September index,
what moved.

The one honest number

The Peptide Price Index launches this month with twenty advertised GLP-1 programs collected from public pricing pages and all of them converted into a single comparable figure: the settled monthly cost, meaning the recurring medication price on a calendar month plus every fee a customer has no choice about. Optional extras never count. First-month promotions never count, and live in their own column instead.

That one rule turned out to be the story. Sorted by advertised headline, the market looks like a tight race between cheap clinics. Sorted by what actually leaves a bank account every month, the order changes almost completely, and some of the loudest offers fall to the bottom half of the table.

The double price

The dominant pattern in the September data is the split price. A clinic advertises the medication alone, in large type, and charges a mandatory membership or program fee separately. Neither number is a lie on its own. Together they describe a different product than the headline suggests.

The clearest example in the semaglutide table is an advertised $99 a month for the medication that settles at $198 once the mandatory $99 monthly membership is added. The headline is exactly half the bill. Other programs do the same at smaller scale, adding fees in the seventy to eighty dollar range to a medication price that carries the marketing. Across the tracked programs, memberships and program fees moved the number by roughly seventy five to one hundred dollars a month wherever they existed.

This is why the index sorts on a fee-inclusive figure. A shopper comparing advertised prices across four tabs is not comparing prices, they are comparing marketing decisions about which part of the price to display.

The 28-day trick

The second pattern is quieter and costs less, but it hides better. Several clinics bill per 28 days or per four-week supply rather than per month. Thirteen charges land in a year instead of twelve, so a price advertised as $299 per cycle is really about $325 a month and $359 per cycle is about $390. The index multiplies those prices to a calendar month, which adds roughly nine percent, and every affected row says so on its face.

Nobody hides the billing cycle. It is printed, usually in the terms rather than the headline, and a reader comparing a per-month price with a per-28-day price is simply being asked to do arithmetic at checkout. The methodology page holds this rule and the rest of them.

Where the floor sits

The cheapest verified all-in price for compounded semaglutide in this edition is $139 a month, and the cheapest for compounded tirzepatide is $149 a month. Both carry a floor badge, which matters. A floor is the lowest rung of a published dose ladder or an as-low-as figure, so it is a real price that a real person can pay at a starting dose, not the number most people settle at once the dose escalates. We never print the word cheapest without that qualifier, because a floor quoted as a typical price is how a table starts lying.

The spreads around those floors are wide. Semaglutide programs run from $139 to $325 a month, tirzepatide from $149 to $434, for the same molecule class prepared by the same kinds of pharmacies. What separates the ends is service, commitment and marketing budget rather than chemistry. Full rows, with what each program includes and the date each price was verified, sit in the semaglutide table and the tirzepatide table.

Commitment pricing

A third pattern deserves a warning label. Several clinics publish a much lower monthly price that requires prepaying six or twelve months. One tirzepatide program drops by about a third on a prepaid year. Those numbers are real, and they are not comparable to a month-to-month price, so the index keeps them on a second line with the term named. Prepaying a year of a drug you have never taken, before you know how your body handles dose escalation, is a bet rather than a discount.

BPC-157 goes quiet

The most interesting non-price finding was an absence. When this edition went looking for BPC-157 pricing, the large telehealth brands that once published it largely no longer do. What remains is a range held by smaller clinics, roughly $150 to $320 a month depending on whether the protocol is injectable or capsules.

That retreat reads as regulatory caution rather than lost demand. The FDA has placed BPC-157 among bulk substances that may present significant safety risks for compounding, and a public price page is the easiest thing for a large brand to remove when its lawyers ask. Demand is unchanged, which means the sales moved somewhere less visible than a pricing page.

What is not in here

Brand pens sit in the index as anchors rather than competitors. With insurance or a manufacturer savings program, a branded copay can beat every compounded row in the table, which is the first thing to check rather than the last. Gray-market vials are not priced here at all and never will be, because an unregulated research chemical is not a cheaper version of a medicine, it is a different product with no one accountable for it.

How to use this

Bring one number to the comparison: what leaves your account every month at your settled dose, shipping and mandatory fees included. Ask any clinic for that figure in writing before you pay. The index republishes monthly with each price re-verified and dated, and the market moves that matter between editions land in our GLP-1 supply and price tracker. Shortage status, which drives much of this market, stays public in the FDA drug shortage database.

Follow the GLP-1 price tracker