Pricing-verification methodology

The one rule everything derives from

Monthly equivalent = plan total ÷ plan months. That is the whole method. We publish the plan total beside the monthly figure so you can check it. A provider quoting '$195/month on a 3-month plan' is making a claim about a $585 total, and if those two numbers disagree, one of them is wrong.

We normalise every provider onto a total ongoing monthly cost: medication plus any required membership, plus any mandatory fee. A programme that bills $199 for medication and $79 for a membership you cannot decline costs $278, and that is the number we rank on.

We never merge the six meanings of 'cheapest'

Six different meanings of "cheapest" — and why we refuse to merge them

Almost every comparison page in this category gives you a single "cheapest" number. There are at least six honest answers to that question, and they point to different providers. A page that merges them has chosen which answer flatters its preferred provider.

• Lowest advertised starting price. Frequently an introductory rate. TrimRx and MEDVi both advertise $179; both charge $299 ongoing.
• Lowest introductory price. Noom Med at $79 for a first month, then $199. Useful only if you plan to leave.
• Lowest month-to-month price. No commitment, no prepayment — the honest comparison for anyone who is not certain they will stay a year.
• Lowest committed-plan monthly equivalent. The plan total divided by the plan months. Lower, but you are locked in.
• Lowest full-dose cost. Excludes microdose programmes, which sit below every dose studied in the trials and are therefore not the same product.
• Lowest FDA-approved option. Brand Foundayo (oral) at $149/month and oral Wegovy at $149 now undercut most of the compounded market — while actually being approved.

These are six different questions. We publish all six and let you take the one that matches your situation.

Introductory rates are never used for ranking

An intro rate is customer-acquisition pricing. You pay the ongoing rate for eleven of your twelve months, so the ongoing rate is what we sort on. TrimRx's $179 and MEDVi's $179 are first-month figures; both charge $299 ongoing. Noom's $79 becomes $199. We flag intro pricing and exclude it from rankings.

What our evidence labels mean

Corrections we have applied to providers' own numbers

We audited all eighteen of NexLife's published plan cards — six programmes at three committed plan lengths — by checking three things against each other: does the monthly figure times the plan length equal the stated total, and does the stated saving reconcile against the month-to-month rate? Sixteen of the eighteen reconcile exactly. Two do not, and in both cases we publish the arithmetic rather than the marketing figure.

Semaglutide ODT, 3-month. The card shows a $597 total, $185/month, and a $42 saving. All three cannot be true. $185 × 3 = $555, and $199 × 3 − $42 = $555. Two of the three figures agree on $555, so the $597 total is the outlier. We publish $555.

Semaglutide microdose, 3-month. The card shows $117/month against a $357 total. $357 ÷ 3 = $119, and the stated $30 saving independently confirms the $357 total. We publish $119.

Both corrections make NexLife look marginally worse than its own marketing claims. We publish them anyway, because a publication that only corrects errors in its own favour is not correcting anything.

This is what a pricing-verification methodology is for. Anyone can copy a number off a marketing card. Checking whether the card agrees with itself is the part that separates a comparison site from a press release — and note that both material corrections make NexLife look slightly worse than its own advertising, not better.

Prices go stale, and we say so

This market changes prices frequently. Every cost page carries a verification date. Brand pricing is re-checked against manufacturer sources; compounded pricing against provider pages. If a figure here is more than about thirty days old, treat it as indicative and confirm at checkout — and please tell us.

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, and we may earn a commission when readers use certain links. 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.