What is OpenBody?

TLDR: OpenBody is a free, open source personal health intelligence platform. You upload your blood work and genetic data, track your biomarkers over time, and run analysis locally on your own device. Your data never touches our servers. We make money through a marketplace where practitioners and tool builders offer services to users. For example, if you order a blood panel through our marketplace, we get a ten dollar commission. That's it! If you want to understand why we built it this way and what we think is at stake, read on.

The Longer Version

Function Health and Superpower are impressive products. For somewhere between two hundred and five hundred dollars a year, they will draw your blood, run a comprehensive panel, and hand you a dashboard that tells you more about your body than most people learn in a lifetime. The pitch is compelling, and the execution is genuinely good. But there is a question neither of them has any real incentive to answer: who owns that data? When you pay Function or Superpower, you are not just buying a service. You are feeding a proprietary database that belongs to them, one that becomes more valuable with every user who signs up. Your biomarkers, your trends, your longitudinal health record, these become assets on someone else's balance sheet. That arrangement is not a bug they forgot to fix. It is the business model.

OpenBody is the open source alternative. When you use OpenBody, you download models locally and run them on your own device. Your biological data never leaves your machine unless you decide it should. When you do want to share it, whether with a clinician, a researcher, or a community you trust, that sharing is encrypted and controlled entirely by you. We also run a marketplace where practitioners and tool builders can offer services to users, and we take a commission on those transactions. That is our business model, stated plainly. There is an old line in technology that if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. We are not trying to make you the product. We are trying to build something where the incentives actually point in your direction.

The quality of health intelligence OpenBody offers is the same class of insight that Function and Superpower sell. Comprehensive blood panels, genetic data, longitudinal tracking, biomarker interpretation. The protocols for this are not trade secrets. The interpretation frameworks are not proprietary science. What the incumbents sell, in large part, is convenience and trust, and there is no reason that convenience and trust cannot be built on open foundations. Open source software spent thirty years proving that communities of motivated individuals can build tools that outcompete proprietary alternatives while keeping the underlying infrastructure free for anyone to inspect and improve. We think the same logic applies here.

A fair criticism of this space, and one worth taking seriously, is that individual biomarker optimization is far more complicated than any dashboard makes it look. Biology does not reduce cleanly to a set of numbers you can tune. Interventions ripple through systems in ways that are difficult to predict, and the gap between a metric improving on a panel and an actual health outcome improving in a person is wide enough that people have fallen through it. We do not think that criticism is wrong. What we think is that it applies at least as much to proprietary platforms as it does to open ones, and that the answer is not to keep people away from their own data but to build better tools for interpreting it honestly. This is hard, and it will likely be harder than it looks. But the alternative, leaving that interpretive layer in the hands of institutions with different incentives than yours, seems like the worse bet.

That is ultimately what this is about. For most of human history, understanding your own biology required an institutional intermediary, a lab, a hospital, a corporation, someone to translate the data and decide what you were allowed to know. AI changes that calculus in a fundamental way. For the first time, individuals have a realistic path to genuine sovereignty over their own biological data, the ability to understand it, interpret it, and act on it without surrendering it as the price of admission. OpenBody is built on the conviction that this shift is not only possible but necessary. Function and Superpower are building toward a world where a handful of platforms own the longitudinal health records of millions of people. We are building toward a different one.