There is a comfortable tendency to treat health subscription models as a North American phenomenon — Medicare products, fragmented plans and a consumer accustomed to spending out of pocket. This reading ignores the obvious: Brazil combines one of the biggest gaps in health coverage in the world with a middle class that already pays for streaming subscriptions, gyms, cosmetic boxes and meditation apps. The structural conditions are present. What is missing, for now, is someone to organize the offer in a coherent way.
What Levels, Function and Hims actually built
Levels Health sold access to continuous glucose monitors along with a software and coaching layer. The nominal product is the sensor; the real product is ongoing metabolic awareness — a datum that the conventional healthcare system only captures in times of crisis. Function Health was more aggressive: 100 biomarkers per year, interpreted results, all outside the plan system. The proposal is to function as a body control panel instead of an annual visit to the general practitioner.
Hims and Hers, in turn, chose the more commercial route: telehealth for common and embarrassing conditions — hair loss, erectile dysfunction, mental health, weight management — with prescription and product delivered to your home. None of the three depend on an insurance company. All three operate with recurring revenue, product plus software gross margins, and a direct relationship with the consumer that traditional health plans have never been able to build.
The financial logic behind the model
Health plans are, in essence, collective risk management vehicles. When they work, they redistribute costs. The problem is that this model creates little incentive for the healthy insured to continue being healthy — the plan captures claims in the aggregate, not individual behavior. Companies like Levels have seen exactly this gap: Consumers who don't need to use the health care system often have less reason to pay for robust coverage, but they have an appetite for services that help them stay that way.
Subscription recurrence solves an old problem of unit economics in healthcare: single consultations have a high acquisition cost and low customer lifetime value. When the same client pays monthly for data, coaching and access to professionals, the LTV changes completely. This attracts different capital, allows different hiring and enables investment in technology that the transactional model would never justify.
What’s different about Brazil — and why it matters
The Brazilian health market is formally dominated by the SUS and private plans, but there is a huge informal layer of direct expenses that most analyzes underestimate. Private consultations, out-of-network exams, supplements, beauty clinics with a wellness bias — this parallel economy already exists and generates significant amounts. The Brazilian consumer is already paying out of pocket for healthcare; it just doesn't have an offer structured enough to call it a product.
Regulation by Anvisa and CFM creates real friction, especially in telemedicine and electronic prescribing. But the legal framework has changed a lot since 2020, and telemedicine, which was an emergency exception, has become a permanent norm. The regulatory window for continuous monitoring services is still ambiguous, which is simultaneously a risk and a temporary competitive advantage for the first mover with adequate legal advice.
What translates to the Brazilian market and what doesn’t
The Levels-style continuous glucose monitor model faces a cost challenge in Brazil that goes beyond the exchange rate. Sensors continue to be imported, with relevant taxation, and the local supply chain is in its infancy. This limits the addressable market to high-income consumers in the short term — which does not make the business unviable, but defines where it starts.
What translates well is the logic of the Function Health-style biomarker panel. Brazil has laboratories with national reach, home collections operating in capitals and a growing obsession with preventive medicine among the middle and high income groups. An annual subscription product that delivers 80 interpreted biomarkers, with access to a functional physician via video call, doesn't depend on any radical regulatory innovation — it depends on execution and branding.
The Hims model has the most obvious equivalent in Brazil: sexual medicine, baldness treatment and mental health clinics already exist as physical businesses. What is missing is the digitalization of the journey, the recurrence and the debureaucratization of prescriptions. Some startups are starting to fill this space, but still with limited scale and diffuse positioning. The big mistake would be to copy the aesthetics without copying the obsession with unit economics.
Where the market will move first
Corporate healthcare is probably the most rational entry point. Companies with more than 200 employees already pay for expensive health plans and have a direct financial incentive to reduce claims. A preventative monitoring subscription product sold as a B2B benefit has a predictable sales cycle, a larger ticket, and a buyer — HR — that is more sophisticated than the average individual consumer.
The second vector is longevity medicine, which in Brazil still lacks an accessible reference brand. The Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic have executive health programs that cost tens of thousands of dollars. There is a pent-up demand for something between the annual health plan checkup — which is superficial — and the high-end longevity program. This middle range, priced between R$500 and R$1,500 per month, is still practically empty.
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