Forward pricing

About

Forward was an AI-first primary care company that tried to rebuild the doctor’s office from scratch — and to bill for it like a software subscription rather than through insurance. Founded in 2016 by Adrian Aoun, a former Google executive who had run Special Projects under Larry Page, Forward opened sleek, tech-heavy clinics where members paid a flat $149/month for unlimited primary care: in-house blood panels, full-body biometric scans, genetic screening, a 24/7 in-app care team, and far longer doctor visits than a typical PCP. No co-pays, no surprise bills, no insurance claims — just one monthly fee.

The money followed the vision. Forward raised roughly $400M across its life (some tallies put it near $657M including debt), hit a $1B valuation when SoftBank led a $225M Series D in March 2021, and counted Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures among its backers. In November 2023 it raised a $100M Series E to chase its boldest bet yet: the CarePod, a self-service AI clinic kiosk — a literal pod you stepped into in a mall, gym, or office for an automated check-up, sold on a roughly $99/month consumer plan with no clinician on site.

It ended abruptly. On November 13, 2024, Forward shut down with no warning — disabling its app, cancelling visits, closing all ~19 clinics and the handful of deployed CarePods, and laying off nearly 200 employees, with care supported only through December 13, 2024. It had generated under $100M of lifetime revenue. The goforward.com domain no longer resolves. This page documents Forward’s last-known pricing as a post-mortem.

Pricing summary : How Forward’s pricing model worked

Forward’s pricing was the deliberate opposite of how American healthcare usually charges: one flat monthly fee, paid by the patient, for unlimited care — no fee-for-service, no insurance billing, no usage meter. The core Forward membership was $149/month, and it bought unlimited visits at Forward’s clinics plus in-house labs, body scans, prescription delivery, and a 24/7 app care team. You paid the same whether you came once a year or once a week. Introductory promotions (around $99 for the first few months) were sometimes used to lower the entry barrier, but the standing price was the flat $149.

From 2023 Forward layered on a second product at a lower price point: the CarePod, at roughly $99/month. The CarePod was a self-service kiosk — no doctor or nurse on site — that ran automated check-ups (blood pressure, biometric body scan, even a self-administered blood draw) and pushed you into app-guided programs for diabetes, hypertension, anxiety, depression, and weight. The pricing logic was that removing the clinician should remove the cost of care, letting the same membership economics scale through hardware instead of real estate and staff.

What makes this different: Forward priced primary care like a consumer subscription — a “gym membership for your health” — and refused the usage-based, insurance-mediated model entirely. That made the price radically transparent and predictable for the patient, but it also meant Forward absorbed all the cost variance: a member who needed a lot of care cost far more than $149/month to serve, and the CarePod’s job was to crush that cost with automation. The automation didn’t work well enough, and the flat fee never covered the hardware.

Pricing by product

Sales motions across products: self-serve consumer signup through the app and website for both the membership and the CarePod — you subscribed directly, the way you would to any consumer subscription. There was no sales-led enterprise motion for the core product. All prices above are historical (last offered before the November 13, 2024 shutdown) — the company no longer exists.

Hidden costs : What Forward members actually paid

For the member, Forward’s bill was unusually honest: a flat fee, no co-pays, no claims, no surprise charges. The “hidden cost” of Forward wasn’t borne by patients — it was borne by Forward, and it’s what killed the company. The flat $149/month had to cover unlimited clinician time, in-house lab equipment, expensive real estate, and a heavy engineering and hardware org. For the CarePod, the implied cost was the capital expense of the pods themselves — bespoke, sensor-laden hardware reportedly costing on the order of a million dollars apiece to build, against a roughly $99/month subscription.

Two structural traps doomed the unit economics. First, a flat fee with unlimited usage transfers all cost variance to the vendor — the sicker the member, the deeper underwater the $149 went, with no overage mechanism to recover it. Second, the CarePod’s CapEx-heavy bet inverted software economics: instead of near-zero marginal cost per new user, every new “location” was a six- or seven-figure machine that frequently malfunctioned (automated blood draws failed, patients reportedly got stuck inside), and Forward launched only a handful before the money ran out.

Want to model a flat-subscription healthcare business? Use the Forward pricing calculator to explore membership economics and break-even on a flat per-member fee.

Pricing evolution : Forward pricing history and changes

Cadence

Tracked range: 2016–2024. Direct Wayback Machine access to goforward.com was network-blocked from this capture host (TLS reset to web.archive.org), so the $149 and $99 prices are recorded via second-source transcriptions of contemporaneous reporting that quoted Forward’s pages. The live site no longer resolves.

Notable changes

• 2016 — Forward launches with a flat ~$149/month membership for unlimited concierge primary care, billed to the patient, not insurance.
• 2021-03 — $225M Series D (SoftBank) at a $1B valuation; pricing unchanged, footprint expands.
• 2023-11 — $100M Series E; Forward introduces the CarePod at ~$99/month, pivoting toward unstaffed, hardware-based care.
• 2024-11-13 — Abrupt shutdown. App disabled, visits cancelled, ~19 clinics and the CarePods closed, ~200 staff laid off; $149 membership and $99 CarePod plans end immediately. Care supported through Dec 13, 2024.

What’s unique : Forward’s distinctive pricing mechanics

1. Primary care priced like a consumer subscription. Forward charged the patient a flat monthly fee for unlimited care and refused to touch insurance — a radical break from fee-for-service. The price was utterly transparent and predictable to the buyer, a rarity in US healthcare.

2. A flat fee with no usage meter — and no overage. Unlike usage-based products, Forward had no mechanism to recover cost from heavy users. Every member paid the same regardless of how much care they consumed, which made the model a bet that average cost-to-serve could be held below the flat price.

3. Hardware as the cost-reduction strategy. The CarePod’s ~$99/month plan wasn’t just a cheaper tier — it was the thesis: replace the clinician with an automated kiosk to make flat-fee care scale. Pricing the pod below the staffed membership signalled that automation, not labor, was supposed to carry the unit economics.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : Forward billing controls and transparency

• Billing controls — Self-serve consumer subscription: members signed up and managed billing directly in the Forward app for the flat $149/month membership (and later the $99/month CarePod), the way they would any consumer plan. There were no co-pays, no per-visit charges, and no insurance claims to reconcile. Historical — the app and signup flow no longer exist.
• Usage visibility — Because the price was flat, there was no usage meter to watch and no bill to forecast: the member’s cost was the same every month regardless of how much care they used. The trade-off was that members got no itemized record of what their care actually cost to deliver.
• Payment options — Standard consumer card-on-file subscription billing through the app. Membership was month-to-month; introductory promotions (around $99 for the first few months) were sometimes offered. Details beyond the headline price are not recoverable now that the site is gone.

Strategic wins : Why Forward’s pricing decisions worked

1. The flat fee made healthcare legible

A single monthly price for unlimited care is the most legible pricing in a famously illegible industry. Members knew exactly what they’d pay, with no co-pays or claims — a genuine UX win that drove brand love and signups, and a clean example of how predictability itself is a feature. See usage-based pricing strategy for the predictability-vs-alignment trade-off Forward sat at the extreme end of.

2. Decoupling from insurance

By billing the patient directly instead of payers, Forward escaped the coding, claims, and reimbursement machinery that distorts most healthcare pricing. That let it set a clean consumer price and own the relationship — a structural advantage direct-primary-care models still pursue. Related: how AI companies structure pricing.

3. Pricing the automation thesis explicitly

The CarePod’s lower ~$99 price made the strategy testable: if automation could deliver care at a lower cost, a lower price could still be profitable. Tiering by how care was delivered (staffed vs. self-service) — rather than one blended fee — was the right way to express the bet, even though the bet lost. See choosing the right usage metric.

Areas to improve : Gaps in Forward’s pricing approach

1. A flat fee with no cost-recovery lever

Charging one price for unlimited care works only if average cost-to-serve stays below the fee. Forward had no overage, no usage tier, and no way to price heavy utilizers differently — so the model’s profitability depended entirely on member mix, a variable it couldn’t control. See bill shock and cost unpredictability for the mirror-image risk on the usage-based side.

2. The price assumed hardware economics it never achieved

The ~$99 CarePod price implied automation would drive marginal cost toward zero. Instead each pod was a six- or seven-figure machine that malfunctioned in the field. Pricing a subscription against unproven, CapEx-heavy hardware meant the unit economics were underwater from day one. Related: outcome-based pricing trends.

3. No graceful wind-down for paying members

When the money ran out, Forward shut down overnight — app disabled, visits cancelled — leaving paying members to scramble for records and continuity of care on under two weeks’ notice. A subscription business that holds the customer’s health data owes a more orderly off-ramp than a hard stop; the abruptness became part of the brand’s epitaph.

Key takeaways

1. A flat fee transfers all cost variance to the vendor. Forward’s $149/month was beautifully simple for members but left the company holding unbounded cost-to-serve, with no usage lever to recover it.
2. Pricing can’t outrun unit economics. No amount of transparent, beloved pricing saves a model where average cost-to-serve exceeds the fee — and Forward’s did, badly.
3. Don’t price a subscription against hardware you haven’t proven. The ~$99 CarePod assumed automation economics that never materialized; the pods cost a fortune and frequently failed.
4. Capital is not product-market fit. ~$400M raised, a $1B valuation, and marquee investors couldn’t manufacture demand from healthy people for a service that solved no pressing problem at $149/month.
5. Owe your subscribers an exit. An overnight shutdown of a health service holding members’ data and care is a pricing-and-trust failure as much as an operational one.

UBP implications

1. Flat-rate is the anti-usage model — and it only works with controllable cost-to-serve. Forward is the cautionary extreme: when the underlying cost is variable and uncapped (clinician time, labs, hardware), a flat fee with no overage is structurally fragile. See usage-based pricing fundamentals.
2. Automation is a unit-economics bet, and pricing makes the bet explicit. Forward priced the CarePod as if automation had already lowered cost. Practitioners should price to demonstrated marginal cost, not projected, or carry a usage/overage mechanism while the automation matures. See choosing the right usage metric.
3. Predictability is a real value metric — but not a free one. Members loved the flat price precisely because it removed variance. Someone has to absorb that variance; if the vendor can’t, the predictability that wins customers is the same thing that sinks the business.

Sources

• FierceHealthcare: Primary care player Forward shutters after raising $400M, rolling out CarePods (accessed 2026-06-10)
• TechStartups: Forward shuts down after burning through $400M from investors (Nov 18, 2024) (accessed 2026-06-10)
• Maginative: AI healthcare startup Forward shuts down (accessed 2026-06-10)
• Healthcare Huddle: Why Forward Health failed — lessons for tech-driven primary care (accessed 2026-06-10) — “$150/month for unlimited primary care”
• FinVsFin: Forward vs One Medical vs Parsley Health (accessed 2026-06-10) — quotes goforward.com: “$149 per month”
• Second-source price evidence (Wayback access network-blocked): public/images/blueprint/forward/2026-06-10-membership-validated.txt ($149/mo), 2026-06-10-carepod-validated.txt ($99/mo)
• Liveness check (2026-06-10): goforward.com does not resolve (ECONNREFUSED) — Forward shut down November 13, 2024.

Bottom line

Forward was an AI-first primary care startup that priced the doctor’s office like a consumer subscription — a flat $149/month for unlimited concierge care, no co-pays, no insurance — and later a ~$99/month self-service CarePod kiosk meant to scale that flat-fee model through automation instead of labor. It raised roughly $400M, hit a $1B valuation, and added a $100M Series E in November 2023, but the CarePods cost a fortune, malfunctioned, and never proved their economics; on November 13, 2024 Forward abruptly shut down, closing every clinic and pod and laying off nearly 200 people. The pricing was the most transparent in healthcare and still couldn’t save a model where cost-to-serve outran the flat fee. This page is a post-mortem of the last-known pricing. Browse the pricing blueprint for fully-researched company profiles.

Want to compare Forward against living healthcare and AI-subscription pricing models? Browse the pricing blueprint.