Comparison · Function Health

What your Function Health results mean. Merlin reads them beside everything else you hold.

Function generates both the data and the read, and as of mid-2026 its clinician notes are real clinical reasoning: per-system narratives, trends across consecutive draws, your medical history folded in. The ceiling is the panel itself - your Function panels, plus what Function asked about at intake. Merlin starts from those results and everything else you hold - your last physician's blood work, a raw genome file, last year's imaging report, a gut panel from elsewhere - and reads all of it as one person, the way a functional and integrative medicine specialist would.

What each hands you

Function Health

$365 / year

Best for

Comprehensive twice-yearly panels with substantive clinician-style synthesis.

Function generates both the data and the read. Its clinician notes now carry per-system narratives with marker-level reasoning, trend analysis across consecutive draws, mechanistic explanation, genetic suspicion flagged where the phenotype suggests it, and your medical history - medications, lifestyle, prior symptoms - folded into the read. It is no longer accurate to call this a flat summary: the synthesis within a Function panel, and across consecutive Function draws, is real clinical reasoning.

Merlin

$35/mo Core · first month guaranteed · $348/yr annual after your first month

Best for

Anyone with panels they haven't been able to make sense of.

A read, not a panel. Merlin reads whatever you already have - no required panel purchase - the way a functional and integrative medicine clinician would: cross-system reads across blood, imaging, genetics, body composition, gut, musculoskeletal, fertility and neuropsychiatric. Practitioner-friendly. The art-gallery model: the kind that keeps its doors open by keeping them low-cost. Your first month is $35 and reads your results together.

Tell us you're not happy within 30 days of your first charge, and we'll refund you. This covers your first month of Core.

Prices are each platform's own public price, checked in September 2026. Each platform's product evolves rapidly; if anything here is out of date, the underlying structural distinction (cross-source synthesis, surface breadth beyond blood) still holds.

Where Merlin differs

The ceiling at Function is your Function panels plus what Function asked about at intake. Merlin's synthesis extends across any panel from any source - your last physician's blood work, your raw genome file read variant by variant rather than inferred from a phenotype, the imaging report from last year, your gut panel from elsewhere - and across surfaces Function does not test: imaging-derived musculoskeletal, gut barrier function, fertility beyond hormones, neuropsychiatric beyond cortisol.

Use Merlin on top of Function: the Function clinician notes get richer in context, not replaced.

None of these platforms are either-or with Merlin: the synthesis layer reads whatever panels you already have, no matter who ran them.

Actual panel · anonymized

A 39-year-old male. Function ran the panel. LDL-C 195. ApoE4 noted. Hyperlipidemia flagged. Familial hypercholesterolemia: never raised or connected.

This sat alongside significant food sensitivities to wheat, casein, and egg white - all staples in this individual's diet. Function never asked about his symptoms, his goals, or anything that would push him to explore these. A note that he had some high levels and important findings, yes - but it arrived weeks after the panel resulted, and the onus to return and apply any of it was left solely on him.

What Function showed

Hyperlipidemia noted. ApoE4 heterozygosity noted. Total cholesterol 281. LDL-C 195. The summary directed the reader to “consider lifestyle modifications” and “discuss with your physician.” No urgency. No FH possibility raised. No cardiology referral suggested. At 39 with LDL-C 195 and ApoE4 heterozygosity, the standard differential includes familial hypercholesterolemia. The summary the patient received didn't mention it.

What Merlin surfaced

LDL-C at 195 with ApoE4 heterozygosity at 39 is a textbook familial hypercholesterolemia suspicion. Merlin says it. The pattern around it sharpens further: ApoB 117, Lp-PLA2 145 (vascular-specific inflammation already declaring itself), OxLDL drifting up. But the HDL efflux capacity is still intact at 11.9%, hs-CRP is 0.4, homocysteine is 7.7. This is a young man at familial-tier LDL who hasn't yet accrued systemic damage. The intervention window is wide. The reader walks into the next visit with the FH question explicit, the labs worth ordering (Lp(a), CAC scan), and the priority order. Not a diagnosis. The conversation that should have happened on day one.

Educational context for your conversations with your licensed healthcare provider, not a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Merlin thinks clinically and never diagnoses.

In a real read

A real Cardiovascular surface from a real anonymized panel: a score, a narrative in plain language, 19 biomarkers read in context, a plan, the follow-up testing worth running, and the questions to ask your physician. Every system you have data for gets this depth.

See the full read

The other platforms

How Merlin compares, platform by platform

Bring what you have, wherever it came from - PDFs, portal downloads, a photo of a printout. Your first month reads your results together, across every system, then shows you what they mean and what's worth finding out next. If there's a lot, Merlin tells you what order to bring it in.

Start your first month - $35

If you don't feel the value of Merlin after paying for your first month, tell us and we'll refund you in full. Monthly Core, once per person, by email within 30 days. The terms

No results yet? Start with the questions, free.

Want to see one first? Here's a real read, on a real anonymized panel.

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