Most of what you need to check, you can check yourself, and it takes about ten minutes. None of it requires trusting us, which is the point of writing it down rather than just publishing a list and asking you to believe it.
The five checks
1. Look the company up on LegitScript
LegitScript certifies online pharmacies and telehealth providers, and its certification is the one most commonly cited in this market. It is searchable, free, and takes a minute. A company that claims certification it does not hold is telling you everything you need to know.
Certification is a positive signal, not a guarantee, and its absence is not proof of anything either: plenty of legitimate practices are not certified. Treat it as one input among five rather than as a verdict.
2. Check the pharmacy licence with the state
Ask which pharmacy actually dispenses your medication, by name and state. A legitimate operation will tell you. Then look that name up with that state's board of pharmacy, which maintains a public licence register.
"Our partner pharmacy network" is not an answer. A name and a state is an answer, and it is checkable in a couple of minutes.
3. Confirm there is a real prescriber and a real prescription
GLP-1s are prescription drugs. There should be a licensed clinician, a genuine assessment of your history, and a prescription at the end of it. You should be able to find out who they are and where they are licensed.
If a seller does not require a prescription, stop. That is not a shortcut, a loophole, or a cheaper tier. It is the clearest single signal that whatever you are buying is not being handled the way a prescription medicine has to be.
4. Find a physical address and a way to reach a human
A corporate address, a phone number, and someone reachable when something goes wrong. This sounds basic and it eliminates a lot.
5. Ask whether the price makes sense
This one we can help with, because it is what we do all day.
There is a floor to what this market can charge and still be paying a licensed US pharmacy to compound a real drug. A price far underneath the cheapest verified program is not a better deal, it is a claim about a supply chain, and it is the claim worth interrogating.
That is the cheapest thing we can currently verify. Something priced dramatically below it deserves the other four checks twice over.
What "compounded" changes, and what it does not
Most of the cheap end of this market is compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide, and compounding is legal and long-established. It is also not FDA-approved, meaning the finished product has not been reviewed for safety, effectiveness or manufacturing quality, and the regulatory position moved recently. The FDA's own words:1
For a state-licensed pharmacy or physician compounding, dispensing or distributing semaglutide injection products under section 503A of the FD&C Act, the period of enforcement discretion has ended.
FDA
We went through what compounding does and does not change in full. That does not make every compounded seller illegitimate. It does mean the pharmacy's own licensing is carrying the weight an FDA approval would otherwise carry, which is exactly why check two matters more here than anywhere else.
What we verify, and what we do not
Worth being precise about, because a page like this one is easy to write dishonestly.
We do verify, across every program on this site, re-checked weekly:2 the advertised price read off the seller's own page, membership and consultation fees, which states they ship to, plan terms, and third-party review scores where a platform will let us read them. Every number on this site carries the date we read it.
We do not verify: pharmacy accreditation, facility conditions, product testing, or what is actually in a vial. We are not an inspectorate, and implying otherwise would be the exact behaviour this page warns about. Any comparison site that tells you it has vetted the safety of what is in the syringe is claiming something it almost certainly has not done.
So the honest version: we can tell you what a program charges and whether that number is real. We cannot tell you it is safe. Checks one to four are yours, and they are not hard.
The red flags, in order of severity
- No prescription required. Not negotiable.
- No named pharmacy or no named prescriber. Both should be answerable questions.
- A price far below the verified floor. See above.
- Pressure and countdowns. Common in legitimate marketing too, so weigh it lightly, but a countdown that resets forever is a small lie about a big purchase.
- No physical address, no phone, no way to reach a clinician. Ask yourself who you call in week three.
- Claims of FDA approval for a compounded product. Compounded drugs are not FDA-approved. A seller saying otherwise is either confused or lying, and neither is reassuring.
Where to start
Every program we track has its own page with what it charges, what its fees are, how many states it ships to, and what its reviews say, with the date each was checked. Those pages are where the per-seller answer lives:
Take the five checks to whichever you are considering. If a company fails one of them, the price stops being relevant.