[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/03/12/23andme...
While I could never bring myself to spend the $199, I was a very early adopter when it went on sale for DNA day (maybe the first DNA day sale), and the rest of my family bought the next time it went on sale for DNA day a year later. Now that medical results are back, I think it is worth either price, particularly if you have any concerns about genetic health issues being passed down to you.
In my case, my father was schizophrenic (and a couple of other relatives on the same side of the family likely suffered from undiagnosed mental illness based on what I know of their behavior and the details of their violent deaths), so I was more than a little curious about whether I had any of the genetic hints that I might suffer the same fate. I don't, and knowing that I don't have the couple of markers known to 23andme was worth at least $99.
A few years after we all signed up for 23andme, my father passed away of pancreatic cancer, which can also be a genetic condition, and so I was able to check for the risk factors that are known (though my father also lacked those markers, so it's either a marker that is unknown to 23andme, or he was not genetically predisposed to pancreatic cancer in his case). That was, again, worth at least $99, to me.
I know in either case, the ability of 23andme to predict those diseases is low, and it shouldn't replace hands-on medical care and paying attention to warnings signs, but it does provide some predictive power. And, for a while they were doing original research (polling their customers and comparing data to produce reports), which was really cool and fun to see happening. I don't think they're still doing that, maybe because of the FDA ruling.
When the medical stuff went away, I stopped recommending 23andme to friends and family, as it no longer held any interest for me. The family tree functionality is neat, I guess, but I'm not Mormon, and don't have a huge amount of interest in whether I'm related to somebody interesting 200 years ago (I'm probably not; I come from very poor white trash stock).
In short, the fact that we're arguing over whether a genetic profile is expensive at $199 or at $99 is a laughable first world problem. I'd like it if more of the world could afford it, and my signing up early was part of my encouragement for that to happen; I want it to be possible for everyone to look at their genetic predispositions and such, and take some of their medical care into their own hands with more informed choices. So, I opted in early. I would have bought eventually at $199, if they hadn't ever offered the $99 deal.
But, I too, would like to see it getting cheaper. It's been many years now, since I bought in at $99. At some point, they've gotta be thinking in terms of making it more accessible to more people. There are huge swaths of people for whom $199 is not chump change.
Many of those medical genetic tests are more expensive because they directly sequence the region of the gene associated with the disorder, providing much more data (for example, for some BRCA tests, a 'marker' consists of thousands of genomic positions, where 23andme might provide only several SNPs). This is important because a lot of disease-causing mutations are private to a single individual or a very closely-related group of individuals, and would not turn up in the population-level GWASes behind the construction of the present 23andme assay.