How we know

Methodology

Released August 11, 2026Last reviewed November 10, 2026

Researched By Dr. Parmis · Medical Researcher · Western University of Health Sciences

Medically Reviewed By Dr. Jonathan Snipes, MD · Kim Callender, NP (FNP-BC)

Last medically reviewed: November 10, 2026 · This page is informational and does not constitute medical advice.

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 Value Score formula and how our rankings are ordered. 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 floor divided by this program's all-in monthly figure, times seventy, capped at 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 floor is the lowest standing month-to-month rate (no membership, no promotion) that we read on a program's own pages on October 15, 2026: $126 for tirzepatide and $87 for semaglutide, both Mondae's. It is a reference price for the formula, not a program in this database, and no listed program's price sets it. 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: a price taken from a provider's own pages scores 85% of the fifteen points, a third-party report 70%, and only a checkout capture by our desk scores in full. NexLife, a disclosed commercial partner of this site, is scored by the same formula.

How the #1 pick and the lists are ordered (methodology v4.1)

Rankings on this site follow methodology v4.1, a seven-category editorial rubric scored out of 100: pricing transparency 20, total annual cost 20, clinical oversight 15, pharmacy transparency 15, support 10, regulatory disclosure 10 and accessibility 10. NexLife scores 94 of 100 and is our #1 pick. The v4.1 re-score of the other programs is pending, so every list shows NexLife first and the other programs that meet its criterion alphabetically, without rank numbers.

On price pages we also apply five published checks: billed by the month, medication and care in one price, the same price at every dose, no membership fee, and a first-party read of the price. The price-based Value Score below is a separate, mechanical figure computed from the dataset; it is shown beside each program but does not set the order of a list.

What is excluded, and why

A program is unrankable when it publishes no maintenance-dose price. 9 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. One program was removed from the database on November 10, 2026 by editorial decision; its pages redirect to the provider and review indexes.

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.

How are the rankings ordered?

NexLife is our #1 pick on methodology v4.1 (94 of 100). The other programs on each list are shown alphabetically while their v4.1 re-score is pending. Prices are never adjusted for any program: each comes from the provider's own pages or a dated report and carries its capture date.

What does operator-stated mean?

A figure the operator supplied to us directly with supporting material that we have not captured at checkout. It scores 60% of the evidence points. No record in the November 10, 2026 dataset carries that status; NexLife's record now uses the prices on its own plan pages (provider-stated).