[srunni]

I'm a biomedical engineering graduate student at a research university. While I haven't investigated Transcriptic's pricing in depth, based on a conversation with one of their employees about collecting some basic growth curves (https://www.transcriptic.com/guides/3-growth-curves.html), their prices were simply far too high (even with the steep discount they offered) for repetitively collecting a large amount of data - precisely the situation in which you'd want to use something like Transcriptic. This is especially true for labs (such as mine) that have already made the upfront capital investment for the equipment used to take these measurements. As for the repetitive labor, you can usually find undergrads to do that for far less (often completely free) than what Transcriptic charges.

However, a service like Transcriptic may make sense if (a) you're in a company (no free undergrad labor, though summer interns may be a suitable alternative) or (b) you don't already have the equipment and just want to do a one-off collection of a large amount of data. Also, maybe prices will significantly drop as Transcriptic scales up and streamlines their operations. I'll definitely be checking back in the coming years to see if they ever reach the point where it makes sense to use their services.