How This Site Works

What this page covers

Where the numbers come from and what we will not publish. Everything on this site rests on one dataset with a capture date and an evidence status on every record, and this page states how that applies here.

How to check us

Download the price index and sort it yourself. The order should match our tables. Follow any provider link to its own pricing page and compare. If our figure and theirs differ, ours is wrong and we want to know.

What we cannot tell you

Whether a programme ships on time, whether messages get answered, or whether semaglutide is appropriate for you. The first two we do not measure and will not guess at; the third belongs to a licensed clinician with your history in front of them.

Independence

No programme pays for placement, position or the removal of a criticism. Rankings are computed from the published dataset rather than assigned. Where commercial links exist they are disclosed on the page carrying them and cannot affect an order that is generated from data.

Corrections

Substantive errors — a wrong price, a misstated term, a ranking moved by bad data — are logged with the date they were fixed. A site publishing prices in a fast-moving market that never records a correction is not being careful; it is not checking. Report anything you believe is wrong through contact.

The standard this site holds itself to

Publish what can be verified, label what cannot, and record what changed. Those three rules generate everything else: why 4 of 32 programmes carry a verified tag and the rest do not, why some rows are blank, and why corrections appear on the page where the error was rather than in a log nobody reads.

They also explain what is missing. There are no ratings out of ten, no star scores and no aggregate quality judgements, because we cannot measure service quality from outside and inventing a number for it would corrupt the figures that are real.

Why the dataset is published rather than described

Every table on this site is generated from one file: 32 programmes with all-in cost at five dose tiers, first-year totals, fee structure, commitment terms, care model, pharmacy disclosure, evidence status and source, each with a capture date.

That file is downloadable. Sort it by first-year cost and it should reproduce our cheapest ranking exactly. If it does not, that is a bug or a lie, and you can find it without our help. A comparison site that will not publish its own data is asking to be trusted rather than checked.

The commercial conflict, named

Comparison sites in health are funded by the companies they rank. That creates an obvious incentive to rank the highest-paying option first and describe the arrangement vaguely, and it is the reason readers are right to be sceptical of every site in this category.

The defences available are boring and checkable: compute rankings from a published dataset on a stated sort key, publish the dataset, log corrections publicly, and record negative facts about highly ranked programmes. None of that proves good faith. It makes bad faith detectable, which is the most any publisher can honestly offer.

What good looks like in this market

A programme that publishes its price at every dose tier, names the pharmacy that compounds the medicine, states its cancellation terms before you pay, and can decline to prescribe. Those four together are rarer than they should be, and they cost a programme nothing except the ability to advertise a number that is not the number.

The cheapest tracked route currently runs $145 a month all-in at a 2.4 mg maintenance dose, about $1,740 for a first year. That figure is what a well-informed buyer should be measuring every other offer against.

Where this sits against the dataset

The figures behind this page come from one file: 32 programmes, all-in cost at five dose tiers, terms, care model, pharmacy disclosure, evidence status and source, each with a capture date. All-in cost at a maintenance dose runs $145 to $324 across it.

Change the file and every table, ranking and calculator changes with it. There is no separate editorial layer to adjust, which is the structural reason a policy page here can describe a rule rather than an intention.

What it would take to prove us wrong

Download the dataset, sort it on the criterion named in any ranking title, and check whether our published order reproduces. Then open any provider link and compare our figure to theirs. Both checks take minutes and neither requires trusting us.

If they disagree, that is a bug or a lie and we would rather hear about it than have it found later by someone with less reason to be generous.

Where how this site works sits in the sequence

Order matters more than most guidance admits. Establish coverage first, because a covered prescription under a documented indication beats every cash route here. Then establish the dose you expect to hold. Only then compare prices.

Most people do this backwards — compare prices, enrol, then discover an indication they already qualified for. Semaglutide has more of those routes than most weight-management drugs: type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular risk reduction, and a liver indication for a narrow population.

The check that costs nothing

Ask which pharmacy fills the prescription and search your state board's licensee register for it. Two minutes, free, and possible for only 6 of the 20 priced programmes because the rest do not name one.

A name and a licence number is the good answer. A category is incomplete but honest. A deflection about proprietary partnerships is the answer.

Why this matters more here than for approved medicines

An approved product has been reviewed before marketing and is made under a federal quality system with supply-chain traceability. A compounded preparation has not been through that review. Its assurance comes from the pharmacy, the state board licensing it, and at good operations batch testing for sterility and potency.

That is a legitimate framework rather than a loophole, and it moves verification work onto you. It is the honest reason the compounded price is lower.

What this page assumes about you

That you are paying cash, that you will hold a maintenance dose rather than a starter dose, and that a difference of a few hundred dollars across a year is worth an hour of reading. If any of those is wrong, the ordering here changes.

Insurance is the biggest one. A covered prescription under a documented indication beats every cash route on this site, and establishing whether you qualify comes before comparing 20 cash prices spanning $145 to $324.

The bias we can see in our own data

We track what programmes publish, so programmes that publish well look better here than programmes that treat pricing as a sales conversation. That is a real bias and we would rather name it than pretend the dataset is neutral.

It cuts a defensible way — a programme unwilling to state a price before an intake has made a choice you should notice — but it is a bias, and 12 tracked programmes appear here with an explanation instead of a number because of it.

What we deliberately do not measure

Shipping reliability, response times, and whether the clinical oversight is any good. None is observable from outside without enrolling, and we did not enrol.

That absence is why there is no rating out of ten anywhere here. A single score would compress price, disclosure, service and clinical depth into one figure and hide the weighting — which is precisely the trick that makes comparison sites feel authoritative while telling you less than a table would.

The usable proxy is what a programme publishes before it has your money, and that is what every disclosure column here records.

The switching cost nobody prices

Moving programmes for a modest saving carries two costs a table cannot show: a supply gap while a new intake is reviewed, and a new prescriber restarting titration rather than continuing your dose.

The second is expensive. Sixteen weeks back through the ladder erases most of what a year's saving would have bought. Ask for dose continuation in writing before cancelling anything, and do not cancel until the new programme has shipped.