How we know
Methodology
Every figure on this site is normalised to one basis, carries the date it was captured, and states how it was obtained. This page defines all three, plus the formula behind every ranking. If a claim on this site cannot be traced to something here, it is a defect — report it to the corrections desk.
The comparison basis
All-in monthly is the medication plus every mandatory recurring fee: membership amortised monthly, required shipping, and any consultation charge that is not optional. It is quoted at the maintenance dose — 10 mg/week for tirzepatide and 2.4 mg/week for semaglutide — because that is the dose most people settle at, and because quoting a starting dose lets a program advertise a number nobody pays for long.
Twelve-month cost uses a program's real prepaid annual rate where one is published, and twelve times the all-in monthly figure where one is not. Which of the two applies is printed beside every annual number, because a prepaid year and a monthly year are different products with different risk.
The dose ladder
This site records a price at every dose on the ladder rather than one price per provider: tirzepatide at 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5 and 15 mg per week, and semaglutide at 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 1.7 and 2.4 mg. Where a company has published a price at a dose, we record it. Where it has not, we record nothing.
We never interpolate. A program that publishes $199 at 2.5 mg and $289 at 10 mg has not told you what 5 mg costs, and filling that in with a straight line would be inventing a price. Of the 27 rankable tirzepatide programs, 17 publish a complete ladder; of the 29 rankable semaglutide programs, 21 do. Those gaps are the most useful thing in the dataset.
Evidence status
Every price carries one of five statuses, printed wherever the price appears.
- verified
- captured at checkout by our desk on the stated date
- provider-stated
- taken from the provider's own published pages; checkout capture pending
- operator-stated
- supplied by the operator with screenshots; independent capture pending
- reported
- sourced from dated third-party reporting; first-party capture pending
- unrankable
- no comparable maintenance figure published; excluded from every ranking
Status is not a quality judgement about the company. It is a statement about how well we know the number, and it is deliberately conservative: a figure supplied to us directly by an operator is weaker evidence than one we captured at checkout ourselves, even when the operator is entirely reliable.
The Value Score
The score is out of 100 and is recomputed at every build. It is a formula, not an opinion, and it is published here in full so anyone can re-run it against the downloadable dataset:
- Seventy points scaled by price. The category's cheapest all-in monthly figure divided by this program's, times seventy. The cheapest rankable program earns the full seventy; a program at double the floor earns thirty-five.
- Fifteen points scaled by evidence status: verified 100%, provider-stated 85%, reported 70%, operator-stated 60%.
- Ten points for a dose-flat price — one rate at every dose.
- Five points for carrying no membership fee.
The current tirzepatide floor is $169 and the semaglutide floor is $129, both over compounded programs only. Brand channels are excluded from the floor: a compounded program is not cheap merely because it undercuts an FDA-approved product, and using a brand price as the denominator would flatter the entire compounded field.
The evidence term is the part worth understanding. It scores our own confidence in a figure against the program quoting it. Our disclosed commercial partner's prices are operator-stated, so they lose six of those fifteen points at every single build. A scoring bar that cannot dock the site's own partner is an advertisement.
What is excluded, and why
A program is unrankable when it publishes no maintenance-dose price. 11 program records currently sit in that state. The most common cause is an advertised "from" price attached to a starting dose with nothing behind it — the single most common way GLP-1 pricing is misreported.
We do not substitute a starting price for a maintenance price, we do not average plan tiers, and we do not silently swap a promotional rate for a standard one. Where a promotion is running, both rates are stored and the promotional figure is labelled with its published end date.
The eight dimensions
Head-to-head pages compare programs across all-in monthly, twelve-month cost, dose policy, membership, shipping, commitment, cancellation terms and evidence status. A matchup where two programs differ on fewer than 3 of those eight is published but carries a noindex tag: two programs that differ only in price are the same product, and a long page pretending otherwise is padding.
What we do not know
- State-level availability. Providers publish this as prose ("most US states", "confirm at intake") rather than as a list. We reproduce what they say and do not claim per-state coverage we have not verified.
- Checkout confirmation. Most compounded figures on this site are provider-stated or reported, not captured at checkout by us. The status on each figure says which.
- Pharmacy identity. Many programs do not name the compounding pharmacy. Where that is true, the record says so rather than guessing.
Questions
What does all-in monthly include?
The medication plus every mandatory recurring fee — membership amortised monthly, required shipping, and any non-optional consultation charge — quoted at the maintenance dose.
Can a provider pay to rank higher?
No, because no ranking on this site is assigned. Every category is a minimum computed over a column of the published dataset at build time, and the dataset is downloadable so the computation can be repeated.
Why are some prices marked operator-stated?
Because the operator supplied them to us directly with supporting material, and we have not yet captured them independently at checkout. It is deliberately weaker than verified and costs the program points in the Value Score.