Lab Fees
What gets tested, what it costs, and why requiring labs is a good sign.
What gets tested, what it costs, and why requiring labs is a good sign.
Across the 20 programmes we price, all-in cost runs from $145 a month at the starter dose, with the cheapest first year at about $1,740 (NexLife, $145 a month at a 2.4 mg maintenance dose). Every figure on this page is on that same all-in basis.
All-in monthly cost = medication + any recurring fee, at a named dose, before tax and before prepaid discounts. Captured 2026-08-05. How we verify a price.
All-in monthly cost at 2.4 mg
| Programme | All-in at 2.4 mg | First year | Per mg | Structure | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NexLife | $145 | $1,740 | $15.10 | flat at every dose | ✓ verified at source |
| Yucca Health | $146 | $1,752 | $15.21 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Henry Meds | $149 | $1,788 | $15.52 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| OrderlyMeds ⚠ reports | $149 | $1,788 | $15.52 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Join Fridays | $175 | $2,100 | $18.23 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Mochi Health | $178 | $2,136 | $18.54 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| MEDVi | $179 | $2,148 | $18.65 | flat at every dose | ✓ verified at source |
| Hims & Hers | $199 | $2,388 | $20.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Found | $199 | $2,388 | $20.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| LifeMD | $199 | $2,388 | $20.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| ShedRx | $199 | $2,388 | $20.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| TrimRx | $199 | $2,388 | $20.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| SkinnyRx | $199 | $2,388 | $20.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| IVIM Health | $224 | $2,688 | $23.33 | flat at every dose | ✓ verified at source |
| Amble Health | $225 | $2,700 | $23.44 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Noom Med | $249 | $2,988 | $25.94 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Eden | $295 | $3,540 | $30.73 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Ro Body | $299 | $3,588 | $31.15 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Remedy Meds | $299 | $3,588 | $31.15 | flat at every dose | third-party figure |
| Lavender Sky Health | $324 | $3,625 | $33.75 | rises with dose | ✓ verified at source |
What escalating the dose does to your bill
What to ask before you enrol
One question does most of the work: what will I pay in total in month six at 2.4 mg, including every fee? A programme that answers in one sentence has flat, all-inclusive pricing. A programme that needs three sentences has a structure worth reading carefully. A programme that cannot answer has told you something.
Then four more: which pharmacy fills the prescription, is the prescriber licensed in my state, does the quoted rate hold at renewal, and what is refundable before shipment.
Where these numbers come from
One dataset, captured 2026-08-05, with a verification status on every record. Prices we read at the provider are tagged as such; figures taken from third-party round-ups are tagged separately and treated as indicative. Where sources disagree we show the conflict rather than choosing. The whole file is downloadable.
Why this distinction changes what you pay
Every structural difference in this market resolves into money at a maintenance dose. Whether a programme charges a membership, whether it reprices with the dose, whether it demands a term, and whether it bundles or splits its charges together account for most of the gap between the cheapest tracked first year at $1,740 and the most expensive.
None of those differences is visible in an advertised headline figure, which is the reason this site exists in the form it does.
How to act on it this week
Price the dose you expect to maintain on rather than the starter dose. Add every recurring fee. Ask whether the quoted rate holds at renewal. Establish who compounds the medicine. And do not enter a prepaid term until you have held a maintenance dose for a cycle.
Those five steps take under an hour and reliably beat any amount of comparison reading, because they surface the information that comparison tables omit.
How this connects to what you will actually pay
Everything in this section resolves to one number: the all-in monthly cost at the dose you end up holding. Across the 20 programmes we price, that runs from $145 at the cheapest tracked route to several times that at the most expensive, for the identical molecule from the same category of licensed pharmacy.
4 of those programmes charge a recurring platform fee on top of medication and 19 hold one price at every strength. Those two facts explain most of the spread between advertised prices and real ones.
What we could verify and what we could not
4 of 32 tracked programmes have a price we read at the provider or manufacturer. The rest carry third-party figures we have not confirmed, or publish nothing we can interpret. Every table on this site marks which is which, and the comparison matrix lets you filter to verified prices only.
Where we have checked a third-party figure against a provider's own page, it has almost always moved — and it has moved upward. Promotional first months, prepaid bundle rates and medication-only figures that exclude memberships are all published as ongoing all-in prices. Assume an unverified figure is optimistic.
The regulatory distinction that sits under all of this
Compounded semaglutide is not FDA-approved. FDA does not review compounded preparations for safety, effectiveness or quality before they are marketed. The active molecule is the same as the branded product; the pre-market review is not, and the assurance comes instead from the pharmacy, the state board that licenses it and, at good operations, batch sterility and potency testing.
That is a legitimate framework rather than a loophole, and it is also why the price is lower. It puts more of the verification burden on the patient, which is the honest trade being made.
How this component moves the total
Across the 20 priced programmes, all-in cost at a maintenance dose spans $145 to $324. Most published comparisons explain that spread as differences in the medicine. It is not: the molecule is identical and frequently comes from the same category of licensed pharmacy.
It is overhead, clinical wrap, pharmacy sourcing and margin — plus the component this page isolates, which is invisible in a single headline figure.
The comparison this makes possible
Once each component is priced separately, two programmes with the same advertised number stop looking equivalent. 4 of 20 charge a mandatory recurring fee; 19 hold one price at every dose. A programme scoring badly on both can advertise the same figure as one scoring well on both.
That is why every table here states all-in cost at a named dose rather than a headline, and why some of our figures are higher than a programme's own homepage.
What to take from this page
One number to carry into any intake conversation: what you will pay in month six at 2.4 mg, including every fee. On the cheapest verified route that is $145. Anything materially below that band, from anyone, deserves the question of which of the four distortions is producing it.
Testing as a signal
Isolating baseline bloodwork and who pays for it is the only way two programmes with different structures become comparable. Without it you are ranking marketing decisions rather than costs.
The spread is not marginal. All-in cost at a 2.4 mg maintenance dose runs $145 to $324 across the 20 programmes we price — for the identical molecule, frequently from the same category of licensed pharmacy. Add the brand routes and the same active ingredient spans more than fifteenfold, from a roughly $149 oral option to a list price near $1,349.
The correction worth more than any negotiation: price the dose you expect to hold, add every recurring charge, and compare that figure. On the cheapest verified route it is $145 a month.
What a programme's answer here reveals
A programme that can state this component in one sentence has a simple structure and usually knows it is competitive. One that needs three sentences has a structure worth reading closely — not necessarily a worse deal, but a more conditional one.
One that cannot answer before an intake has made a commercial choice: it wants your contact details and a medical history before you can compare it against anything. That is legal and common, and it is why several programmes on this site carry a page explaining why we publish no figure for them.
Get the answer in writing. Almost every dispute in public complaint records for this category traces back to a number that was never put in an email.
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.
Where lab fees 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.
Open these rather than taking our word for it. Every one is a regulator, a trial registry, a label, an accreditor or the manufacturer.
Compare every programme on one screen
The matrix carries all-in price at every dose, fee structure, commitment terms, pharmacy disclosure and verification status for every programme we track.