Methodology · Updated 2026-08-14
How the scores are built.
One rubric, five weighted criteria, applied in the same order to every service. The component scores are published on each provider page so the total can be recomputed by anyone who disagrees with it.
Two datasets, two standards
This site holds two separate things, and it matters which one you are reading.
◆ Researched providers — sourced
78 real companies across the US and UK. Every factual claim traces to a URL listed on the page, retrieved on the date shown. These carry no score, because the rubric below measures things a marketing page cannot tell you. What they carry instead is a count of how much of a thirteen-item checklist each company publishes.
Read the reviews▲ Sample providers — illustrative
5 invented companies with invented scores, used to demonstrate how the weighted rubric behaves. They are not real and their scores are not real assessments. They exist so the scoring method can be shown working end to end.
See the demonstrationHow the research was done
Providers were discovered with the Bright Data SERP API, running 150 queries across Google and Bing over four sweeps — fourteen seed topics, then a pass targeting segments the first missed (oral GLP-1s, microdosing, men’s services, employer benefits, non-US markets), then a third on brand names — every approved GLP-1 brand, the discontinued ones, the insulin combinations and the pipeline — and a fourth on the long tail of smaller providers, which also opened up the UK market. That returned 1,269 organic results, which were deduplicated by domain and filtered against a list of editorial and aggregator sites to leave the companies that actually sell or prescribe.
Every discovered provider was then checked against its own pages. Nothing was written from a search snippet: if the company’s site could not be retrieved, no review was written. That is why 2 frequently-surfaced names — including the single most-referenced domain in the whole sweep, whose most recent usable archive is seven months stale — appear as a documented gap rather than as reviews.
Where a company blocks retrieval entirely, we try its corporate newsroom, and then a dated Wayback Machine snapshot of its own pages. Two reviews — Ro and Hers — rest on archived snapshots rather than live pages, and both say so at the top, with the snapshot date shown. An archive is the provider’s own page, pinned to a date; it is good evidence provided the date travels with it, which is why it does.
Where a company publishes a fact, it is quoted or closely paraphrased and attributed. Where it does not, the field reads “not stated in the sources we checked” rather than being filled from general knowledge. The gaps are findings in their own right, and they are counted.
Market scope: Primarily the United States, with a UK section. US prices are USD and refer to the FDA; UK prices are GBP and refer to the MHRA. Every provider page states which market it covers. Providers were discovered on google.com and bing.com with US geolocation. Nothing on this site describes availability, pricing or approval status anywhere else, and a reader outside the US should treat every figure here as inapplicable rather than as a converted equivalent.
The score is not comparable across markets. In the UK, advertising a prescription-only medicine to the public is prohibited, so a British provider that omits its price is usually complying rather than concealing — which we explain separately. Compare US providers with US providers.
Every provider is also checked against the FDA warning-letter record. Five of those reviewed here are named recipients, and each of those reviews opens with the action, the entity the regulator named, and a link to the letter. That check is structured rather than written into prose, so a new review cannot quietly omit it.
One limitation to state plainly: fda.gov refused automated retrieval throughout. FDA positions cited on this site are therefore sourced from the search index rather than a page fetch, and claims are held to what the indexed text supports. Those pages are linked so you can read them directly.
The criteria
- 0130% of the total
Clinical support
Who prescribes, how reachable they are between visits, whether dose escalation is managed or automatic, and what happens when side effects show up at 11pm on a Sunday.
- 0225% of the total
Price transparency
Whether the total monthly cost is visible before you hand over a card, whether the medication is included or billed separately, and how loudly the renewal price is disclosed.
- 0320% of the total
Access and wait time
Days from sign-up to a written prescription, pharmacy availability, and how the service behaves during a supply shortage.
- 0415% of the total
Cancellation and lock-in
How many clicks it takes to leave, whether prepaid multi-month plans are refundable, and whether your records follow you out.
- 0510% of the total
Data privacy
Third-party trackers on intake forms, whether health answers feed ad platforms, and how plainly the privacy policy admits to data sharing.
Worked example
Each criterion is scored 0–5, multiplied by its weight, and summed. Here is Meridian Health, the current leader, in full.
| Criterion | Score | × | Weight | = | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clinical support | 4.8 | 0.30 | 1.440 | ||
| Price transparency | 4.7 | 0.25 | 1.175 | ||
| Access and wait time | 4.4 | 0.20 | 0.880 | ||
| Cancellation and lock-in | 4.6 | 0.15 | 0.690 | ||
| Data privacy | 4.2 | 0.10 | 0.420 | ||
| Overall | 4.6 | ||||
What we deliberately do not score
How much weight people lost
That is a property of the medication and the person, not of the service that faxed the prescription. Attributing it to a subscription would be the single most misleading number we could publish.
App polish
A pleasant interface is not care. It correlates with funding, not with whether someone answers at week six.
Star ratings scraped from app stores
They measure onboarding delight and cancellation anger, sampled at the two worst moments to ask. We collect structured reports instead, and publish the sample size next to the score.
Independence and its limits
No service reviewed here pays for placement, and no link on this site earns a commission. Where that changes, it will be disclosed on the page it affects rather than in a footer, and the ranking will remain reproducible from the published rubric either way.
The honest limits: scores are point-in-time and services change their terms quietly; the reported figures come from structured member submissions that we verify but cannot audit; and a rubric is a set of editorial choices about what matters, which is exactly why the weights are published rather than described.
The five services listed in this build are illustrative sample data written to demonstrate the format. They are not real companies and the scores are not real assessments.