Scoring System

The seven inputs

1. Price published at every dose tier — 25 points.
2. Price does not rise as the dose escalates — 20 points.
3. Dispensing pharmacy or prescriber named before purchase — 15 points.
4. No separate recurring membership fee — 10 points.
5. Prepaid term and its rate published — 10 points.
6. State availability published — 10 points.
7. Cancellation terms published — 10 points.

All seven are derivable from the published dataset, so the number can be recomputed and checked. If you think the weighting is wrong, take the data and weight it differently.

What the score is not

It measures what a programme publishes before you pay, not the quality of its care. A programme can score 100 and ship late; another can score 40 and employ excellent clinicians. What disclosure buys you is the ability to verify things yourself.

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.

What the inputs look like in practice

Of the 20 priced programmes, 15 name a dispensing pharmacy or prescriber before purchase, 16 charge no separate recurring fee, and 19 hold one price at every dose.

Those three inputs alone separate the field more than price does. A programme can sit mid-table on cost and top the disclosure score, and several do.

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.

The short version of scoring system

Price the dose you expect to hold, not the one in the advertisement. Add every recurring fee. Verify the pharmacy. Everything else on this page is detail underneath those three.

Done properly the answer is usually one of a handful of programmes: the cheapest verified route runs $145 a month all-in, about $1,740 across a first year including titration.

The next step that actually moves things

Send two or three programmes the same five questions: total at 2.4 mg including every fee, which pharmacy, is the prescriber licensed in my state, what notice to cancel and what is refundable, and which form of the active ingredient is used.

Whoever answers all five in writing has told you more than any comparison table can, this one included. Whoever does not has also told you something.

One thing worth doing annually

Re-price the market at your actual maintenance dose. No programme notifies existing patients when a competitor drops below it, and semaglutide pricing moved repeatedly through 2025 and 2026 — manufacturer cuts, an oral option, a higher-dose product, and several platforms leaving compounded entirely.

An hour once a year is a poor use of time for most purchases and an excellent one for a medication you may take for years.

Reading this alongside the rest of the site

Pricing pages isolate one component. Provider reviews carry the whole record for one programme. Comparisons run two side by side at every dose. The rankings sort the same dataset on different questions. None is the whole picture and none is meant to be.

If you read one other page, make it how to verify a pharmacy. Price is the easiest thing to compare and rarely the thing that goes wrong.

What we would need to change our mind

A programme publishing a figure at a dose tier currently blank. A named dispensing pharmacy with a checkable licence. A pricing model changing in either direction. A regulatory action. Or a correction from a reader with a source we can open.

All five are logged with the date they landed, on the change log and in the dataset. Prices here were captured 2026-08-05.

What this site will not do

Publish an estimated price for a programme that does not publish one. Rank a programme higher because it pays. Present a compounded preparation as equivalent to an approved product. Or carry a figure without the date it was captured.

Those four rules cost us pages, rankings and revenue, and they are the only reason a reader has to prefer this to a round-up assembled in an afternoon. A price without its date is not a fact, and a comparison built from undated prices is not a comparison.

Who this site is not for

Anyone with coverage under a documented indication, who should use it rather than read a cash comparison. Anyone looking for a source without a prescription, which this site will not help with. And anyone wanting a single confident recommendation, because the honest answer depends on your dose, your coverage and your tolerance for commitment.

If you want the short version anyway: price the dose you will hold, add every fee, verify the pharmacy, and avoid long prepaid terms until you have tolerated a maintenance dose for a cycle.