Price Matters - Why Dash Believes in Transparency

Price matters. But until 150 years ago, it barely existed. 

Before the mid-1800s, shopping, and buying in general, meant haggling. The same process we all loathe when buying a car was how you bought everything. The buyer and seller sized each other up, named a figure, and hashed it out until they struck a deal or walked away. 

What you paid depended on many factors: how desperate you or the seller were, how much each of you needed the item or the cash, or how good of a negotiator you were. Typically, someone won, and someone lost. 

In the mid-1800’s the idea of “one price” emerged. Taking it a logical step further in 1870s Philadelphia, John Wanamaker made what seemed like a small change, but became a retail earthquake: the fixed price tag.

For the first time, every customer saw the same number on the shelf. No more back-room negotiations, no more uncertainty. Pricing became transparent, a public promise of fairness. This was more than convenience—it was trust, enshrined in ink.

Price transparency benefited both sides. Sellers could sell more faster, without the overhead of sales negotiations. Buyers could buy more, plan, compare, and come away happy. But the real impact was the shift of focus to value. With transparent pricing, buyers could easily compare the value of products relative to their cost. Transparency also drove up competition between sellers, forcing them to eliminate inefficiencies, further driving up value for customers.This in turn created the concept of “brand” rather than earlier differentiation like region or variety. Brand built companies, and retail was born.

Negotiating was out. Value was in. 

The innovation of transparent retail pricing transformed shopping from a chore into a pastime, birthed retail giants, and built an engine which continues to power the global economy to this day. Shopping as an enjoyable experience created the modern world, and it was all built on price. 

Yet 150 years later, pockets of opaque pricing persist. To see why, we have to look at the incentives. Opaque pricing is favored by sellers when they believe it is worth the added friction to extract as much as possible out of each transaction. On a large enough purchase, such as a car or house, sellers still look to maximize their profit on every transaction. As an example, this is extremely prevalent in high cost enterprise software sales, where ‘price’ is hidden behind layers of discounts, managers, incentives, and promotions. (Note to enterprise software providers: please stop doing that.)

There is a second dimension to price: alignment. Alignment tests whether how you are paying aligns with the value provided. If you are paying for home repair but paying by the hour, your builder is incentivized to bill more hours. Your incentive, on the other hand, is to pay as few hours as possible assuming the result remains constant. The incentives between the two parties are misaligned.

This kind of misalignment of pricing strategies is often seen as unavoidable. Car repair, an industry I tried and failed to revolutionize 15 years ago with a marketplace model, is in part so frustrating because with information asymmetry and misaligned incentives, buyers are frequently taken advantage of. Hourly models such as car mechanics, lawyers, or consultants are the most common examples of this, but so is the bioanalysis CRO market.

Today, pricing in the bioanalysis market is both opaque and misaligned. Vendors do not publish their prices publicly. Good luck finding a dollar sign anywhere on their websites. Customers must instead go through a long discovery process to get to a quote. But even with a quote in hand, the true cost is buried behind fees, material passthroughs, and change orders. For assay development and validation projects, vendors get paid by the day for however long it takes. For sample analysis projects, the vendor’s goal is to level out demand by overbooking customers and putting them in a queue while their customers wait. And different customers pay radically different prices for the same work depending on their negotiating leverage.

Why do current bioanalysis vendors price this way? Because they have to. 

Providing fixed and transparent pricing requires a consistent and predictable cost structure. The highly variable and manual processes at legacy bioanalysis CROs makes it impossible for them to predict costs for a project ahead of time. And operating on thin margins, they have to protect themselves from loss–so the pricing model becomes “cost plus.” Customers essentially rent labor, equipment, and facilities at a premium while paying markups on materials. It’s a pricing model that is inherently misaligned, but customers are stuck buying into this model because their demand is often short-term and variable, making bringing these capabilities in-house impractical. 

The result is the market we have today: low trust, expensive, slow, and unreliable. Sponsors do not know how long bioanalysis projects will take or how much they will cost. They can estimate, plan, and manage, but all with high uncertainty and high effort. Cross-functional teams of procurement, project management, quality, and R&D experts work hard to mitigate the pain and ensure they get what they need, when they need it, but this uncertainty slows decision-making, inflates budgets, and erodes trust between CRO and sponsor.

In contrast, Dash publishes our pricing right on our website. Our pricing is also all-inclusive, covering materials costs, data transfer costs, and other related items our competitors charge separately for. This pricing strategy aligns our incentives with our customers.

You pay for results–not rework, not hours, not materials. 

How? We fixed the cost model. By automating our lab workflows and integrating our processes with tech, we transformed how bioanalysis projects are executed. Like AWS, SpaceX, or Ford’s Model T assembly line, once we have created the platform, our unit costs are lower, consistent, and predictable, which allows us to offer fixed and transparent pricing. In addition to aligning our incentives, this pricing model lets us cut out layers of complexity in quoting, procurement, and invoicing, passing those cost and time savings along to sponsors.

So what comes next? We believe this change will enable further changes in drug development. Fixed, predictable costs for high-quality services enables better planning and accelerated timelines. Over time, and at scale, this will reduce the cost of drug development at the same time as reducing risk, a virtuous cycle which encourages investment and enables previously un-fundable targets and models. 

We do not know the full impact of this fundamental shift in pricing strategy. We do know we believe in it, deeply, and we are committed to accelerating drug development. 

It may have taken 150 years, but we believe fixed, transparent pricing is here to stay in the CRO industry. Come check them out. No need to negotiate, worry about change orders, or wait for a hidden “gotcha.” We can all be winners, and we can all create value, because biotech is about patients who need us. 

It's time to run with Dash.