Tirzepatide Shortage Status and What It Permits

The short answer

Resolved in December 2024. What that closed, what remains lawful, and why coverage keeps getting it wrong. Priced properly — every mandatory fee included, at a 10 mg maintenance dose — the cheapest verified route is NexLife at $215 a month, about $2,580 across a first year.

Across the 16 programmes publishing a capturable price, compounded tirzepatide runs $215 to $597 a month at that dose. Prices captured 2026-08-05.

The programmes, written out

Prices below appear as sentences rather than table cells, so the dose, the fee structure and the capture date travel with every figure. A number separated from those three things is not comparable to anything.

SkinnyRx charges $299 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $3,588 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Pharmacy: not named. Captured 2026-08-05, graded source verified.

Amble Health charges $300 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $3,600 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Captured 2026-08-05, graded third party reported.

Lavender Sky Health charges $352 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $3,971 across a first year. It prices by dose, so the figure climbs as you titrate. A mandatory $25 membership is included in that figure. Captured 2026-08-05, graded source verified.

Henry Meds charges $349 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $4,188 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Pharmacy: not named. Captured 2026-08-05, graded third party reported.

TrimRx charges $349 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $4,188 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Pharmacy: not named. Captured 2026-08-05, graded source verified.

Join Fridays charges $359 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $4,308 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Captured 2026-08-05, graded third party reported.

MEDVi charges $399 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $4,788 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Pharmacy: not named. Captured 2026-08-05, graded source verified.

Remedy Meds charges $399 a month all-in at a 10 mg maintenance dose, about $4,788 across a first year. It holds one price at every strength from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. There is no separate recurring fee. Captured 2026-08-05, graded third party reported.

What decides the number you actually pay

Three structural facts explain most of the spread. 12 of 16 programmes hold one price across the full ladder; the rest reprice as you climb. 5 charge a mandatory membership on top of medication. And 4 name the dispensing pharmacy.

Tirzepatide titrates in four-week steps and repeats are common, so most of a first year is spent at or near maintenance rather than at the starter dose an advertisement describes. On a flat programme that costs nothing. On a dose-scaled one it is the whole difference.

How to check this without trusting us

Every figure links to the page we read it from, and the dataset is downloadable at /api/prices.json. Sort it on first-year cost and the order here should reproduce. If it does not, we are wrong.

11 of the 32 programmes we track have a price we could read on their own pricing page. The rest are labelled third-party and should be confirmed at checkout.

What this page assumes about you

That you are paying cash, that you will hold a maintenance dose rather than a starter dose, and that a difference of a few hundred dollars across a year is worth an hour of reading. If any of those is wrong, the ordering here changes.

Insurance is the biggest one. A covered prescription under a documented indication beats every cash route on this site, and establishing whether you qualify comes before comparing 16 cash prices spanning $215 to $597.

The bias we can see in our own data

We track what programmes publish, so programmes that publish well look better here than programmes that treat pricing as a sales conversation. That is a real bias and we would rather name it than pretend the dataset is neutral.

It cuts a defensible way — a programme unwilling to state a price before an intake has made a choice you should notice — but it is a bias, and 16 tracked programmes appear here with an explanation instead of a number because of it.

What we deliberately do not measure

Shipping reliability, response times, and whether the clinical oversight is any good. None is observable from outside without enrolling, and we did not enrol.

That absence is why there is no rating out of ten anywhere here. A single score would compress price, disclosure, service and clinical depth into one figure and hide the weighting — which is precisely the trick that makes comparison sites feel authoritative while telling you less than a table would.

The usable proxy is what a programme publishes before it has your money, and that is what every disclosure column here records.

The switching cost nobody prices

Moving programmes for a modest saving carries two costs a table cannot show: a supply gap while a new intake is reviewed, and a new prescriber restarting titration rather than continuing your dose.

The second is expensive. Eight to twelve weeks back through the ladder erases most of what a year's saving would have bought. Ask for dose continuation in writing before cancelling anything, and do not cancel until the new programme has shipped.