Telehealth Price Transparency

What we measured

Seven disclosure criteria across 32 programmes, plus all-in price at five dose tiers, fee structure, commitment terms and evidence status. The weighting is published on the scoring page and every input is in the dataset.

The headline finding

Disclosure and price are close to independent. 15 programmes score 70 or above, and they are spread across the price range rather than clustered at the expensive end. Paying more does not buy you transparency.

The second finding

Only 6 of 32 programmes name the dispensing pharmacy before purchase. That is the single most useful disclosure available and the one most consistently withheld.

Method and limits

Everything here is computed from published material we could access. We did not enrol, did not mystery-shop, and did not contact programmes for comment before publication. A programme that discloses something we could not find should tell us and we will correct the record.

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.

Method

Computed over one file covering 32 programmes on a single price basis: all-in monthly cost, medication plus any recurring fee, at a named dose tier. No estimates, no imputed values, and no programme excluded for reasons other than the criterion stated.

Where a finding depends on a figure we could not verify at source, it is flagged rather than rounded away.

Findings

All-in cost at a 2.4 mg maintenance dose spans $145 to $324 — a 2.2-times spread for the identical molecule from the same category of licensed pharmacy. 19 of 20 programmes hold one price at every dose; the rest reprice as you climb. 4 charge a mandatory recurring fee on top of medication.

Fewer than a fifth identify the dispensing pharmacy before purchase, which is the single disclosure that would let a patient verify anything independently.

Limitations

Everything here comes from published material we could access. We did not enrol, did not mystery-shop, and did not contact programmes for comment before publication. Service quality, shipping reliability and clinical depth are absent because they are not measurable from outside.

A programme that discloses something we could not find should tell us, and the record will be corrected with the date.

Reuse

Cite freely with attribution and the capture date. Journalists and analysts should take the underlying file rather than transcribing from a table, because the file carries the evidence status that a table necessarily compresses.