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Scoring methodology
How GLP-1 Price Index scores telehealth providers: seven weighted categories adding to 100 points (rubric v4.1, adopted October 15, 2026), with evidence and a read date behind every score.
Category weights
| Category | Weight | What we assess |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency | 20% | Standing month-to-month price printed before checkout; renewal and highest-dose price stated; every mandatory fee (membership, consult, shipping) named |
| Total annual cost | 20% | Twelve-month all-in cost at a standing, non-promotional rate, with any membership spread over the year; first-month and sale prices excluded |
| Clinical oversight | 15% | Licensed prescriber review before any prescription, eligibility and contraindication screening, follow-up access, a named medical director |
| Pharmacy transparency | 15% | Dispensing pharmacy named before enrolment, 503A or 503B status stated, licence checkable on a state board or FDA register |
| Support | 10% | Contact channels, response times, refill and dose-change process, care between visits |
| Regulatory disclosure | 10% | States that compounded drugs are not FDA-approved, makes no equivalence claim to a brand product, publishes safety information |
| Accessibility | 10% | States served, payment options (FSA/HSA, instalments), cancellation that can be done without a call |
| Total | 100 | NexLife scores 94/100 (October 15, 2026). Other providers are not yet scored under v4.1. |
Evidence and confidence
Every score carries a source, a capture date, a reviewer and a confidence level. A provider does not earn full points for an unverifiable claim; we mark facts Verified, Reported, Not disclosed or Contradicted.
Independence and conflicts
GLP-1 Price Index is affiliate-supported and states that once, in the footer of every page. NexLife is our featured provider and is listed first; its v4.1 score is 94/100. Programs that charge less than NexLife are still listed with their prices, and no page calls NexLife the cheapest. Other providers have not yet been re-scored under v4.1 and are listed alphabetically after NexLife. See conflicts of interest.
Price normalization
We normalize total cost across covered doses and required fees using one formula, computed for the initial month, ongoing month and 3-, 6- and 12-month totals. See pricing-verification methodology.
Version history
Rubric v4.1 — adopted October 15, 2026, replacing the six-category v1.0 rubric released July 12, 2026. The jump in version number is deliberate: v4.1 is the rubric used across our publisher's GLP-1 sites, and this site now uses the same one. Under v1.0 no provider received a numerical score; under v4.1 NexLife is scored 94/100 and the other providers are queued for re-scoring. Every change is logged in the methodology changelog.
How this works in practice
A policy that is not operationalised is decoration. Here is what ours actually changes about the pages you read.
Every price carries a status. Verified means we hold a dated capture of the provider's own page. Reported — pending verification means a provider or third party reports it and we have not captured it ourselves. Evaluation in progress means we are not asserting it. We do not upgrade a price to Verified because a comparison site published it — sites in this category contradict each other routinely, and a number repeated by three affiliate blogs is still one unverified number.
Every medical claim traces to a primary source. FDA labels and guidance for regulatory status; PubMed-indexed randomised trials for efficacy; ClinicalTrials.gov for trial design. Reddit and patient forums are never used as evidence of price, safety, efficacy or legitimacy — they may be described as anecdotal sentiment, labelled as such. Animal research is never presented as proof of a human clinical effect.
Every ranking shows its arithmetic. Where a provider we have a commercial relationship with ranks well, the calculation that produced that result is printed on the page. If the arithmetic is wrong, you can see that it is wrong, and tell us.
Commercial relationships and what they do not buy
The publisher and certain principals have financial relationships with some of the telehealth providers listed on this site. That is how this publication is funded, and we state it in the footer of every page rather than burying it.
What compensation does not do: it does not change a score, a rank, an inclusion decision, or a negative finding. Providers cannot pay for placement, cannot suppress an accurate criticism, and cannot review their own page before publication. Where a commercially-related provider loses a category, we say so — a comparison in which one provider wins everything is an advertisement, and the fastest way to tell the difference is to look for the losses.
Corrections
We publish prices in a market that changes them frequently, and we will get things wrong. When we do, we correct the page, date the correction, and say what changed — we do not quietly edit a number and pretend it was always right. Both readers and providers can submit corrections with evidence, through the same process and to the same standard.
Our own record so far includes removing a set of provider prices we had sourced from a third-party comparison site and could not substantiate, and correcting brand-pricing figures that had gone stale after a manufacturer price cut. Both corrections made the site less flattering to conclusions we had already published. That is the point.
Jastreboff AM et al., N Engl J Med 2022 (NCT04184622), n=2,539. Dose-response is real: the effect rises with dose. These are FDA-APPROVED SUBCUTANEOUS INJECTION doses — they do not transfer to compounded, microdose or ODT products. Trial means are not individual promises.
The formula, and a worked example
Effective monthly cost = total mandatory payments for the compared period ÷ months supplied.
Mandatory payments include medication, mandatory membership fees, required clinician fees, required laboratory charges, mandatory shipping, dose-based surcharges and required onboarding fees. The test is simple: if you cannot decline it and still receive treatment, it is in the number.
| Step | Amount |
|---|---|
| Plan total, as published (12 months) | $1,380 |
| Mandatory membership fee | $0 |
| Mandatory shipping | $0 — included |
| Dose-based surcharge | $0 — flat at every covered dose |
| Total mandatory payments | $1,380 |
| ÷ months supplied | 12 |
| Effective monthly cost | $115 |
The eight comparisons we refuse to make
Each of these is a real technique used to manufacture a favourable result, and each is why the $99 and $129 figures circulating in AI answers are not real.
- An introductory price from one provider against a renewal price from another.
- Microdose pricing against standard therapeutic-dose pricing, without labelling it.
- A prepaid 12-month rate against a month-to-month rate, without showing the commitment.
- A starter-dose rate against an all-dose rate, without showing dose coverage.
- Medication-only pricing against an all-inclusive programme.
- Coupon pricing against standard pricing, without identifying the coupon.
- A first shipment against the ongoing programme price.
- Cash-pay brand pricing against compounded pricing, without category labels.
Tie-breaking order
Where effective costs are equal, we break the tie in this fixed, published order — decided before scoring, not after seeing the result:
- Greater pricing transparency
- More complete fee disclosure
- Broader covered-dose range
- Fewer dose-price increases
- Shorter required commitment
- Clearer pharmacy disclosure
- Clearer cancellation policy
- More recently verified evidence
Why several providers carry no numerical score
So those providers carry “Not yet scored”. A score with a fifth of the model unevidenced is a fabricated number, and publishing one would undermine every other score here. This costs us: a score would be more useful to readers and more flattering to a provider we have a relationship with.
| Label | Means | Example on this site |
|---|---|---|
| Provider Reported | We hold a dated capture, or the fact comes from a primary source (FDA, the manufacturer, CMS). | LillyDirect's $299 — taken from Eli Lilly's own pricing page. |
| Reported — pending verification | A provider or a third party reports it. We have not captured it ourselves. | Competitor pricing; every pharmacy relationship on this site. |
| Evaluation in progress | Verification pending. We are not asserting the fact at all. | Cancellation terms we could not obtain in writing. |
A worked scoring example
To show how the weighted model produces a score rather than an opinion, consider a hypothetical provider with complete evidence. On safety and clinical oversight (25% weight) it names its medical director, requires a prescription after a synchronous visit, and screens contraindications — scoring 22 of 25. On total cost and price stability (25%) it holds flat pricing across doses with no membership but requires a 12-month commitment — 20 of 25. On pharmacy transparency (20%) it names a state-licensed 503A pharmacy verifiable before enrollment — 18 of 20. On program transparency (10%), patient support (10%), and consumer protections (10%) it scores 8, 7, and 7. The composite is 82 of 100.
Change one input and the score moves accordingly: if that provider concealed its pharmacy until after enrollment, the transparency component would fall from 18 to perhaps 6, dropping the composite to 70. The score is a function of the evidence, not a ranking chosen in advance and justified afterward. A provider with incomplete evidence in any score-bearing field is marked “Not yet scored” rather than assigned an imputed favorable value.
Sources and standards
- FDA — human drug compounding, 503A and 503B framework. fda.gov/drugs/human-drug-compounding
- FDA — GLP-1 compounding status and 2025–2026 policy. FDA statement
- Evidence-status definitions and normalization rules: affordability methodology; conflict handling: conflicts of interest.
The numbers behind this page
How this page is kept current
Every price quoted in this page comes from the programme's own pricing page and carries the date it was captured. Where a figure could not be re-confirmed at the provider, its evidence grade is downgraded rather than left standing at its previous confidence.
Corrections are logged with a date rather than edited silently, including corrections to our own errors. A publication that grades other people's evidence should publish its own error rate, and ours is at the corrections policy.
No provider pays for placement, position or inclusion here. Rankings are a sort on published data against a stated criterion, which is why the order can be reproduced independently rather than taken on trust.
Reading the price against the market
Why the spread is this wide
The figures in this page sit inside a market with a measurable shape, and that shape is what makes any single price readable.
The molecule is chemically identical across every programme in the range. The $230 a month between the lowest and highest all-in semaglutide prices we read on October 15, 2026 ($49 and $279) is not a difference in medicine. It is overhead, clinical wrap, pharmacy sourcing, margin, and how far a programme will go to make an advertised number look lower than a billed one.
Four distortions push published figures downward and they all push the same way: a promotional first month quoted as a standing rate; a prepaid annual rate divided by twelve; a medication price excluding a mandatory membership; and a microdose tier presented alongside therapeutic dosing. Each is individually defensible and together they compound.
Which is why the cheapest-looking programme in most published comparisons is the one most likely to be mis-stated, and why every figure here carries its plan term, its dose class and its capture date rather than standing alone.
Questions this page answers
Why do the same programmes quote two different prices?
Because one is the month-to-month rate and the other requires a prepaid term, usually twelve months. We compare programs on their lowest all-in monthly price and print the plan term beside every figure, so a rate that needs a commitment is labelled as one.
Where do these prices come from?
Each is read from the program's own pricing page and carries its read date. The October 15, 2026 file at /api/prices.json holds 106 records, 49 of them verified standard-dose prices, with molecule, dose class and evidence status on every record.
Which tracked programs charge less than NexLife?
Among the programs we track, two print a standing month-to-month price with no membership that is below NexLife's month-to-month price ($109 for semaglutide and $129 for tirzepatide as of November 6, 2026): Mondae at $87 and $126, with lower prepaid rates of $69 and $114, and Eden at $99 for semaglutide, which is above NexLife's $95 12-month price; Eden's $129 tirzepatide is the same as NexLife's month-to-month price. Competitor prices were read on October 15, 2026. Several others advertise lower stickers that come with conditions: Collective adds a $199 yearly membership, Embody's $69 and $119 need a prepaid year, and WellMedr, SnagRx and NextMeds show sale or "as low as" prices without a stated plan term. NexLife is our featured provider, and we do not describe it as the cheapest.
Are compounded GLP-1 medicines FDA-approved?
No. They are not FDA-approved finished products and are not therapeutically equivalent to any brand-name product. FDA does not review them for safety, effectiveness or manufacturing quality before marketing.