no guarantee pregnancy will be possible through this route. Only about half of in vitro fertilization cycles resulted in successful births in 2023.
“A lot of people think that if they freeze three eggs, they’re going to have three babies in the future, and that’s just not how egg freezing works,” Denny said. “This is something of a backup plan, but not a guarantee.”
Makler said Cofertility makes this and other technicalities clear in legal agreements that donors sign with the business and with their egg donation recipients.
For instance, intended parents get to keep the extra egg if an odd number of eggs are retrieved.
The agreements also state that intended parents—not the donor—will pay a premium for temporary health insurance for the donor and front the bill for unexpected medical costs up to a previously agreed-upon amount.
For recipients, Cofertility also offers a baby guarantee.
Correction 06/13/2025: The headline of this story has been corrected to reflect Cofertility is making egg freezing free, not donation.