Procedure
Methodology
Every price here is a reading taken off a company's own page on a stated day, then put through the same arithmetic as every other price on the site. This page is that procedure in full — the capture steps, the five ways a price gets captured wrong, and what a monthly number becomes over a year.
Last updated
Where this page sits
This is the procedure: the steps, the named failure modes, and the arithmetic, worked on rows that are on the site today. The commitments behind it — who writes this, what a commercial relationship can and cannot reach, what we do with an FDA warning letter, and what credentials we do not have — are on the editorial policy. Neither page repeats the other.
Section 1
What this method has priced so far
Three counts, read straight out of the published data rather than typed here — which is also the first thing this page is demonstrating.
53
Priced rows
44
Charge more than they advertise
10
Bill every four weeks
Section 2
How a price is captured
The same five steps run for every row, in this order. A price that cannot complete them does not get published — it is not softened, estimated or carried over from a previous quarter.
- 1
Open the company's own page
The pricing or checkout page on the company's own domain. Not an aggregator, not a comparison site, not a press release, not another publisher's table.
- 2
Load it clean
No stored session, no prior visit, nothing carried over. Providers run split tests, and a price shown to a returning visitor is not the price a new reader will see.
- 3
Go through the intake, not around it
Most of these are single-page apps whose marketing copy and whose checkout disagree. Where they do, the price the funnel would actually charge is the one that counts — we read it out of what the application itself loads.
- 4
Ask what month two costs
The single most productive question on this site. A first-order rate is a real price for exactly one charge, and it is not the price of treatment.
- 5
Record the date and the URL
Both are required fields on every row. A row missing either fails validation and the site does not build, so an undated or unsourced number cannot ship by accident.
Section 3
The five ways a price gets captured wrong
These are not hypothetical. Each one is a specific arithmetic mistake that turns a real number on a real page into a figure nobody is charged, and between them they account for nearly every implausibly cheap price in this market. Three of the five are shown below on a row that is live on this site right now.
- Error 1
Prepay as monthly
A multi-month commitment price is printed with a “/mo” suffix, so a rate that only exists if you pay for three, six or twelve months up front reads as the price of one month.
- How you spot it
- A large headline number, a smaller “billed quarterly”, “3-month plan” or “save 40%” line near it, and a second, higher price that only appears once you decline the plan.
- What we publish instead
- We publish the price of one cycle with no commitment, and show the prepay number beside it rather than instead of it.
On a live row
Captured August 2026
Ro — Semaglutide — Wegovy
- Advertised
- $238
- Charged, with no commitment
- $498
- Over a year, at 12 charges
- $5,976 not $2,856
The headline understates the year by $3,120. See the working on the Ro review.
- Error 2
Introductory rate as the ongoing rate
A first-month or first-order promotional price is captured as the standing price, so the figure is correct for exactly one charge and wrong for every charge after it.
- How you spot it
- “Starting at”, “first month”, “new patients”, or a price that is a long way below every comparable provider. Ask what month two costs — that is the question the page usually will not answer.
- What we publish instead
- We price month two. An introductory rate is recorded as a note on the row, never as the row.
On a live row
Captured August 2026
Noom Med — Compounded semaglutide — Microdose GLP-1Rx
- Advertised
- $49
- Charged, with no commitment
- $179
- Over a year, at 13 charges
- $2,327 not $637
The headline understates the year by $1,690. See the working on the Noom Med review.
- Error 3
Per-day price read as a month
A “$X a day” figure is multiplied by 30 and treated as the monthly cost — or, worse, the per-day line on the page was itself computed from a different, lower price than the one being charged.
- How you spot it
- A per-day figure sitting under a monthly figure that it does not divide into. When those two numbers disagree, one of them is describing a plan the reader is not being offered.
- What we publish instead
- We reconcile every per-day figure against the monthly price on the same page, and publish the monthly price the provider actually charges for one cycle.
On a live row
Captured August 2026
Strut Health — Compounded injectable tirzepatide
- Advertised
- $199
- Charged, with no commitment
- $325
- Over a year, at 12 charges
- $3,900 not $2,388
The headline understates the year by $1,512. See the working on the Strut Health review.
- Error 4
Membership divided by twelve
An annual membership or program fee is divided by 12 and shown next to a medication price, so two separate charges on two separate schedules read as one monthly line.
- How you spot it
- A small monthly figure described as a membership, a program, a “care fee” or “support”, with no statement of when it is actually billed.
- What we publish instead
- Fees are priced on the schedule they are billed on. A yearly fee is a yearly fee, and it never gets folded into a monthly medication row.
No published row on this site is affected by this one. Pricing here is recorded per compound, with no single blended figure for a company anywhere in the data — which is the shape this error needs in order to hide. We still screen for it on every capture.
- Error 5
A financing payment quoted as the price
The monthly instalment on a third-party loan or buy-now-pay-later arrangement is presented as what the treatment costs, which it is not — it is what the credit costs per month.
- How you spot it
- “As low as $X/mo”, a lender's name or logo, a term length in months, or an APR disclosure in small type.
- What we publish instead
- We publish the cash price. A financing offer is a lending product, and its instalment is not a price for a medication.
No published row on this site is affected by this one. Pricing here is recorded per compound, with no single blended figure for a company anywhere in the data — which is the shape this error needs in order to hide. We still screen for it on every capture.
Section 4
The thirteenth charge
This one is not a capture error. The number on the page is accurate and the company is not hiding anything — what fails is the reader's assumption that “monthly” means twelve times. A four-week cycle comes round 13 times in a 365-day year, and the thirteenth charge is a full extra payment that appears in no headline anywhere.
- Walk-away price
- What one cycle costs at the standing, no-commitment rate — what you pay if you stop after it. No prepay tier, no first-month promotion, no bundle.
- True year
- The walk-away price multiplied by the number of times it is actually billed in a year: 12 on a calendar-month cycle, 13 on a four-week cycle.
Worked on a live row
LillyDirect — Tirzepatide — Zepbound 5 mg
- Price of one cycle
- $399
- What twelve of those would be
- $4,788
- What a year actually costs, at 13 charges
- $5,187
A difference of $399 that nothing on the page is concealing and nothing on the page is telling you either. Captured August 2026.
Every board and every review annualises on the cycle the company actually bills, and labels which one it is. We never quietly normalise a four-week cycle to a month to make two prices look comparable — that is the comparison being wrong, not the prices.
Section 5
What decides the order of a list
Every ranked surface on this site sorts on a number computed from the price data, and each one states its rule on the page itself. There is no editorial thumb anywhere in the sort, and no field on a price row that a commercial relationship could be recorded in.
| Surface | Sorted by | Anything pinned? |
|---|---|---|
| /cheapest/… | Walk-away price for one cycle, ascending | Nothing pinned |
| /best/… | True-year cost — walk-away × the real billing cycle, ascending | Nothing pinned |
| /compare/… | Not ranked. Two companies side by side, per compound | Nothing pinned |
| /reviews/… | Not ranked. One row per compound, cheapest compound first | Nothing pinned |
The mechanism that keeps this true is structural rather than editorial: a price row has no partner field, no sponsorship flag, no priority number and no featured slot for a sort function to read. What we are paid for, and what it does not buy, is set out on the disclosure page.
Section 6
What we deliberately do not compute
A cost site is judged as much on the numbers it refuses to print as on the ones it does. These are the ones we will not, and why.
Your copay
What a covered drug costs you depends on your specific plan's formulary tier, deductible position and pharmacy network on the day you fill it. No public source publishes a per-drug copay, so any site showing you one has modelled it and called the model a fact.
A dose, or a dose-adjusted price
We price what a company charges for a cycle of treatment. We do not state, imply or build arithmetic around what anyone should take — that is a prescribing decision and it is not ours to make.
A savings figure
“Save $2,400 a year” requires a baseline, and the baseline is always chosen to make the number large. We show what each option costs and let the subtraction be yours.
A quality score
There is no rating out of ten anywhere on this site. We have not assessed anyone's clinical care, and a number in a circle would imply we had.
Section 7
How often this is checked again
Prices in this market move on no schedule at all — a plan can restructure between a Tuesday and a Thursday. So every row carries the date it was read, visibly, next to the number it describes.
Prices
Re-read quarterlyEvery published row is captured again from scratch, by the same five steps. A re-verification is a fresh reading, not a glance to confirm the old one still looks right.
Terms, coverage and inclusions
Re-read quarterlyStates served, what a fee covers, and cancellation terms are checked on the same cycle and carry their own date, separate from the price.
FDA warning-letter status
Re-read quarterlyA letter shown as open long after FDA closed it out is a false, checkable statement about a real company. What a letter does and does not mean — and why one never delists a company here — is on the editorial policy.
Section 8
When this procedure produces a wrong number
It will. A capture misses a condition buried three screens into an intake, a plan restructures the week after we read it, an annualisation uses the wrong cycle. When that happens the fix is published as a fix — what was wrong, what it is now, and when it changed — on the corrections page, which is also where to send one.
If a price here does not match what a company is showing you, that is worth telling us about — a mismatch is either our capture error or a live change, and both are things we want to know within the day rather than at the next quarterly pass.