Taking a look at Quest’s website, hormone tests are about $225 if you aren’t going to go through insurance. Ideally, you’d get these done every 3 months until you figure out your dosage levels. So ideally, you would budget ~$1000 for that. Also, these would still leave medical records that would clearly indicate something is up if you are worried about like worse-case scenario (and getting around that may require access to equipment with costs over $100k and would require some training? idk really know what option their are for this, but assuming something like LC-MS). Technically not strictly necessary, but there is so much variation in how people respond to doses that you pretty much have to do some testing to make sure you are in target ranges. If you manage to get an antiandrogen, those might require additional testing (ie: checking potassium levels if you are on spiro, which would ideally be done before starting)

The hormones would be far cheaper than that afaik, although you may want to get that in bulk upfront if you are concerned about the political changes limiting supplies. And I think I heard a rumor that getting antiandrogens from the grey market in the US is harder right now? So monotherapy may be the only option.

I think anyone starting HRT in the US now should consider DIY and think its probably better than nothing. But I think if I were starting again today, I’d go through informed consent again if at all possible and only switch to DIY if that became the only option. And by that point, hopefully I’d have a decent idea how dosing works for me that going a while without testing wouldn’t be a problem.

Also, if you use injections, they tell you to only use the vial for a month, but a single vial can technically last far longer (the trade-off being the more its used, the more likely there are to be contaminants - one month is sorta like a best sell-by date used by companies to cover their ass). So stockpiling is viable via non-DIY.