Sperm Cryopreservation & At-Home Banking
Legacy, Fellow, Dadi, YO Home Sperm Test, clinical cryobanks
Evidence grade 3 of 5, Mixed. Read how the Atlas grades evidence.
The written rationale for this grade is still being prepared.
- FDA
- Clinical cryopreservation is established practice; at-home mail-in kits are consumer services (analyzers like YO are FDA-cleared devices)
Reference only. Not medical advice.
What can go wrong
The medical risk is low, but consumer risk concentrates in marketing and logistics: implied promises about future success, storage-fee lock-in, and business continuity (Dadi's collapse stranded customers' samples until storage was transferred). Mail-in samples can arrive degraded. Andrologists note that at-home analyzers screen but do not replace a full clinical semen analysis, and a 'good' app result can falsely reassure.
This is something to take to a clinician. The Atlas can tell you what is known about sperm cryopreservation & at-home banking in general. It cannot tell you what is happening in your body, and the difference matters most for exactly the symptoms that bring people to this page.
Sperm cryopreservation - freezing in liquid nitrogen, often with glycerol-based cryoprotectant - is a decades-old, well-validated clinical service essential before chemotherapy, vasectomy, or surgery. A direct-to-consumer industry (Legacy, Fellow, the now-defunct Dadi, plus at-home analyzers like YO Home Sperm Test) repackaged it with mail-in kits, subscriptions, and lifestyle marketing. The science of freezing is solid; the consumer marketing claims about 'declining' counts and proactive banking are where andrologists urge caution.
Decades-old clinical science wrapped in a subscription.
What people take it for
These are the reasons people give for taking it. They are not effects it has been shown to have.
How it is supposed to work
Sperm are mixed with a cryoprotectant to limit ice-crystal damage, cooled and stored in liquid-nitrogen vapor or liquid phase at around -196 C, where metabolism halts and viability is preserved for years to decades. Post-thaw motility loss is expected and varies by sample; banking multiple vials hedges against this. At-home kits ship samples on cold packs to a lab; transit time and temperature can degrade quality versus on-site collection.
What people get wrong
Often saidAt-home sperm tests can tell you if you're fertile
ActuallyThey screen motile concentration; they do not assess morphology, DNA integrity, or function, and cannot diagnose or rule out infertility.
Often saidBanking sperm guarantees a future baby
ActuallyCryopreservation preserves an option, not an outcome; post-thaw quality, partner factors, and ART success all intervene.
Often saidYour sperm count is dropping fast, so bank now
ActuallySome consumer marketing leans on population decline narratives; for an individual with normal parameters, the urgency is usually overstated outside specific medical indications.
Who profits, and who pushes back
Nobody is named here yet, because we have not done that work on this entry. Read that as unfinished. Somebody almost certainly sells this, and somebody almost certainly disputes it. Assume both until we have checked.
How we got here
Cryobiology breakthroughs (glycerol cryoprotection, 1949; first human births from frozen sperm in the 1950s) made clinical banking routine by the late 20th century. The 2010s-2020s DTC wave - Dadi, Legacy, Fellow - applied subscription/consumer models, with Dadi's failure becoming a cautionary tale about continuity of custody for frozen specimens.
- 1949Glycerol cryoprotection discovered (Polge et al.)
- 1950sFirst human births from frozen sperm
- 2017-2019DTC mail-in banking startups launch (Dadi, Legacy, Fellow)
- 2021-2022Dadi shuts down; storage transferred, exposing continuity risk
Set against the alternatives
Clinical cryobanks offer on-site collection, full semen analysis, and institutional storage continuity; DTC mail-in services trade some sample quality and continuity risk for convenience and consumer-friendly UX. At-home analyzers (YO, Trak) are screening tools, not diagnostic substitutes for andrology-lab analysis.
What we do not know
- How should regulators ensure custody and continuity of cryopreserved samples if a startup fails?
- Do at-home analyzers improve or distort men's understanding of their fertility?
- Does proactive banking by healthy men change real-world outcomes, or mainly generate storage revenue?
At a glance
- Clinical cryo first human births
- 1950s-1970s era
- Legacy / Fellow model
- mail-in collection, analysis, freezing, annual storage fees
- Dadi
- raised significant venture funding, then shut down/transferred storage ~2021-2022
- YO Home Sperm Test
- FDA-cleared smartphone-based motile-count screen
What this entry does not yet cover
What follows is unfinished work on our side, not a finding about Sperm Cryopreservation & At-Home Banking. A short entry is not a safe entry.
- Cost and market. We have not documented what it sells for or who sells it.
- Supply chain. We have not mapped where it is made.
- Who uses it. We have not documented the user groups.
- What could change. No forward-looking summary yet.
- Children and teenagers. We have not checked what is known about younger people.
Sources
The studies below are named and described, but not linked. You cannot open them from here and check our reading against them, which means this page is our summary of the literature rather than a document you can verify. Weigh it accordingly until the links exist.
The studies that matter
Bunge and Sherman - first births from frozen human sperm1950s
Demonstrated viable pregnancies from cryopreserved sperm, founding clinical sperm banking
Validation studies of at-home semen analyzers2010s
Smartphone-based devices (e.g., YO) correlate reasonably with lab concentration/motility for screening but miss morphology and full WHO parameters
Oncofertility guideline statements (ASCO)2006/2013/2018
Recommend offering sperm banking to all post-pubertal males before gonadotoxic therapy