Independent review
Updated 2026-08-14The same brand-name semaglutide appears in our research at $149 a month and at $1,599 a month. We traced every price back to the company that published it, and wrote down what each one refuses to say.
Services researched
Search queries run
Blocked our checks
Affiliate deals
What we actually measure
01
Every service here can get you a prescription. What separates them is the twelve weeks afterwards: who answers when the nausea starts, whether the escalation is supervised, and whether anyone checks your bloods — 74 of 87 never mention lab work at all. We record what each one publishes, and what it does not.
02
Alloy advertises $70 a month; the real entry cost is $169 once its mandatory membership is added. Mochi advertises $60; it is $139. Every compounded service we researched prices the medication and the membership separately, and only one of the two numbers makes it onto the landing page.
03
Sign-up takes minutes everywhere. Of the 87 services we researched, 50 say nothing about cancellation at all and 71 publish no refund terms. Exactly one states concrete refund mechanics — and it keeps $50 if you cancel after the provider review.
The research
Discovered across four search sweeps, then checked against each company’s own pages — 87 services across the US and UK. No stars, just what they publish, what they leave out, and what the total actually comes to.
30 of 87 publish most of our thirteen-item checklist. 2 more services surfaced repeatedly in the search sweep but blocked our checks entirely — those are listed, unreviewed, at the bottom of the reviews index.
The medications
Four approved molecules, four different trials, four different answers — and one of them is now a once-daily pill. The gap between them is larger than the gap between most of the services selling them.
Head to head
| Medication | Brands | Licensed for | Dosing | Headline result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tirzepatide | Mounjaro, Zepbound | Weight management | Once weekly | -20.9% · 72 wk | Detail |
| Semaglutide | Ozempic, Wegovy | Weight management | Once weekly | -14.9% · 68 wk | Detail |
| Semaglutide (oral) | Wegovy pill, Rybelsus | Weight management | Once daily | -14% · 64 wk | Detail |
| Orforglipron | Foundayo | Weight management | Once daily | -11.1% · 72 wk | Detail |
| Liraglutide | Saxenda, VictozaSaxenda being discontinued | Weight management | Once daily | -8% · 56 wk | Detail |
| Dulaglutide | Trulicity | Type 2 diabetes | Once weekly | No weight indication | Detail |
The other half of the story
Grouped by the action they call for rather than by how often they appear in a footnote. Severity is carried by an icon and a label as well as by colour.
Concentrated in the weeks after each dose increase. Usually settles; the standard response is to hold the dose rather than push through.
Often both, in sequence. Fibre and fluid help; a stalled bowel that is not improving is a reason to call someone, not to wait.
Repeated vomiting risks dehydration and, with it, kidney injury. This is the most common route to a hospital visit in this class.
A meaningful share of the weight lost is not fat. Protein intake and resistance training are the countermeasure, and most subscription services do not mention them.
Rapid weight loss raises gallstone risk. Persistent upper-right abdominal pain needs assessment rather than reassurance.
Severe, persistent abdominal pain, often radiating to the back. Stop the medication and seek urgent care.
These drugs carry a boxed warning based on rodent studies. They are contraindicated with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or MEN 2. Any intake that does not ask about this is a red flag.
Severe, persistent abdominal pain, repeated vomiting, or signs of dehydration are reasons to seek urgent care rather than to wait for a portal reply.
Sample data · scoring demonstration
The five services below are invented, and their scores are not real assessments. They exist to show how the weighted rubric behaves once someone has done the fieldwork that a marketing page cannot substitute for. The real, source-checked companies are in the reviews.
The only service in this group where a named clinician stays with you through the whole titration, and the one that is most honest about what it cannot get you.
Built around getting a claim approved rather than around selling a subscription. Slower, more paperwork, materially cheaper if it works.
The cheapest credible way in. Clinical contact is real but brief, and the low headline price does more work in the marketing than in the invoice.
A weight-management programme that happens to prescribe, rather than a prescriber that happens to have an app. Strong on the parts that decide whether the result lasts.
A thin layer between a questionnaire and a pharmacy. It is the lowest price in this group and the least support, and the trade is not disclosed clearly enough.
Methodology
Five criteria, fixed weights, applied to every service in the same order. No editorial thumb on the scale, no undisclosed commercial relationship, and the component scores published alongside the total.
Read the full methodQuestions
No affiliate commissions and no paid placement on this build. Where a link earns a commission on a live site, that has to be stated on the page it appears on, not buried in a footer — and the ranking has to be reproducible from the published rubric either way.
Most people regain a substantial share of the weight after stopping, which is what the extension data consistently shows. That is a property of the treatment, not a personal failure — but it does mean the price you are quoted is closer to an ongoing cost than a course of treatment, and a service that will not discuss this is selling rather than treating.
It is a materially different risk. Large-scale compounding of these molecules was permitted while the branded products were in shortage, and that permission narrowed once the shortages resolved. Compounded products are not FDA-approved, dosing errors have caused documented harm, and salt forms sold as equivalents are not. If a service leads with the price of a compounded product, read the fine print about what exactly is in the vial.
It is a weighted mean of five published criteria, applied identically to every service. Nothing is adjusted by hand. The weights and each provider’s component scores are shown in full on the methodology page and on every provider page.
They are prescription medicines with a boxed warning and real contraindications. An intake that never asks about thyroid cancer history, pancreatitis, pregnancy, or your other medications is not screening you — it is processing you. That is scored directly in the clinical support criterion.