Telehealth Price Transparency

What transparency means here

Not how a programme describes itself, but what a prospective patient can establish before paying: the price at the dose they will hold, the fee structure, the pharmacy, the prescriber, the cancellation terms.

The scoring

Seven inputs with published weights, all derivable from the dataset, so the score can be recomputed rather than trusted. It measures publication, not care quality.

The finding

Of 32 programmes, 11 publish a price we could verify at source. The remainder either carry figures we took from third parties or publish nothing interpretable. Every time we have checked a third-party figure against a provider's own page, the number moved — and it moved upward.

Why the errors run one direction

Promotional first months, prepaid bundle rates and medication-only figures that exclude mandatory memberships are all published as ongoing all-in prices. Three distortions, all flattering.

Why this distinction changes what you pay

Every structural difference in this market resolves into money at a maintenance dose. Whether a programme charges a membership, whether it reprices with the dose, whether it demands a term, and whether it bundles or splits its charges together account for most of the gap between the cheapest tracked first year at $2,580 and the most expensive.

None of those differences is visible in an advertised headline figure, which is the reason this site exists in the form it does.

How to act on it this week

Price the dose you expect to maintain on rather than the starter dose. Add every recurring fee. Ask whether the quoted rate holds at renewal. Establish who compounds the medicine. And do not enter a prepaid term until you have held a maintenance dose for a cycle.

Those five steps take under an hour and reliably beat any amount of comparison reading, because they surface the information that comparison tables omit.

How this connects to what you will actually pay

Everything in this section resolves to one number: the all-in monthly cost at the dose you end up holding. Across the 16 programmes we price, that runs from $215 at the cheapest tracked route to several times that at the most expensive, for the identical molecule from the same category of licensed pharmacy.

5 of those programmes charge a recurring platform fee on top of medication and 12 hold one price at every strength. Those two facts explain most of the spread between advertised prices and real ones.

What we could verify and what we could not

11 of 32 tracked programmes have a price we read at the provider or manufacturer. The rest carry third-party figures we have not confirmed, or publish nothing we can interpret. Every table on this site marks which is which, and the comparison matrix lets you filter to verified prices only.

Where we have checked a third-party figure against a provider's own page, it has almost always moved — and it has moved upward. Promotional first months, prepaid bundle rates and medication-only figures that exclude memberships are all published as ongoing all-in prices. Assume an unverified figure is optimistic.

The regulatory distinction that sits under all of this

Compounded tirzepatide is not FDA-approved. FDA does not review compounded preparations for safety, effectiveness or quality before they are marketed. The active molecule is the same as the branded product; the pre-market review is not, and the assurance comes instead from the pharmacy, the state board that licenses it and, at good operations, batch sterility and potency testing.

That is a legitimate framework rather than a loophole, and it is also why the price is lower. It puts more of the verification burden on the patient, which is the honest trade being made.

Method

Computed over one file covering 32 programmes on a single price basis: all-in monthly cost, medication plus any recurring fee, at a named dose tier. No estimates, no imputed values, and no programme excluded for reasons other than the criterion stated.

Where a finding depends on a figure we could not verify at source, it is flagged rather than rounded away.

Findings

All-in cost at a 10 mg maintenance dose spans $215 to $597 — a 2.8-times spread for the identical molecule from the same category of licensed pharmacy. 12 of 16 programmes hold one price at every dose; the rest reprice as you climb. 5 charge a mandatory recurring fee on top of medication.

Fewer than a fifth identify the dispensing pharmacy before purchase, which is the single disclosure that would let a patient verify anything independently.

Limitations

Everything here comes from published material we could access. We did not enrol, did not mystery-shop, and did not contact programmes for comment before publication. Service quality, shipping reliability and clinical depth are absent because they are not measurable from outside.

A programme that discloses something we could not find should tell us, and the record will be corrected with the date.

Reuse

Cite freely with attribution and the capture date. Journalists and analysts should take the underlying file rather than transcribing from a table, because the file carries the evidence status that a table necessarily compresses.

Why titration is a pricing question

Tirzepatide is started at 2.5 mg weekly and increased in 2.5 mg steps at intervals of at least four weeks. The starter dose is a tolerance-building dose rather than a therapeutic one, and the gastrointestinal effects that cause most discontinuation cluster in the days after each increase.

Reaching a maintenance dose therefore takes at least eight to twelve weeks when nothing is repeated, and repeats are common rather than exceptional. Most of a first year is spent at or near maintenance, which is why every figure on this site is stated at 10 mg and why 12 of the 16 priced programmes holding one price across the ladder is a materially different offer from the rest.

The molecule, and why it costs more than semaglutide

Tirzepatide is a single peptide that activates two incretin receptors: GLP-1, which semaglutide also targets, and GIP, which it does not. Both receptors influence insulin secretion, gastric emptying and central appetite signalling, and the working hypothesis for the larger effect size is that engaging both produces effects the GLP-1 arm alone does not.

That dual action is also part of why it costs more to make. The peptide is longer and more structurally complex than semaglutide, the synthesis is harder, and the active pharmaceutical ingredient sells at a premium to compounding pharmacies. Across programmes carrying both molecules, tirzepatide typically runs forty to a hundred per cent above the same programme's semaglutide price.

The commercial consequence is that a compounded tirzepatide programme has less room to discount than a compounded semaglutide one. When a tirzepatide price looks dramatically below the market, the explanation is usually a promotional rate, a prepaid term or a starting dose rather than a cheaper supply chain.

What the head-to-head trial actually showed

SURMOUNT-5 randomised adults with obesity to tirzepatide or semaglutide and reported a larger mean reduction in body weight on tirzepatide over 72 weeks. It is the strongest direct comparison available and it is the reason many people arrive at this molecule specifically rather than at GLP-1 therapy in general.

Three caveats are worth carrying. A mean is not a prediction for an individual, and the distribution around it is wide. Trial participants received structured support most telehealth programmes do not replicate. And the trial compared maximum tolerated doses, which is a different question from what a given person will tolerate.

Read as a purchasing decision, it says the more expensive molecule does more on average. It does not say it will do more for you, and it says nothing about which programme should supply it.