There's another way to look at it: Compared to medical regulated DNA tests, such as those for breast cancer risk or other types of risk factors, which can cost

There's another way to look at it: Compared to medical regulated DNA tests, such as those for breast cancer risk or other types of risk factors, which can cost in the thousands per marker, 23andme is astonishingly cheap. Many of those medical genetic tests are more expensive because they directly sequence the region of the gene associated with the disorder, providing much more data (for example, for some BRCA tests, a 'marker' consists of thousands of genomic positions, where 23andme might provide only several SNPs). This is important because a lot of disease-causing mutations are private to a single individual or a very closely-related group of individuals, and would not turn up in the population-level GWASes behind the construction of the present 23andme assay.