How we grade

The scale

That third column is the live count across the 28 companies published here, not a target we are working toward. It moves when a review ships or a price changes.

A dash is not a soft C. It means a company withheld something we needed to judge it, and we are not rounding that up to make a page look tidier. A company can climb out of a dash the day it publishes the thing it was holding back.

What the letter is actually measuring

Not the drug. Semaglutide is semaglutide whoever ships it, and we are not qualified to tell you otherwise. What varies between these companies is everything around the molecule, and that is what a grade is about:

• Whether the advertised price is the price. The headline number in this market is usually a prepaid annual rate divided by twelve. We grade against what you pay if you cancel after a month.
• How far in the real number is buried. A company that publishes its price on a pricing page is telling you something different from one that makes you finish an intake to find out.
• What it says about the parts that matter. Which pharmacy compounds it, who prescribes, which states it is licensed in, what happens to your money if you stop.
• What it does when you want to leave. Cancellation terms, refunds, and whether either is findable before you pay.

A high grade means a company was clear about its price and its terms on the day we read them. It is not a certification, not an endorsement, and not a statement that a medication is right for you. Our editorial policy lists the four things that will move a letter and the things that never will.

The letter is written before the money is checked

This is the order the whole site depends on. We read a company’s pages, source its prices, and write the grade and the reason for it. Only afterward does anyone work out whether we have an approved program with that company — and that happens in separate code, not a later step of the same routine. By the time money is in the picture, the letter is already written down.

6 of the 28 companies graded here pay us a commission, and the rest pay us nothing. The disclosure page names which are which, counted from the same code that decides where a click lands.

Color never carries a grade by itself

Every grade renders as the letter, the word, and a shape together, on purpose. We tested the palette as a set: under some forms of color blindness the amber we use for a caveat and the green we use for a pass sit too close to separate by hue, and red against amber is marginal even with full color vision. So the letter and the word carry the meaning, and the color only backs them up. If you cannot see it at all you lose nothing — more on that in our accessibility statement.

Who writes it

J. Merrick, pricing desk, writes every grade on this site along with the plain-English reason for it. One person, one standard, applied the same way to every company — which is the only way a grade means anything when you compare two reviews.

Nobody here holds a medical license, and we are not going to dress a pricing desk up as a clinic. What we do is read the pricing page and finish the signup ourselves, which is a real skill and not a medical credential. Whether a treatment suits you is a question for a clinician who knows your history, and it has nothing to do with what it costs.

For the other half of the method — where a number comes from and how it gets dated — see how we verify prices. If you think we graded a company wrong, tell us; we would rather fix it than defend it. Who we are and how the site pays for itself is on about us.