Technology

When it's an inexpensive product that nobody ever has a reason to buy twice yet remains an ongoing cost for the company? (They keep the data available for review and continue to update it with useful information as knowledge of genetic traits and lineages grows). That's not a way to build an ongoing cash flow to cover expenses. Especially when all the people inclined to be interested have already purchased.

When quarterly profits must always be green compared to the previous quarter.

Selling a product is a good business model if the product has a shelf life or naturally degrades over time, but served you so well that you'll replace it in kind or with an upgrade.

A product that does something exactly once and done doesn't scale long term, so once the hype was over, that was that.

Not really. They used to have pretty good privacy agreements. I don't know about now. They do supply agrigate information to pharmaceutical companies, but that has become a pretty fungible resource. The only big consumer of individual DNA information is law enforcement, and that's more of an expense than an income flow, since reviewing warrants and providing responses costs money.

An important lesson in infosec is that the best way to reduce the cost of discovery and warrant compliance is to regularly delete any data you don't need or aren't legally required to retain. Companies like this don't have that option. Data is both an asset and a liability.