My wife and I sat in a Starbucks off the highway in Greenwich, Connecticut, waiting for a non-descript woman who said she would be holding a cardboard box.
I didn’t see her car, her license plate, or even get her last name, but I knew she was a nurse. The handover was quick, and we lucked out on our first haul. She had hooked us up with extra needles, syringes and alcohol wipes. And she gave us a boost of confidence in our slightly unhinged plan to have a child without breaking the bank any further.
Our second stop was 30 minutes east, in a random carpark, where we scored two bags, iced appropriately. The contents of both pick-ups were still cold by the time we made it home.
That six-hour tour of southeastern Connecticut made a dent in the list of medications we needed to start our in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle. In the process, we uncovered the ways in which patients are quietly finding ways to subsidize their fertility costs.
A daunting $30,000 price tag
My wife and I live in the New York City area. Once we were 35, we were ready to start a family. The plan was to use my eggs and for me to carry the pregnancy, so we chose a sperm donor who had features resembling my wife’s.
In 2024, three failed attempts at intrauterine insemination—or IUI, where concentrated sperm is placed into the uterus during ovulation—led us to a fertility clinic in Manhattan. The clinic quoted us $17,850 for a single egg retrieval.
An egg harvesting cycle spans approximately two weeks. This price tag didn’t include the consult, diagnostic and genetic testing, anesthesia, sperm injection, or embryo-testing parts of that process. It also didn’t include the vital medications that stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs and help time ovulation, so they can be harvested. Just the monitoring appointments, egg retrieval procedure, and inseminating the oocytes, or egg cells, with sperm would clock in at $17,850, roughly half the $30,000 cost of the total IUI cycle.
Neither of us had fertility insurance. I’m self-employed and my wife works for a small business, so we had to pay all our IVF expenses out-of-pocket. New York is one of 15 states that have laws requiring insurance to cover IVF, but these rules tend to come with caveats, such as exempting employers with fewer than 100 employees.
Not willing to career jump just for benefits, I asked our doctor if there was anything we could do to reduce costs, especially the medication, which was quoted at $6,000 to $8,000. She said sometimes IVF patients donate their unused, unopened medications once they’re done with them.
It was game on.
I refreshed the r/IVF subreddit “Med Donation” tab every 30 minutes for weeks, so I could be the first to respond if I saw a post with a medication I needed. With 206,000 weekly visitors, I usually saw half a dozen medication donation posts per day.
I also turned to Facebook Groups like IVF Garage Sale, with around 27,000 members, and the more local NYC IVF/IUI Support Group. While the latter only has 2,700 members, it’s specific to my area.
Olena Kalo, a co-admin of the NYC IVF/IUI Support Group, took on the role because she wanted to give back to the community after experiencing challenges trying to conceive her second child. The group, which started in 2017, attracts between two and three new members per day, and Kalo sees a medication donation post about once a week.
Facebook bans the selling of prescription drugs on its platform.
“Our group rules state that you can’t put full names of medications,” Kalo added.
“What I’ve seen is people say, ‘I have’ or ‘I have to DON,’” to avoid running afoul of the rules, Kalo said.
A teacher I met through this group, who was also a patient at my Midtown Manhattan clinic, gave me five boxes of Menopur, a medication that helps the ovaries produce more eggs in a retrieval. It’s one of the most expensive fertility medications we needed, and her donation saved my family around $2,250.
In our quest to save thousands more, we traveled to parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut over two months, and met with around a dozen former IVF patients in unassuming locations like parking lots, outside of offices, and even inside their homes.
Those encounters were more than a medical exchange. Some of my sources were pregnant. Many of them, pregnant or not, shared their experiences, cheered us on, and gave us insider tips like medications to try, as we were embarking on the start of the countless shots, blood draws, bruises, and hormonal whiplash.
Discounters get into the IVF business
Costco, the international wholesaler known for its bargain-bin prices, announced in March 2026 that it was getting into the fertility business and would offer its members IVF drugs at a steep discount of up to 80 percent—a signal of just how expensive the business of conceiving a child can be.
According to GoodRx, an online prescription discount platform, the cost of IVF medications has surged by 84 percent since 2014. This vastly outpaces the 37 percent rise across all prescription drugs, a price hike experts say has been driven by surging demand and the limited insurance coverage of IVF medications.
The GoodRx report also found that there are few generic alternatives with IVF medications, leaving patients with more expensive, branded options.
President Donald Trump made reducing prescription costs a key campaign promise in his 2024 presidential campaign platform. He also billed himself as the “fertilization president.” In February 2026, the administration launched TrumpRx, a discount drug platform, peddled in part as a way to reduce the cost of IVF.
Of the six medications I needed for my IVF cycle, TrumpRx only lists three, at moderately reduced prices. A 900 IU vial of Gonal-F, a common IVF drug that stimulates egg development, is $504 on TrumpRx and $780 at Alto Pharmacy, one of my clinic’s partner pharmacies.
Even with those savings, the rest of the fertility process would still cost a pretty penny.
Online IVF communities are a response to this problem.
Kalo, the co-admin of the NYC IVF/IUI Support Group, believes these online communities probably function better in some places than in others. There might be more availability of medication in New York due to the city’s size, she suggested, or because of the state’s mandated fertility coverage.
People are also having children later, meaning they’re more likely to need IVF. According to CDC research, 2023 marked the first time in U.S. history that more women in their 40s are having babies than teenagers. The average age for first-time mothers in “urban cities” was about 28.5 years in 2023, compared to 24.8 years in rural areas.
San Francisco had the oldest average age for first-time mothers—32.8—in 2023, according to the San Francisco Standard. New York came in third, at 31.9.
It’s not just self-pay patients who are turning to online groups. Patients might need more cycles than their insurance will cover, or their plan imposes rigid conditions on how coverage can be used. Then there are patients whose medication protocol gets extended mid-cycle, requiring them to source extra drugs on a tight timeline—sometimes before they can get insurance approval for it.
Kalo and other fertility patients DIYing their meds are grateful for these groups where people can find medications, answers, and emotional support.
Still, “if we found out that somebody was relying on a neighbor’s goodwill for their diabetes medication, we would be outraged,” Kalo said.
For her, the online IVF community is a band-aid for a problem that needs a permanent fix.
“Things only happen in the medical field because we’ve banded together and demanded change,” she said.
Medication exchanges are a symptom of a broken system that forces some patients to fill the gaps for others. While I’m grateful for the fellow patients and friends of friends whose donations helped my family do two IVF cycles, group chats shouldn’t have to be an access point for reproductive health care.
Online versus overseas IVF meds
Overseas online pharmacies can offer another, cheaper alternative for some U.S. patients.
Fast IVF, for example, is an online pharmacy that sends IVF medications from their locations in Germany, Turkey, and Amsterdam. Europe caps what the medication can be purchased at, unlike the U.S. where there are no limits.
Mary Copperman, one of Fast IVF’s U.S.-based representatives, said they work directly with the manufacturer, which is how they’re able to get better rates.
If we take that 900 IU Gonal-F pen as an example again, it’s $439 through Fast IVF, compared to $504 at TrumpRx.
Kara, a former IVF patient based in California who asked not to use her last name for privacy reasons, was told she’d never get pregnant naturally, after they found stage 4 endometriosis and fallopian tubes “as large as sausages—filled with fluid.”
Kara was quoted $5,000 to $6,000 for one cycle of medication. She ended up spending $1,750 per cycle at two overseas websites—IVF Pharmacy and Discount IVF Meds. She was one of the many patients who didn’t have success on the first round.
Customers who purchase their IVF drugs overseas need constant reassurance that it’s safe and that their meds will arrive on time, Copperman said—especially if they’ve found Fast IVF through a Google search.
“Patients sometimes think it’s too good to be true,” she said. The FDA continues to warn consumers of safety and efficacy concerns as it relates to overseas pharmacies.
In the end, Kara needed three egg retrievals and four transfers to conceive her three children. Multiple IVF cycles is the norm—something I wish was made clearer at the start. Two years, two egg retrievals, and three embryo transfers on, my journey continues.
My story isn’t rare.
For IVF patients like me, with costs adding up, the international route may be more appealing to those who worry about taking donated meds from strangers.
“I felt better about getting medication shipped than donated because it seemed like a more controlled process and safer,” Kara said. “Also, most people aren’t donating the amount that I needed, and I didn’t want to try to source from a bunch of different places.”
“It was the same [medication] names, from the same manufacturer,” she continued. “They came on time. It was stressful to wonder if they’d come. But I had seen on some chat boards it worked for other people, so I went for it.”
IVF is ‘essential medicine’
Dr. Serena H. Chen MD, director of advocacy at a New Jersey fertility clinic called CCRM, agrees that IVF patients shouldn’t depend on donated drugs, which may not be as safe or reliable.
“As a physician, it’s basically against the law. We really can’t condone that,” she said. “We get offers of donations all the time. And it’s a little heartbreaking because we know how much money people have paid for these meds and how much people need them.”
She hopes the new pricing from the federal government will cause other major companies that produce fertility drugs in the U.S. to price match, ultimately increasing accessibility.
Dr. Chen doesn’t recommend overseas pharmacies, either, “because it’s not going through the U.S. system and we can’t vouch for those medications.”
Instead, she works with the patient to try to find discounts locally, based on their insurance plan and location.
Ultimately, she believes the game-changer for the industry would be if “fertility treatments including assisted reproduction” were added to the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) list of essential health care. That would mean IVF for all government and military employees would be covered, she said, prompting commercial insurance to recognize it as essential health-care too.
“If we can get this as an essential health benefit listed with CMS, then it has a ripple effect through the whole system,” she said.
IVF advocacy groups are also working to encourage states to pass more insurance mandates.
In 2026, California began requiring health plans to cover the diagnosis and treatment of infertility, the latest state to do so. An Oregon bill seeking to to impose a similar mandate didn’t make it out of committee, but lawmakers are expected to try again next year.
“Reproduction is essential to the continuation of the human race,” Chen said. “It’s really, in many ways, a life-or-death situation.”
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