At one point, we thought that simply replacing a user's IP with a unique ID was enough to anonymise.

At one point, a blur or pixelating filter on a photo was sufficient to anonymise it.

At one point, Monero transactions were considered anonymous.

That means that by definition, anonymizing genomes is impossible. If someone tells you they will 'anonymize' your genome data, run away, they don't know what they are doing.

http://41j.com/blog/2018/11/illumina-consumables-are-90-prof...

Their overall gross margin is >60%. I suspect that instrument margins are actually also quite high, but they factor in R&D spending on instrument costs.

However, Dante labs appear to be using BGI, not Illumina for sequencing.

Also, in their About Us section they have every technology listed under the sun (Illumina, PacBio, Thermo, BGI) so I think it's just whatever they can get their hands on based on which labs have open runs. Seems quite questionable from a data integrity perspective if you're trying to do population based genetics. The quality between sequencers varies dramatically.

The BGI (MGI) have been pushing out new instruments, reportedly with lower error rates (and much cheaper than Illumina).

They’ve also been building out service centers outside China, and I suspect this is where the sequencing being done by this service is located.

Universities do sometimes offer sequencing as a service, but I suspect not at as low a price point as the BGI, even for those universities with attached genome centers.

We go up against universities all the time in our competitive deals. They're generally always cheaper since everything is subsidized however the turnaround times are usually significant and the quality is not entirely repeatable. The cost here looks heavily subsidized just as a way to spark interest.