"*Requires a recurring Personal Genome Service subscription at $5/month.
1 year contract required. Order for $499 with no subscription commitment."
So it's really $159, with another $60 paid every subsequent year as long as you want access to the data (and any new things which they might provide). If you're expecting to subscribe for longer than the next 80 months (six years and eight months), then it might be better to get the normal $499 version. Although, on the page about what the PGS subscription gives you, it mentions discounts on future things, like moving from genotyping to full sequencing, so perhaps it would be worth it. Not quite enough information to say, really.
That said, I'm all for lowering the barriers to people knowing about their DNA, and $5 a month is pretty small compared to many other things (phone contracts, for instance, or getting coffee every morning).
At the speed at which prices are falling in that industry, that subscription will probably get cheaper or go away with time, so it might be a better deal than it looks if you only extrapolate costs linearly.
So it's really $159, with another $60 paid every subsequent year as long as you want access to the data (and any new things which they might provide). If you're expecting to subscribe for longer than the next 80 months (six years and eight months), then it might be better to get the normal $499 version. Although, on the page about what the PGS subscription gives you, it mentions discounts on future things, like moving from genotyping to full sequencing, so perhaps it would be worth it. Not quite enough information to say, really.
That said, I'm all for lowering the barriers to people knowing about their DNA, and $5 a month is pretty small compared to many other things (phone contracts, for instance, or getting coffee every morning).