We check the prices. On a schedule. With receipts.
eDietAdvice is an independent publication for people navigating diet and health treatments — starting with the most confusing consumer market in American healthcare: GLP-1 weight-loss medication.
Why we exist#
Right now, Wegovy (pill) costs $149 a month at NovoCare Pharmacy and $448 at Ro (Ro Body). Same medication, same month, both prices published by the seller, both including every fee they require — a 3.0× difference for the same drug in the same form. That gap is the entire reason this site exists, and it is not a one-off: it is the widest of 6 products where more than one seller lets us compare like for like.
Most of the "comparison" content covering that gap is written by the companies doing the selling. Prices change without announcement. Membership fees hide until checkout. Nobody keeps score.
So we keep score. The True-Cost Index tracks every legitimate channel with the required fees included, and every change we verify is published in the changelog — 9 so far.
What the operation actually is#
Not a large one. It is a dataset, a set of scripts that re-check it, and a build that refuses to publish when something is wrong.
| 17 channels | Every legitimate U.S. route to a GLP-1, priced with required fees included. |
| 40 pages | Re-fetched weekly and diffed against a stored snapshot. A changed price becomes a draft entry that a human has to confirm at the seller's own page before it publishes. |
| 97 pharmacies | Every FDA-registered 503B outsourcing facility, parsed from a register the FDA publishes as a web page with no download — the index. |
| 15 corrections | Published about ourselves, including the ones that make us look careless — read them. |
What we will not do#
These are enforced by the build, not by intention. Each one is a script that fails the deploy:
- Publish a stale price. An active row that has not been re-verified inside the staleness window stops the build.
- Rank a prepaid year against a cancel-anytime price. Committing twelve months is a different product, and a check fails the build if any page decides that question from a provider's marketing prose instead of the commitment field.
- Earn money from a link without saying so. A link cannot become paid without naming the network that pays for it, and no page that renders a ranking is allowed to import the payout data at all.
- Ship a broken reference. Dead links, dead anchors, duplicate ids and orphan pages all fail the build.
None of that makes us right. It makes a specific set of ways to be wrong impossible to ship quietly, which is a smaller claim and a more useful one.
How solid is any given number#
Two labels, and the difference matters. Listed means we read the price at the seller's own page and dated it. Checkout-verified means a human walked the real purchase flow to the last screen before payment.
No row is checkout-verified yet. Every price here is read from a published page, which is a weaker claim than walking a checkout, and the label on each row says so rather than letting the distinction blur. Closing that gap needs a person with a real identity buying real things, and it is the next thing this site owes its readers.
What we believe#
- Diet first, medication as a tool. The drugs work best on top of food and habits that hold.
- Price is information, not advice. We tell you what things cost and who is legitimate; medical decisions belong with you and a licensed clinician.
- A number without a date and a source is not a price. Every figure here carries both.
- Independence is structural, not a slogan. The cheapest channels in our index are the manufacturers' own pharmacies, which run no affiliate programmes and pay us nothing. They top the table anyway, because that is where the numbers put them.
How we make money#
Today, we don't. No link on this site earns us anything — we hold no affiliate relationship with any provider we track. We intend to take commissions where they are available, because this has to fund itself, and when that happens the disclosure page will name every provider that pays us and the network it pays through. It generates that list from the same dataset the rankings use, so it cannot fall out of step with what the links actually do.
eDietAdvice is not a pharmacy, medical provider, or manufacturer, and nothing here is medical advice. Questions or corrections: a contact address goes live with launch, and every correction lands in the changelog whether or not anyone asked for it.