About · reviewed
Why this site exists
Compounded tirzepatide is sold with a monthly price on the label and a different one at the checkout. This site publishes the second number.
The problem
Sellers bill on cycles that are not calendar months — every four weeks, every eleven weeks, per twelve-week course — and then advertise the result as a monthly figure. A price billed every four weeks is charged thirteen times a year. Presented as “monthly”, it quietly understates the annual cost by about eight percent, and nothing on the seller’s page corrects it.
There are three other ways the number on the page is not the number you pay. A price can be the entry dose only, and climb as you titrate. It can be a prepaid rate quoted per month while billed as one annual charge. Or the medication can be priced honestly while a membership sits beside it, so the figure is true about the vial and false about the month.
What we do about it
We take what the seller actually bills, divide by the number of days that charge covers, and multiply by 30.4375 — the average length of a calendar month. Where a mandatory fee sits alongside the medication, it goes into that figure and is shown separately underneath. Where the computed number differs from the advertised one, both appear, with the billing cycle that explains the gap.
Of the 402 sellers we track, 168 publish enough for that sum to be possible, 166 were read on their own site rather than inherited from anywhere, and 100 charge more per month than they advertise. The method in full →
What is in here
A price index of every US seller we can find, sorted by real monthly cost. A page for each seller we know something specific about. Cuts through the same data by state and by dose. A dated account of what is actually legal, from the FDA orders and court records rather than from other people’s coverage. And a drug-facts corpus that stays carefully separate from all of it, because the clinical evidence for tirzepatide was generated on the approved product and a compounded vial does not automatically inherit it.
Everything is published as JSON and CSV as well, so you can check our arithmetic rather than trust it.
Who this is for
Someone deciding whether to start, or whether to move, and who wants to know what a year of this actually costs. It is not for choosing a medication — that is a conversation with a prescriber, and nothing here is medical advice.
How it is paid for
Some links may earn a commission. That cannot buy position, because there is no position to buy: the order is arithmetic, and a seller that pays us appears wherever its price puts it. Every outbound button is built the same way and styled the same way. How this site makes money →
What we get wrong
Prices change, and a figure here is a record of what a page said on a stated date rather than a promise about today. We have also had our own errors: a seller once sat second-cheapest in the index because a mandatory membership was recorded in our own notes and never reached the price. It is in the arithmetic now, and there is a test that fails if it happens again.
Every check is published, including the ones that found we were wrong. What changed →