Price-verification methodology

Normalization formula

Normalized monthly cost = (medication cost + required membership + required consultation fees + required laboratory fees + shipping + supplies + mandatory administrative charges) ÷ number of covered months. We compute it separately for the initial month, ongoing month, and 3-, 6- and 12-month totals, plus maximum-dose total and early-cancellation exposure.

The fairness rule

We never compare a competitor's introductory starter-dose price against another program's all-dose long-term plan and call the result equivalent. Every pricing claim links to a source, a date checked and an archived capture.

Verification cadence

Pricing pages are re-checked every 14–30 days. A visible 'prices verified' date appears on every page that compares cost.

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.