Cryo-EM Cost Estimator
What microscope time actually costs, computed from the published rate sheets of 14 core facilities — not estimates, not averages of guesses. Pick your instrument and status; the range is what real facilities charge today.
Instrument time only — staff assistance, consumables and data storage are usually billed on top, and processing is separate. Sourced from 14facilities' published rate sheets (2026-08-24); every underlying number appears verbatim on a facility's own page. Compare facilities and their full rate tables in the directory.
Questions
How much does a day on a Titan Krios cost?
It depends mostly on who is asking. Across facilities that publish day rates: internal academic users see roughly $184 to $1,940 per day, external academics up to about $3,000, and industry rates reach $6,000 per day. Hourly billing runs about $30 to $124 internal, up to $183 external, and $125 to $381 for industry. All figures are from published rate sheets, not estimates.
Why do rates differ so much between facilities?
Subsidy structure. University cores are often subsidized for their own researchers by institutional or NIH instrumentation grants, so internal rates can sit far below actual operating cost. External academic rates recover more of the true cost, and industry rates carry the full unsubsidized price plus margin. The instrument is often identical; the funding model is not.
What does this estimate not include?
Staff assistance (often billed hourly on top), consumables like grids and clipping supplies, data storage and transfer, and all downstream processing. Many facilities also charge differently for assisted versus independent operation. Treat the estimate as the instrument-time floor of a project budget, not the whole budget.
Where do these numbers come from?
From the published rate sheets of 14 core facilities in our directory, re-checked periodically. Every underlying number appears verbatim on the facility's own page; nothing is modelled or interpolated. Facilities that do not publish rates are not represented, which likely skews the sample toward academic cores.