Carrot Fertility partners with companies to give employees access to financial and clinical support during IVF, egg freezing, surrogacy, adoption, and other family-building paths. But do Carrot’s strong outcome claims and global reach truly reflect what users experience in terms of costs, clarity, and control?
This review examines what Carrot Fertility does well and where you may need more transparency, allowing you to determine if it is the right choice for you.
Carrot Fertility: A quick snapshot
Founded by Tammy Sun and Dr. Asima Ahmad, Carrot Fertility is a global fertility and family-building platform that partners with employers to make reproductive care more accessible to their employees. It offers support at every stage, from pre-pregnancy and IVF to parenting and menopause.
Carrot isn’t a fertility clinic, but a platform that connects patients, employers, and clinics. Employers purchase Carrot’s program as a benefit for their employees. Once enrolled, members receive a personalized Carrot plan that connects them with relevant experts, clinics, and educational resources based on their goals, diagnosis, and location.
When in-person care is needed, Carrot matches its members with providers in a network of over 17,000 clinics and agencies across 170+ countries. The platform provides 24/7 access to expert care and guidance, available in over 300 languages.
Source: Carrot
Carrot promotes “appropriate care,” helping patients first explore less invasive alternatives to IVF, such as ovulation tracking or nutrition counseling. According to the company, approximately 60% of its members choose non-IVF options, which promise to improve outcomes at lower costs.
Today, Carrot Fertility partners with over 1,000 employers, promising them:
Flexible benefit design
Lower claims through clinical management
Future-focused innovation
To future parents, it promises personalized guidance, coordinated care, and a single platform to manage the often-fragmented fertility treatment process.
Carrot Fertility: Key areas to review
Carrot’s global reach and inclusive approach sound promising, but when you’re deciding whether it’s the right fit for you, the details matter. To understand how Carrot works in practice, let’s go through three key aspects:
Claims about the outcomes
Service and logistics
Costs and coverage
1. Claims about the outcomes
Carrot Fertility positions itself as a data-driven benefits platform, one that improves access to care and delivers better IVF outcomes. In 2024, the company published its most detailed outcomes report to date, claiming higher success rates and fewer complications among members compared to the U.S. national average.
According to the 2024 Carrot IVF Outcomes Study, which analyzed internal member data against national benchmarks from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), Carrot members achieved the following:
Outcome metric | Carrot members | National and benchmark averages |
|---|---|---|
IVF live birth rate per transfer | 55.4% | 44.8% |
IVF pregnancy rate per transfer | 67% | 54.6% |
Miscarriage rate | 12.7% | 16.5–20.5% |
Preterm birth rate | 8.2% | 13.8–18.7% |
Multiple birth rates | 1.8% | 4.7–13.9% |
94.6% (98.2% singleton birth rate) | 79.6–80.4% | |
PGT-A usage | 73.8% | 43.9–58% |
The company highlights that these results are signs that its “appropriate care” model helps reduce unnecessary cycles and complications. Carrot also notes that better outcomes translate to lower healthcare costs for employers and members.
How should you approach this information?
Milliman, Inc., a global actuarial firm, validated Carrot’s measurement methodology, specifically, how it compared its results to SART’s national data. It confirmed that the company’s approach was consistent with industry standards. However, it didn’t review comparisons to competitors.
The reported outcomes are impressive, but this study represents an internal analysis conducted on Carrot’s member population and benchmarked against aggregated SART data. It isn’t a peer-reviewed, independently audited trial.
The results reflect how well Carrot members performed within Carrot’s network and model, rather than indicating how every patient might benefit from using the platform.
Source: Anastasia Shuraeva
2. Service and logistics
Once you’re enrolled through your employer, you must register on Carrot’s website to access your personalized dashboard. From there, Carrot builds a step-by-step plan tailored to your goals, whether they are:
Preserving fertility (egg, sperm, or embryo freezing)
Pursuing IVF or IUI
Adopting
Exploring gestational surrogacy
Carrot also offers support during pregnancy and postpartum, guidance on parenting and returning to work, and male reproductive and hormonal healthcare for users of all ages.
Here’s what you get with Carrot Fertility benefits:
1:1 expert support: Unlimited virtual visits to fertility and family-forming experts, including reproductive endocrinologists, urologists, mental health providers, and adoption or surrogacy specialists.
Vetted clinic network and legal support: Carrot’s network includes more than 3,600 fertility clinics and 2,500+ agencies and attorneys across 170 countries, with live translation available. You can receive expedited appointments and discounts.
Streamlined payment with the Carrot Card: A pre-funded, flexible payment card lets you pay directly for eligible care in over 50 currencies. It integrates with digital wallets and uses proprietary fraud detection technology for enhanced security.
Carrot Rx in-house online pharmacy: It simplifies medication management as U.S. members can order fertility and hormone therapy medications directly through the platform, saving up to 40% through negotiated rates. Prescriptions can be covered instantly with the Carrot Card, avoiding reimbursement delays. The program also offers next-day delivery.
Sprints metabolic fertility program: It tackles metabolic dysfunction, one of the greatest causes of infertility, aiming to reduce the number of IVF cycles needed for a successful pregnancy. The program helps you improve your nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress habits through personalized daily coaching and smart-scale tracking, and may include medications such as metformin or GLP-1a, under medical supervision, to support healthy weight and hormone balance.
What does this mean for your fertility journey?
Carrot’s model takes much of the logistical burden off your shoulders. For many people, that means fewer administrative obstacles and a clearer sense of what to do next.
What makes Carrot stand out is the level of integration within a single system:
Clinic referrals
Payment processing
Pharmacy coordination
Pre-pregnancy support
Still, Carrot Fertility isn’t a medical provider. It only connects you to clinicians and services you need. While this platform can streamline your fertility treatment, the quality of care still depends on the specialists and clinics you choose, as well as their responsiveness within Carrot’s network.
If you value having one centralized dashboard for all fertility and family-forming steps, Carrot offers that convenience. But if you prefer autonomy and direct relationships with local providers, check whether your preferred clinics are part of Carrot’s network to ensure coverage.
3. Coverage and payment options
Carrot Fertility offers financial tools designed to make fertility care more accessible, but the real-world experiences can vary depending on your employer, clinic, and the type of service you need.
The primary methods are:
Carrot Card: The pre-funded payment card that eliminates the need to pay upfront and wait for reimbursement. The card can also be used for cost sharing (coinsurance and copayments).
Reimbursement process: If you pay out of pocket, you can submit detailed invoices or superbills through the Carrot patient portal. Carrot reviews them and reimburses you directly, usually within six weeks. These reimbursements may be taxable, depending on how your employer processes them.
Employers can set annual or lifetime maximums and customize which services are included, such as IVF, IUI, adoption, surrogacy, back-to-work support, and more. Plans may also allow both partners to access separate Carrot accounts for dual coverage. Some services, such as supplements or alternative therapies, may require a doctor’s prescription to qualify for reimbursement.
What are the experiences of real people, and what to expect from Carrot?
Many members find the Carrot Card convenient for paying directly for care without waiting for reimbursement. You need to upload receipts within 30 days for verification. Some users report minor hiccups when first using the card, such as declined transactions that are quickly resolved after confirming the purchase.
Most users have been satisfied with the reimbursement process, stating that it was relatively quick and well-supported. Still, some report issues with coverage clarity and limitations, saying that even though a clinic is eligible, certain services, such as consultations or alternative therapies, may not be reimbursed.
If a claim is denied, it helps to resubmit with more details. One Redditor suggests adding a note explaining how exactly the money was used:
“If you pay out-of-pocket and apply for reimbursement, I find it happens quicker if you add a note in the “anything else you’d like to tell us” spot, explaining what the money was spent on.”
The dual coverage is helpful, but some procedures are linked to the account of the partner undergoing treatment. For instance, treatments like embryo transfer may be restricted to the account of the partner who’s physically receiving the procedure.
One couple reports that Carrot Fertility helped reallocate some costs, such as ICSI fees, from one account to the other, freeing up funds on the account of the parent undergoing embryo transfer.
It’s advisable to clarify how costs can be split between partners to avoid unexpected denials and plan shared payments.
Carrot Fertility benefits and limitations
Carrot Fertility offers numerous fertility and family-building benefits, and features like the Carrot Card, Carrot Rx, and reimbursement options make fertility care more accessible and manageable.
Here’s a quick overview of Carrot’s most notable benefits and limitations:
Benefits | Limitations |
|---|---|
|
|
Carrot claims to increase IVF success rates among its members, specifically by highlighting the importance of preimplantation genetic testing and informed embryo selection. However, it only mentions PGT-A. The platform may lack in-depth genomic analysis and embryo-level insights that can truly personalize your IVF journey.
If you seek granular, genetic-informed guidance during IVF, try Nucleus IVF+, an integrated IVF program that includes everything from family planning to embryo optimization.
Nucleus IVF+: All-inclusive IVF guidance with genetic insights
Nucleus IVF+ is the first IVF package with genetic optimization at its core. It combines advanced genetic science, compassionate guidance, and clinical coordination to help you make informed, confident decisions at every step.
By signing up for Nucleus, your IVF experience becomes a guided journey tailored to your unique genes, goals, and values. Nucleus IVF+ includes:
24/7 support from genetic counselors: Licensed genetic counselors work with you on each decision, explaining every result in plain language, and helping you manage emotional and medical complexities with care.
Preconception genetic screening with Nucleus Preview: Gain clarity about your genetic compatibility and screen for 2,000+ inherited conditions you might pass on to your child, including cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and hemophilia.
Clinic matching: Nucleus connects you to an exclusive network of clinics and physicians with high success rates and helps you find a perfect match based on your genetic profile, health background, and reproductive goals.
Our clinic evaluations use Nucleus’s proprietary quantitative–qualitative model, merging verified success rates for embryo transfers with professional judgment from reproductive specialists to ensure that every clinic that Nucleus partners with demonstrates excellence validated by both empirical data and expert evaluation.
Complete IVF cycles: The Nucleus team guides you through every step of your IVF cycle, including ovarian stimulation, egg maturation and retrieval, sperm collection, fertilization, and ultimately embryo selection and transfer.
Donor selection: Individuals using donor eggs, sperm, or embryos can access an exclusive donor network via Nucleus.
Embryo analysis with side-by-side comparison: Nucleus’s AI-powered analysis looks deeper than standard PGT tests, examining embryos across health and well-being genetic traits and helping you identify those with lower risk profiles for late-onset diseases.
Health insights for you: Nucleus Health helps you understand your genetic risks and offers reports with tailored tips to live longer, healthier lives.
Book an onboarding call with Nucleus to start personalizing your IVF journey.
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Featured image source: Carrot
