Journal · Our own computation

The entry-price illusion: what GLP-1 teaser rates hide

The number on a GLP-1 landing page is almost never the number on the twelfth invoice. We computed the gap between introductory and ongoing monthly equivalents everywhere our dataset holds both — and quantified why the cheapest advertised figure is the least predictive number in this market.

The measured gaps

Only 0 pairs currently carry both figures — most providers publish one number and leave the other to be discovered at checkout or at dose escalation. The thinness of this table is itself a transparency finding.

The mechanics of the illusion

Three structures produce the gap. Dose escalation: GLP-1 dosing conventionally starts low and steps up over weeks; where pricing is dose-tiered, the advertised entry figure describes the dose almost nobody stays at. Promotional first months:time-limited rates that revert — our price-type taxonomy tags these as promo rows.Unbundled fees: the headline covers medication only, with membership, labs, and shipping arriving as separate line items; the fee-impact calculator shows how often that flips a comparison. None of these structures is hidden, exactly — each is disclosed somewhere. The illusion is positional: the entry price is on the landing page and the rest is in the footnotes.

Dataset-wide medians

Across the whole dataset — not just matched pairs — the median advertised starting row is $349 per month (1 rows), while the medianongoing row is $199 per month (65 rows). Medians of different row sets, not a controlled comparison — but a consumer budgeting on advertised figures and a consumer budgeting on ongoing figures are planning around materially different numbers, and only one of them will be surprised.

How to defend against it

Four questions convert a teaser into a comparable number, and all four are answerable before handing over an email address. What dose does this price cover? If the answer is the starting dose, ask what the maintenance doses cost — that is the price you are actually shopping for. What happens to the price at month four? Promotional rates and escalation tiers both surface here; a provider that can't answer is quoting you a number with an expiry date it won't state. What is billed besides medication? Membership, labs, shipping — the total-cost calculator adds them in seconds once you have them. Is the plan prepaid, and what is refunded if I stop? Commitment tiers price discontinuation risk onto you, and refund terms decide how much. Our price-page guide walks through each of these against real page structures, and theprepayment guide covers the last in depth.

Caveats

Every underlying price is a provider-listed claim; none is verified by us, so a "gap" here is a gap between two claims. Matched pairs exist only where a provider publishes both figures — providers with gated or single-figure pricing are absent from the table, and their absence plausibly biases the measured average downward (the least transparent pricing structures are the ones we cannot measure). Dollar figures are monthly equivalents before membership fees, labs, and shipping.

What honest entry pricing would look like

The illusion is cheap to dispel, which is the strongest evidence it is load-bearing. A provider could print the maintenance-dose price beside every "from" figure; state, in the same font, the month a promo reverts and to what; and publish one all-in example — medication plus every required fee, at a maintenance dose, for a named month. Nothing about that requires regulatory change or new infrastructure; it requires only a willingness to compete on the number customers will actually pay. Under our rubric, pricing transparency is the single largest category at 25 points — so the first provider to price this way doesn't just treat its customers better, it takes the top of a scoring category the whole market is currently forfeiting.

Method

For each provider-medication pair in provider-pricing.json with at least one row tagged intro and one tagged ongoing, we take the minimum monthly equivalent of each and compute the ratio. Medians use the dataset's advertised_starting price-type tag and the ongoing tag respectively. All computation happens at build time from the same manifest that renders our price tables; nothing is hand-typed, and thefirst-year calculator implements the same two-phase arithmetic interactively.