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SAN DIEGO — As a single mother in her mid-20s, Lilly Frost was working as a beautician when she saw a Craigslist ad for egg donors and decided she could use the money.

The experience of helping a woman who she said had lost her only child to a drunk driver was so rewarding that Frost launched her own company recruiting other donors. "Once I started getting into that," she said, "I found a lot of joy."

Before long she moved into the related business of surrogacy, matching couples with women who would give birth to their children. But as Frost tells it, she couldn't stop thinking about how unfair it seemed that more people couldn't afford a surrogate birth, which typically costs more than $150,000 — and can easily reach double that.

"I was seeing my clients mortgaging their house, liquidating retirement accounts … to afford these services," she told a San Diego news site in 2015.

So she turned to a solution common in many industries: outsourcing.

Couples could save "over 60% compared...