Dante Labs promised 8 weeks. We timed twelve orders across 2025. Median was 6 months.
Dante Labs has been the cheapest door into whole genome sequencing for most of the past decade. The L'Aquila-based company currently quotes $199 for a 30× short-read WGS — about half what the nearest competitor charges. Its 2026 product pitch, separately, is the strongest it has ever been: ISO 15189 accreditation claims, 200+ physician-ready reports, automatic report updates as annotations improve. On paper, the value proposition is real.
The execution has not caught up. Trustpilot shows 1.8 stars out of 5 at the time of writing. The Better Business Bureau rates the company F, citing volume of complaints and non-response.
We wanted to put a number on the gap between what Dante advertises and what it delivers. Over the course of 2025, we placed twelve orders from three separate addresses, using three separate payment instruments and timing the interval from kit activation to report delivery. One order was cancelled by the customer after 9 months with no sample processed. Of the remaining eleven, the median turnaround was 182 days — six months, against an advertised window of eight weeks. The fastest order clocked in at 11 weeks; the slowest at 341 days. Two are still pending at the time of publication.
This is consistent with the broader public record. Recent complaints archived on the BBB site include orders submitted in mid-2025 that had received no results by February 2026; one long-running complaint describes a wait of roughly 2.5 years. The pattern of customer-service non-response is documented in reviews stretching across 2019-2026; the pattern does not appear to be improving.
What we would recommend: if you want to buy a WGS kit from Dante because it is cheap, enter into that transaction with your eyes open. The probability you receive your report in the advertised eight weeks is low. The probability you receive it within six months is, based on our data, roughly even. The probability you reach a responsive human on the customer service side if something goes wrong is lower still.
If any of those probabilities matters to you — for instance, if you wanted WGS results in advance of a family planning decision, or to inform a medication change, or to resolve a pending clinical question — do not buy Dante. Pay the $200–400 premium to Nucleus, Sequencing.com, SelfDecode, DNA Complete, or Veritas. If turnaround is genuinely irrelevant and you are here for the principle of cheap sequencing, Dante's $199 30× WGS is a real product, eventually. Bring patience.