Editorial Policy

Every clinic gets a 1–10 number from a fixed rubric — four weighted criteria, applied the same way to every listing. The inputs are evidence we've personally checked: a live price, a documented policy, a claim we could confirm. Nothing here is a gut call, and nothing here is for sale.

• Price & Value25%
• Clinical Oversight30%
• Treatment Options20%
• Transparency & Trust25%

When we can't verify a price, we don't score it

Price & Value is meant to measure what you will actually pay. For 12 of the 29 clinics we rank we cannot verify that, so we leave the criterion unscored rather than publish a number we can't stand behind. Their price is still shown — we withhold the score, not the information.

• Synergy RX publishes no GLP-1 price at all before intake.
• Ro, Hims & Hers and Noom Med— we can't confirm the price structure. Ro and Hims block automated access outright; Noom shows no price outside its intake quiz.
• Eight membership-based clinics (GoodRx Care, Found, Sesame, WeightWatchers Clinic, LifeMD, Zealthy, Calibrate, Mochi Health) publish a membership fee with medication billed separately and not disclosed. The membership is not the cost.

We got the first version of this wrong, and it is worth saying how. Our initial approach spread the missing weight across the remaining criteria. That quietly turned missing evidence into a bonus: it re-weighted each clinic's score onto whatever it happened to be best at. The result was that Ro and Hims & Hers — the two clinics that block us from checking their pricing — rose to #1 and #3, while Yucca Health, which publishes both its price tiers and its total prepay amount, fell seven places. Refusing verification was being rewarded.

We replaced it with a rule that cannot do that: an unscored criterion is credited at the lowest score that clinic earned on any criterion we could assess. Where we have no evidence, we extend no benefit of the doubt. Because a clinic's lowest score is always at or below its own average, this can only lower or hold a score — never raise it. That is arithmetic, not a promise you have to take on trust.

One consequence we accept on purpose: a clinic with an unscored criterion can still finish above a fully-scored clinic that simply scored badly. MangoRx is fully assessed and scores 5.5 on its merits — an expired security certificate on its live site, and a contested Eli Lilly lawsuit over its compounded product. Forcing it above Ro because Ro has one unscored criterion would make the ranking more mechanical, not more honest. The rule governs how a gap is credited; it does not turn a gap into a finding.

Why we dropped “User Experience” in August 2026

Until 2026-08-28 this rubric had a fifth criterion, User Experience, weighted 15%. We removed it, and it is worth explaining why rather than quietly renumbering.

It was not measuring anything the other criteria weren't already measuring. Across our 29 clinics it correlated 0.75 with Clinical Oversight and 0.78 with Transparency & Trust, and 18 of the 29 scored identically on Clinical Oversight and User Experience. Once we controlled for the fact that well-run clinics tend to score well on everything, it was the only pair in the rubric that stayed correlated — every other pairing fell to roughly zero.

The second reason matters more. Once you remove what belongs to Clinical Oversight (support access) and to Transparency (disclosure quality), what is left is app polish, shipping speed, packaging and satisfaction guarantees — claims a clinic makes about itself that we cannot independently verify. This is a health rubric built on documented evidence. Scoring vendor marketing copy and calling it a measurement was the wrong thing to do, so we stopped.

Its 15% moved to Clinical Oversight (+5, where the real signal lived) and Transparency & Trust (+10, our most verifiable criterion). This changed the ranking position of 20 of 29 clinics, by at most four places. Patient experience still matters — we now cover it in the review text, where it cannot masquerade as a number.

What each transparency score means

A score is only useful if you know what earns it. These are the bands we actually apply for Transparency & Trust — the criterion that most often separates two clinics at a similar price — with real examples from our own ranking, including the ones that score badly.

One distinction does most of the work here: a disclosed discount for a longer commitment is normal and does not cost a clinic points, but a price that rises after month one without being disclosed caps a clinic at 6.5. We have applied that wrongly before — in August 2026 we scored a clinic as though its published prepay plan were a hidden step-up, and corrected it once we verified the live page.

The other four criteria are applied from the same documented evidence but do not yet have published bands. We would rather say that than imply a precision we haven't written down.

FDA warning letters — scored, not just disclosed

Until 2026-08-30, an FDA warning letter was shown to readers but never moved a score — a documented policy choice, not an oversight. We reversed it. A provider with an openFDA warning letter alleging false or misleading marketing claims about the medication it's reviewed for here has its Transparency & Trust score capped at 4.0— the same “active trust flags on a medical product” band above, not a new number invented for this rule. The cap applies only while the letter is open. FDA does post close-out letters once it accepts a company's corrective action; if that happens for a provider we track, the cap lifts and the score moves — logged on the changelogautomatically, the same way a price change is, because a score moving with nothing nearby to explain it is exactly the kind of thing this page exists to prevent. The rule applies identically whether a provider pays us a referral fee or not — it reads FDA's own database, not our payout ledger.

Applying it moved six providers. We checked all seven letters we hold across those six directly against FDA's own database on 2026-08-30 — none had a close-out letter on file; all seven remain open. Hims fell from #3 to #31, the largest single change this rubric has ever produced, because nothing else was already holding its transparency score down. Ivim Health, Direct Meds, SkinnyRx, Strut Health and Zealthy moved by smaller amounts — for them, the FDA letter wasn't the only thing already weighing on transparency. Three of the six — Direct Meds, SkinnyRx and Strut Health — are affiliate partners; the rule cost them rank the same way it cost Hims, which at the time was an unpaid listing. We're publishing the size of the change because a rule is only credible if you can see what it actually did, not just read what it says it does.

Note added 2026-09-11: Hims & Hers is no longer covered on this site — it was one of 13 listings removed when we narrowed coverage to clinics we hold a commercial relationship with, so you will not find its review here any more. The record above is left exactly as it was. It happened, it is dated, and the rule that produced it is still the rule.

Regulatory and legal actions — the same cap, a sibling rule

Ported from our sister site (trt-picks.com) the same day it was built there. A federal or state enforcement body (FTC, a state Attorney General, DOJ, or equivalent) filing a lawsuit or reaching a settlement that confirms or alleges a provider deceived consumers about billing, cancellation, or data handling caps that provider's Transparency & Trust score at 4.0— the identical ceiling and rationale as the FDA rule above: a government body formally saying a provider wasn't straight with consumers is exactly what this criterion measures. One cap per provider, whether it comes from an FDA letter, a regulatory action, or both — it does not stack.

It is not symmetric with the FDA rule in one respect, deliberately: FDA maintains a public database we can check on a schedule, so that cap lifts automatically on a closeout. No equivalent database exists for AG settlements or FTC/DOJ suits, so a cap from this rule never lifts automatically — only a human, after independently confirming an active suit was dismissed or a settlement's remediation was actually carried out, lifts it, logged the same way as any other correction.

Applying this rule on 2026-08-30 found three matches, none of which moved a score further than the FDA rule already had — Hims and Zealthy both already sat at the 4.0 floor from their own open FDA letters, and the new findings (an FTC lawsuit against Hims & Hers Health, Inc. over sharing health data with Meta and Snap; an active DOJ/FTC case against Zealthy, Inc. and its CEO — disclosed on Zealthy's review with an explicit, unresolved note that this entity name differs from the one on its FDA letter, “FitRX, LLC dba Zealthy”) are published anyway, because “the score can't move further” is not the same claim as “this doesn't matter.” The one provider this rule newly capped is GoodRx Care: transparency 8.0 → 4.0, overall 7.2 → 5.6, rank #20 → #32, following a 2023 FTC+DOJ settlement — GoodRx Holdings, Inc. paid a $1.5 million penalty for sharing users' health data with advertisers without consent. We state that date prominently on GoodRx Care's page: a penalty already paid in 2023 is a different fact from an open 2026 case, and a reader deserves to weigh it as such, not read it as breaking news.

Three more providers here face private class-action litigation over similar issues — Ro, Noom Med, and (like Hims) other telehealth brands with pixel-tracking or auto-renewal claims against them. Private litigation is not government enforcement and doesn't trigger this rule; we say so plainly on the providers' pages rather than staying silent, because silence would look like we hadn't found them.

Applied: Gala Health's BBB record

On 2026-08-30 we found that Gala Health — then ranked #14, an affiliate partner, transparency scored at 7.5 — holds an F rating from the Better Business Bureau, with 11 complaints filed and all 11 unanswered. We reported that finding here first, without changing anything, because a BBB F is exactly the evidence category the 5.0 transparency band above already existed for (Direct Meds was that band's only published example at the time). The site owner then applied the same treatment already used for Direct Meds, the same day: Gala Health's transparency moved from 7.5 to 5.0, its overall score from 7.4 to 6.8, its rank from #14 to #27, and its editorsPicklabel was removed — an F with 11 unanswered complaints doesn't carry an editor's pick badge, whatever it pays. Gala Health remains listed and remains an affiliate partner; only the promotion changed. The full BBB record is disclosed on Gala Health's review.

A suspended Trustpilot rating — a new evidence category

Added 2026-08-31, alongside a process fix it depends on: before recording any Trustpilot figure, we now confirm the profile's domain actually matches the provider's own site — not just that the brand name matches. Two providers we track sit one character apart from an unrelated company's domain (ulo.com/ulo.co), and we had already corrected one live mixup (healthrx.online, a different company from healthrx.com) before catching a third mid-review: the only “Luvo Health” result on Trustpilot belongs to an unrelated supplement brand (luv.health), not Luvo Health Inc.

Checking domains properly is what surfaced this: CoreAge Rx's own Trustpilot profile — the correct domain, coreagerx.com — has its rating suspended by Trustpilot itself, not by us. The page states plainly: “This company's rating is unavailable due to a breach of our guidelines” and “We've removed a number of fake reviews for this company,” despite 2,624 reviews on file, 2,623 of them within the past year. We treat a platform-suspended rating as stronger evidence than a merely low one— a low rating is a customer opinion; a suspension is the platform's own finding that the review record was manipulated. It moved CoreAge Rx's transparency score to 3.5, not the 5.0 band a BBB F alone would draw, and shows up as its own line on /lowest-rated, separate from “no rating found.”

A wave of self-published PR-newswire pieces (syndicated across Yahoo Finance, GlobeNewswire, MarketScreener, Barchart, and OpenPR) all report an identical “4.5-star Excellent” rating for CoreAge Rx that Trustpilot's own page contradicts. None of those are primary sources, and none were used here — exactly the gap a competitor taking the syndicated number at face value would fall into. The full finding is disclosed on CoreAge Rx's review.

Price verification

We run an automated weekly check (via GitHub Actions) against each clinic’s own live pricing page. Every review shows that provider’s actual verification status — "Verified" with a date if we’ve confirmed it recently, or "Last confirmed" if it’s due for reconfirmation. Any price that goes 45 days without being reconfirmed automatically switches from verified to unverified rather than continuing to display as current.

Integrity

We review the GLP-1 clinics we hold a commercial relationship with. 26 of the 30 pay us a referral fee if you sign up through our link; 4 have paused their programs, so we earn nothing from them today and their pages carry no link. The score is computed from a published rubric that never reads commission — but we are not claiming to cover the market, and we do not review clinics we have no relationship with.

Whether a clinic pays us a referral fee is public information (see the affiliate disclosure) and it stays out of the rubric entirely — the commission figure is not a field the scoring code reads. What that no longer buys us is an outside check: until 2026-09-11 this site also ranked clinics it earned nothing from, and you could see the rubric treat them identically. Those listings are gone, so the claim now rests on the published method and the evidence under each score rather than on a control group you can inspect. Mistakes get corrected on the record, on the changelog, not quietly. Think we got something wrong? Show us the evidence and we'll re-check it.

What we got wrong

A public record of claims this site published that were not true, how long each one was live, and how it surfaced. It is kept because a methodology page that only lists what we do right is marketing, not a methodology.

Corrections and tips

Email contact@myglp1guides.com to report an error, flag a price that has moved, or tell us about a clinic we should be looking at. Useful things to include: the page you are looking at, what it says, and what you believe the correct figure is — a link to the clinic's own page is the strongest evidence there is, because that is the same source we check against.

We publish our own corrections rather than editing quietly, so a report that holds up ends on the changelog with the date and what changed. If you tell us we got something wrong and we disagree, we will say so and explain why.