Multi-Year Cost Calculator

Why the horizon matters more than the monthly rate

A $100 monthly difference is $1,200 over a year and $6,000 over five. Choosing a programme on the first invoice, rather than on the horizon you actually expect, is how people end up interrupting treatment for cost.

Set against surgery, and against insurance

A large one-off surgical cost that insurance frequently covers compares differently to an indefinite monthly cash cost that it frequently does not. That comparison belongs in this calculation, not outside it.

Affordability is a clinical variable

A therapy that works only while taken, and that you cannot sustain, will be interrupted. Choosing a price you can hold for years is part of the treatment plan.

The assumptions behind this calculator

Every figure here rests on one escalation model: four weeks at 2.5 mg, four weeks at 5 mg, then your chosen maintenance dose for the remainder. That model is stated so you can disagree with it. If your prescriber repeats a step for tolerability — which roughly a third of patients do — add a month at the lower rate. If you escalate past 10 mg, use the higher band, because dose-scaled programs reprice you there.

Membership fees are folded into the monthly figures wherever a program charges one, because an advertised medication price that excludes a recurring platform fee is not comparable to one that has no such fee. Prepaid-term discounts are not applied: these are monthly-plan figures, and prepaying typically lowers the rate while making the commitment effectively non-refundable once medication ships.

A worked example

Take a patient who titrates normally and settles at 10 mg. On the cheapest tracked route, Oak Longevity, that is about $199 a month at maintenance and roughly $2,388 across a first year. On a dose-scaled program advertising below $153 at entry, the same patient can finish the year higher, because ten of those twelve months are billed at a maintenance rate the advertisement never quoted. That reversal is the single most common pricing surprise in this market and it is what these tools exist to surface.

What this tool cannot tell you

Whether tirzepatide is appropriate for you, what dose you will end up on, whether a program ships reliably, or whether its clinical oversight is adequate. It is a budgeting instrument built on published prices, not a recommendation. Read the program's review and run the verification checks before enrolling anywhere it surfaces.

Where the numbers come from

The same dataset that generates every table on this site, loaded into your browser as a static file. Nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere, no account is required, and the underlying data is downloadable with a verification date on every record. If you find an error in it, the corrections process is the fastest route to having it fixed for everyone.

Re-run this annually

Prices in this market have moved repeatedly, and programs do not notify existing patients when a cheaper tier appears. An annual re-run at your actual maintenance dose is worth more than most of the optimization patients attempt elsewhere.

How to use this alongside the other tools

Each tool answers a different question and they are meant to be used in sequence. The dose planner tells you when you will reach a maintenance dose. The projector tells you what a year at that dose costs across the market. The savings calculator tells you what switching would be worth if you are already enrolled somewhere. The brand comparison puts a number on what FDA approval status costs you. And the matcher ranks programs against all of it at once.

The numbers these tools will not flatter

They include membership fees, which many advertised prices exclude. They price the maintenance dose rather than the starter dose, which is where dose-scaled programs look worse than their homepages suggest. And they show twelve-month and multi-year totals rather than monthly figures, because a monthly figure is how a large annual commitment gets made without being noticed. If a result here is higher than what you were quoted, the difference is usually one of those three.

Sanity-checking the output

Two checks catch most errors. First, does the cheapest result match the cheapest tirzepatide ranking? It should, because both read the same dataset. Second, does the monthly figure match what the program's own page states at your dose? If it does not, our record may be stale — every one carries a verification date, and telling us is the fastest way to get it fixed. Entry pricing across tracked compounded programs currently runs $133 to $399; a result far outside that band is worth questioning.

Why these tools do not ask for your email

Every comparable calculator in this market gates its result behind contact details, because the result is the bait and your details are the product. Ours run entirely in your browser against a static dataset, collect nothing, and require no account. If a tool elsewhere will not show you a number without an email address, the number is not the point of the tool.

What to do with the output

Take the twelve-month figure at your expected maintenance dose to the program you are considering and ask them to confirm or correct it in writing. That single email does more than any amount of comparison reading: it forces a specific, dated, attributable number out of a market that prefers to quote starter prices. If their answer differs from ours, send it to corrections and we will verify and update the record.