Fact-Checking

Three source classes

Provider-published: prices, terms and disclosures read on the programme's own site with the date recorded. Manufacturer-published: brand pricing and programme conditions. Named editorial: a third-party review that states its own verification date. Anything without a date does not qualify as a source.

How disagreements are handled

Published, not resolved silently. Where two current sources give materially different figures for the same programme, both appear with their dates and the record carries a conflict note. The disagreement is usually the most useful thing on the page — it typically means one source is quoting a promotional rate or excluding a mandatory fee.

The pattern in errors

Every correction we have made to a third-party figure moved the price upward. Promotional first months, prepaid bundle rates and medication-only figures excluding memberships are all published as ongoing all-in prices. Three distortions, all flattering. Treat any unverified figure as optimistic.

How this page fits the rest of the site

Everything here rests on one dataset: all-in monthly cost at six dose tiers for every tracked programme, with a capture date and an evidence status on each record. Rankings sort that dataset on a stated criterion; comparisons read the same rows; the calculators run against the same file. Nothing on this site is assembled by hand, which is why a policy page can describe a rule rather than an intention.

What we publish when we are not sure

The absence. A programme that does not publish a price gets a page saying so and listing what to ask before handing over a medical history. A figure taken from a third-party round-up is labelled as unconfirmed rather than presented alongside verified prices as though the two were equivalent. Where two sources disagree we show both.

That produces a shorter table than competitors publish. It also produces one that survives being checked, which is the only durable advantage a comparison site has.

The disclosures that matter more than any policy

Compounded preparations are not FDA-approved and are not reviewed by FDA for safety, effectiveness or quality before marketing. Tirzepatide is a prescription medicine and nothing here is medical advice. No programme pays for placement or position, and rankings are computed from the published dataset rather than assigned.

Tell us when we are wrong

Prices move, terms change and programmes leave the market. If a figure here differs from a programme's own page, ours is wrong. Send the URL through contact and the change is logged in corrections with the date it was made.

The ledger

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 11 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 six 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 $215 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $2,580 for a first year. That figure is what a well-informed buyer should be measuring every other offer against.

Where this sits against the dataset

The figures behind this page come from one file: 32 programmes, all-in cost at six dose tiers, terms, care model, pharmacy disclosure, evidence status and source, each with a capture date. All-in cost at a maintenance dose runs $215 to $548 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.

How much fact-checking should weigh

Less than the pharmacy question and more than the entry price. That ordering is unusual in published guidance, which typically inverts it, and it follows from what actually goes wrong: interrupted supply and unverifiable sourcing cost more than a modest price difference ever saves.

A useful test is whether a fact would change your decision if it were twice as bad. Double the price gap between the cheapest and second-cheapest verified routes and most people still choose on disclosure. Double the uncertainty about who compounded the vial and nobody should.

What a well-run programme publishes

The figure at 10 mg rather than at initiation. The pharmacy, by name. The prescriber or medical director. The cancellation notice period. And an unambiguous statement that a compounded preparation is not FDA-approved and is not reviewed for safety, effectiveness or quality before marketing.

Across the 17 priced programmes, the ones doing all of that span roughly the same price range as the ones doing none. Transparency here is a choice rather than a cost, which makes its absence informative rather than neutral.

The next step that actually moves things

Price your own course rather than reading someone else's ranking. Take the dose you expect to maintain, add every recurring fee, multiply by twelve, then ask whether you could sustain it for three years — the horizon the withdrawal evidence implies rather than the twelve months every comparison uses.

If the answer is no even at $215 a month, the useful move is checking coverage under a different indication rather than hunting a lower cash price. The cash market has a floor, and figures materially below it usually indicate one of four specific distortions.