If you are new to tirzepatide, work through four questions in order: what dose will you actually maintain on, what does that dose cost across every route, is the program you are considering verifiable, and what does the clinical evidence say about what to expect. Each has a page on this site.
The order matters. Most people price the wrong dose first, choose on that number, and discover the real cost in month four.
This is a policy page describing how the site works. It carries no clinical claims.
One: find your likely maintenance dose
Most patients maintain between 7.5 and 15 mg. The dose ladder pages explain what each strength involves and how long it takes to reach.
Two: price that dose, not the entry dose
Our price tables carry all six strengths and a twelve-month total for every tracked program, with membership fees folded in.
Three: verify before you pay
Named pharmacy, named prescriber, stated concentration and beyond-use date, testing disclosure. The verification pages walk through each check.
Four: set expectations from the trials
The research library summarizes the pivotal trials with their registration identifiers so you can read the primary sources rather than a summary of a summary.
Start Here: the shortest useful summary
Tirzepatide is a once-weekly injection titrated from 2.5 mg to a 15 mg ceiling in 2.5 mg steps at intervals of at least four weeks, producing roughly 15 to 21% mean weight reduction across the studied maintenance arms at 72 weeks and about 20% against semaglutide's 14% in the only head-to-head trial. It works while it is taken; the withdrawal evidence shows substantial regain after stopping. Compounded preparations cost from $133 a month and are not FDA-approved; brand product is approved and costs considerably more.
Those five facts decide most questions people arrive with. Everything else on this page is detail underneath them — which is worth reading before you spend $2,388 on a first year, but not worth confusing with the outline.
Start Here: where to go next
If you have not chosen a program, price your expected maintenance dose with the projector rather than reading advertisements. If you have, check what it charges at 10 mg against the price-by-dose table. If you are struggling with side effects, the side-effect reference covers each one with reported frequencies and the red flags that need a clinician. And if a program has refused to name its pharmacy, the verification walkthrough explains why that single answer outranks any price difference.
Start Here: how this site is actually built
Every price table, ranking and comparison on this site is generated from a structured dataset rather than written by hand. That has one consequence worth stating plainly: rankings are computed, not chosen. We cannot quietly move a program up a table, because there is no table to edit — there is a dataset and a sort order, both published. The dataset is downloadable, and so is the formula for the disclosure score.
We currently track 44 routes to tirzepatide or semaglutide, priced at all six dose tiers, with entry pricing for compounded preparations starting at $133 per month. Every record carries the date it was last verified, because a price without a date is not a fact, it is a memory.
Start Here: what we will not do
We will not publish a price we cannot interpret. A figure advertised without the dose it applies to or the period it covers is left blank rather than estimated, and the blank is deliberate. We will not invent review counts, ratings or testimonials. We will not describe a compounded preparation as equivalent to an FDA-approved product, because FDA does not approve compounded drugs and does not review them for safety, effectiveness or quality before marketing. And we will not accept payment for placement, for position, or for the removal of a criticism.
Start Here: the disclosure score in full
The score measures what a program publishes before you pay — not the quality of its care, which we have no way to measure and will not pretend to. Its seven inputs and weights:
- Price published at all six dose tiers — 25 points.
- Price does not rise as the dose escalates — 20 points.
- Dispensing pharmacy or prescriber identified by name — 15 points.
- No separate recurring membership fee — 10 points.
- Prepaid term and its rate published — 10 points.
- State availability published — 10 points.
- Delivery formats published — 10 points.
All seven are derivable from the published dataset, which means anyone can recompute the number and get the same answer. If you think the weighting is wrong, take the data and weight it differently; that is why it is published.
Start Here: how we handle conflicting sources
Where two sources give different prices for the same program, we show both, name each source and its date, and state that neither has been independently verified. Choosing one silently would produce a cleaner table and a less honest one. Those conflicts appear as callouts on the affected program pages.
Start Here: commercial relationships
Some outbound links are commercial and may earn a commission. Commissions do not influence rankings, scores or published prices. Table order is computed from the published dataset rather than assigned, so the ranking can be reproduced from the files on the data page. Where we have no outbound link for a program, the page says so and suggests searching for it directly rather than following an advertisement. See the advertising disclosure for the full statement.
Start Here: corrections
Substantive errors — a wrong price, a misstated dose, an incorrect trial result, a ranking moved by bad data — are logged publicly with the date they were fixed. A site publishing prices in a fast-moving market that never records a correction is not being careful; it is not checking. Report anything you believe is wrong through contact with the page URL and, if you have one, a source.
Start Here: what this site is not
It is not medical advice, it is not a pharmacy, and it does not sell medication. Tirzepatide is a prescription medicine, and only a licensed clinician who has reviewed your history can decide whether it is appropriate for you. Compounded preparations are not FDA-approved. If a program guarantees approval before a clinician has seen your record, that is the clearest warning sign available in this market, and no price justifies it.
Start Here: why any of this is worth stating
Health-adjacent comparison sites are structurally conflicted. They are funded by commissions from the companies they rank, which creates an incentive to rank the highest-paying option first and to describe the arrangement vaguely. The defences against that are boring and checkable: publish the dataset, publish the formula, compute the ranking rather than choosing it, disclose the commercial relationships in the same typeface as everything else, and log corrections publicly with dates.
None of that proves good faith. It does make bad faith detectable, which is the most any publisher can honestly offer. If our ranking and our published dataset ever disagree, that is a bug or a lie, and either way you can find it without our help.
Start Here: how to check us
Download providers.json and sort it yourself by twelve-month cost. The order should match our tables. Recompute the disclosure score from the criteria and weights on the data page; the numbers should match the badges. Follow a trial citation to its registration record and confirm the endpoint we quoted was the primary one. Any mismatch is a reportable error and goes in the corrections log with the date it was fixed.
Start Here: the limits of what a website can do
We can tell you what a program publishes and what it costs at each dose. We cannot tell you whether its clinicians are good, whether its shipments arrive on time, or whether tirzepatide is appropriate for you. The first two we do not measure and will not guess at; the third belongs to a licensed clinician with your medical history in front of them. Compounded preparations are not FDA-approved and are not reviewed by FDA for safety, effectiveness or quality before marketing, and no amount of comparison shopping changes that distinction.
Start Here: the numbers behind the site
We track 44 routes to tirzepatide or semaglutide, priced at all six dose tiers, with compounded entry pricing from $133 to $399 a month and a cheapest twelve-month total of about $2,388. Every figure carries a verification date. Anything older than a month should be re-checked before you act on it, including by us.
Frequently asked questions
What if I already have a program?
Price your current program at your current dose against the table. Re-pricing annually is worth real money.
Is this site selling tirzepatide?
No. We publish pricing and verification information and disclose that some outbound links are commercial.
People also ask about start here
What is start here?
Start here is covered in full on this page, with the clinical detail drawn from the tirzepatide prescribing information and the published SURMOUNT and SURPASS trial program, and any price figures drawn from our tracked dataset and dated to their last verification.
Does start here apply to compounded tirzepatide as well as Zepbound?
The molecule is the same, so the clinical content applies to both. What differs is regulatory status, dose metering and price: compounded preparations are not FDA-approved, arrive as a multi-dose vial you measure yourself, and cost a fraction of the brand routes.
How much does start here cost per month in 2026?
Compounded tirzepatide runs from $133 per month at the entry dose across the 21 compounded programs we track. At a 10 mg maintenance dose the cheapest tracked route is Oak Longevity at $199 per month, or about $2,388 for a first year on the standard escalation. Brand Zepbound through manufacturer self-pay sits well above that and pharmacy retail well above again. Verified 2026-08-05.
Is start here FDA-approved?
Brand tirzepatide (Zepbound and Mounjaro) is FDA-approved. Compounded tirzepatide is not: FDA does not approve compounded drugs and does not review them for safety, effectiveness or quality before they are marketed. The active molecule is the same; the regulatory review is not.
Sources
- Program pricing as published by each provider and recorded in our pricing dataset, with the verification date shown on every table.
- US Food and Drug Administration, human drug compounding: compounded drugs are not FDA-approved and are not reviewed by FDA for safety, effectiveness or quality before marketing.
- Full source ledger — every primary source with a live link, what it supports, the date we read it, and the claims we deliberately do not source.