Fertility Care Has Come So Far, Costco Is Now in the Game: How Did We Get Here?
Understanding your own fertility can mean running into a gauntlet of obstacles before you even truly get started. An initial doctor’s appointment booked out months in advance, sometimes thanks to a hard-won referral. Lab work that takes days or weeks to come back. Results explained in clinical language that require several follow-up questions just to understand in a practical sense. Many women feel fertility conversations happen to them, rather than for them.
That experience is still common. But thankfully, it’s no longer universal.
Over the past decade, something has significantly shifted. Women are tracking their own hormone levels at home before their first appointment. Fertility journeys that once happened in near-total privacy are now shared, documented and discussed on TikTok and Instagram.
Employers have started building fertility benefits into compensation packages. And as of March 2026, support has moved beyond the workplace into everyday life — Costco members can access up to 80% savings on fertility medications through a new retail partnership that would have seemed unlikely five years ago.
None of this happened overnight. And it did not happen by accident.
The Scale of the Issue
The starting point is just how common this experience is. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 1 in 6 people globally (17.5%) experience infertility at some point in their lives. That rate holds consistent across income levels and geographic regions. It’s not a niche health concern, it’s a common one. And for a long time, most people faced it quietly, without much of a roadmap to guide them.
At-Home Hormone Tracking Gave People Their Own Data
The large portion of the shift has happened through technology. A new generation of at-home health monitoring devices gave people clinical-level data that previously required a clinic visit to obtain. According to a 2025 review published by PMC, researchers describe a “significant evolution in new technologies for at-home personalized fertility monitoring” over the past two decades and that evolution has accelerated considerably at the consumer level.
Three devices currently leading this category:
Inito measures all four key hormones — estrogen, LH, PdG, and FSH — on a single strip in about ten minutes. Rather than returning a simple yes or no, it provides actual numerical values that sync to an app and can be shared directly with a doctor. It’s currently iPhone only. In December 2024, the company reduced its price by 40%, making it more accessible than when it launched.
Mira takes an AI-powered approach to hormone tracking, measuring LH, E3G, PdG, and FSH using what the company calls FluoMapping™ fluorescent lateral flow technology. It’s built to work with PCOS and irregular cycles and is compatible with Android devices — an important distinction in a category where most devices are iOS-only.
Natural Cycles focuses on basal body temperature-based tracking and holds a distinction that matters: it is the only FDA-cleared digital birth control app in the United States, first cleared in 2018 with an updated clearance in 2025. It has more than 3 million registered users worldwide, saw 50% year-over-year growth in new users in 2023, and integrates with Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and Samsung Galaxy Watch. It operates in both contraception and conception modes.
The practical result is a meaningful shift in how people show up for fertility care. Someone arriving at a fertility appointment in 2026 may already know their LH surge date, their progesterone trend and their fertile window. They come with questions, not just concerns. The dynamic change from reactive to proactive has rippled through the entire fertility landscape.=
Everyday People Changed the Conversation Online
There is also the matter of how this became something people talk about at all.
Public figures sharing their IVF journeys helped create early momentum. But the more durable change came from everyday people — the ones who opened TikTok accounts to document egg retrievals, joined Facebook groups for emotional support during the two-week wait and posted about losses they once would have kept private.
The platforms became a parallel infrastructure: part support group, part education resource, part community for people who had never found that community before.
The numbers give a sense of the scale. A December 2025 analysis published in ScienceDirect reviewed 1,905 TikTok posts related to fertility and infertility. Those posts had accumulated more than 1.8 billion cumulative views and 117 million likes.
The majority of content creators (66.82%) were patients with fertility challenges themselves, not clinics or brands. Personal experience posts made up 61.36% of the content. Under the #infertility hashtag alone, videos reached 40 million total views, with more than half of the content being personal accounts of infertility journeys and pregnancy loss.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has noted that social media transformed fertility from a private experience into one shared openly and honestly. It credits this shift with creating new opportunities for both peer support and medical education from reproductive specialists who have built their own presence on these platforms.
It’s worth being honest about the tradeoffs, though. A survey conducted by Fertility Family in June 2025, covering 241 people actively trying to conceive, found that 53% said they had encountered fertility misinformation on social media. And 72% said the platforms made them feel “behind” in their journey.
The community piece is real and meaningful. So is the noise. For anyone engaging with fertility content online, filtering for credible sources (and even sensitive topics when you need to) and verifying anything medical with an actual provider remains essential.
Egg Freezing Became a Planning Tool, Not a Last Resort
In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the “experimental” label from egg freezing. That single reclassification changed what was socially and medically possible.
The growth since then has been substantial. According to SART data via Cofertility, more than 40,000 egg freezing cycles were performed in the United States in 2023 — up from approximately 29,000 the prior year, a 39.2% year-over-year increase.
That is not just a market metric. It reflects a real behavioral shift, particularly among younger women. Women under 28 are now increasingly treating fertility preservation as a planned life decision, something they schedule alongside career goals and educational milestones rather than something they pursue after discovering a problem.
As more people freeze eggs, the procedure becomes more normalized. As it becomes more normalized, more people consider it who might not have before. That cycle is still underway.
Employers Took Notice
That cultural shift has made its way into the workplace in a tangible way. According to data from the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, 42% of US employers offered fertility benefits in 2024 — up from 30% in 2020. Mercer reports that IVF coverage among large US employers doubled between 2019 and 2023, reaching 45%.
How those benefits are structured is evolving too. According to Maven Clinic, 64% of employers now describe their fertility benefits as inclusive, meaning they’re not limited to a clinical infertility diagnosis. And 66% of employees have taken or considered a new job specifically because of reproductive health benefits.
That last number underscores just how far this has moved: fertility coverage has become a factor in where people choose to work, not a footnote in the benefits packet.
Access Is Widening But With Honest Caveats
In March 2026, Costco, Sesame, and IVI RMA announced a partnership offering Costco members up to 80% savings on fertility medications, with coordinated access to fertility care for the organization’s 125 million-plus members. It’s a meaningful development, and a signal of how fertility care is beginning to move into retail and membership channels that didn’t previously play a role in this space.
The broader market reflects the momentum. According to the American Journal of Managed Care, $8.9 billion was spent at US fertility clinics in 2023, with the market projected to reach $16.8 billion by 2028 — a 13.6% compound annual growth rate.
At the same time, a clear-eyed view of access requires acknowledging what hasn’t changed. A full IVF cycle in the United States typically costs anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 including medications, depending on clinic, location and individual treatment needs. Twenty-eight percent of employees have incurred debt to cover fertility-related costs. Employer benefits, new retail models, and reduced-price tracking devices are all moving things in the right direction. But cost remains a significant barrier for many people.
What This Means Right Now
The fertility landscape in early 2026 offers more tools, more community, and more access points than at any previous moment. If you’re navigating this space either personally or for someone you care about, here’s what’s actually useful to know.
At-home hormone monitoring has become significantly more capable and more affordable. Inito, Mira, and Natural Cycles each approach tracking differently, and which one makes sense depends on your specific situation: what hormones you want to track, whether you need Android compatibility, and whether you want wearable integration. Inito cut its price 40% in late 2024. Natural Cycles now works with Apple Watch and Oura Ring for continuous temperature monitoring.
Employer fertility benefits are worth reviewing carefully, especially in light of how quickly coverage has expanded. The question isn’t just whether a benefits package mentions fertility, it’s whether coverage is inclusive (not requiring a clinical infertility diagnosis to qualify) and what it actually covers. For anyone evaluating a job offer or in the middle of open enrollment, this has become a meaningful line item.
The Costco/Sesame/IVI RMA partnership is worth watching as a model. Whether or not you’re a Costco member, it signals a direction: fertility care migrating toward access models that bypass some of the traditional cost barriers.
And for anyone engaging with fertility content on social media, the Fertility Family research is a useful reminder. The peer support can be genuinely valuable. The medical information requires a second opinion.
The fertility conversation has changed. It is louder, more data-driven, and more publicly held than it was a decade ago. The tools exist, the communities exist, and the employer response is real. What’s still being worked out — and what makes this an ongoing story rather than a resolved one — is whether all of that translates into access for everyone who needs it.
Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.
