The number that isn't your bill
Two women can pay the same headline price and one of them is finished paying. After a month reading pricing pages, four structures keep repeating — and the difference between them is rarely explained on the page where you agree to it.
Before anything else
This is about how prices are structured, not about which provider is cheapest. Nothing here is a recommendation, and nothing here is medical advice. Figures move constantly; confirm any number with the provider before you enrol.
Spend a month reading GLP-1 pricing pages, as we have just done, and a pattern surfaces that has nothing to do with how much anything costs. It is about what the advertised number is for.
There are four common shapes, and they are not interchangeable. Two women can pay the same headline figure and one of them is done paying, while the other has three more bills coming.
Shape one: all-in
One number, medication included, at any dose. Nothing else arrives. This is the easiest to compare and, this month, the shape most visibly gaining ground — one provider on our board moved to bundling the medication into a single flat monthly figure that does not change as you titrate upward.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. Dose-tiered pricing is where a lot of budgets quietly break: the number you agreed to at 2.5mg is not the number you are paying at 10mg, and the increase lands months later, when stopping feels expensive in a different way.
Shape two: membership plus medication
A membership fee buys the clinician; the drug is billed separately. Both figures are usually published, so the arithmetic is available — you just have to do it. A $79 membership and a $199 medication is a $278 month, and it is not dishonest, but the marketing will show you the $79.
Shape three: membership plus medication plus labs
The version that catches PMOS (PCOS) patients specifically. Membership is posted. Medication is separate. And labs, imaging and prescriptions sit outside the membership too, unpriced.
For a condition monitored through bloodwork — the schedule we wrote about in The screening schedule nobody gave you asks for lipids, blood pressure and glucose testing at diagnosis and glucose again every one to two years — an unpriced labs line is not a rounding error. It is the part of your care most likely to be skipped, and the reason it gets skipped is often that nobody could tell you in advance what it would cost.
An unpriced line item is not usually a trap. It is usually the line item that quietly does not happen.
Shape four: prepay to unlock
The attractive number exists, but it belongs to a twelve-month prepaid plan. Month to month costs substantially more. We saw a gap of well over a hundred dollars a month between the two on a single provider this cycle.
There is nothing wrong with a prepay discount; committing volume in exchange for a lower rate is ordinary commerce. The problem is the sequence. You are asked to commit a year before you know whether the medication agrees with you, and on most of these platforms the cancellation terms are not published — so you are prepaying into an exit you cannot read.
That is the single most common gap in our billing row, across nearly every provider we score: not deception, just silence where the cancellation policy should be.
What we do with this
Our scorecards carry one price per provider, and we pick the realistic lowest monthly figure a new patient could actually pay without a long commitment — not the promotional first month, not the twelve-month prepaid rate, not the membership fee with the drug removed. Where the structure is stacked, the row says so in words.
We would rather a provider be visibly expensive and completely legible than cheap on the homepage and complicated at checkout. The Care Standard rewards exactly that, which is why a well-priced service with published cancellation terms can out-score a cheaper one that leaves them out.
Four questions before you enrol
Is this figure my total each month, or is anything billed separately? Does the price change as my dose goes up? What do labs cost, and are they included? And what exactly happens if I stop in month three — in writing, before I pay for month one?
None of those are rude questions. A provider who answers all four in plain language has told you something real about how the rest of the relationship will go.
The honest disclaimer. This is general information from the women who write Selene — not medical advice, not financial advice, and not a recommendation of any provider. Pricing structures described here are generalisations drawn from publicly posted terms across the providers we review; individual terms vary and change often, so confirm everything directly before you enrol. No GLP-1 is FDA-approved specifically for PMOS (PCOS), and GLP-1 medications are not a treatment for endometriosis. Selene is editorial: we do not prescribe, sell, or dispense anything.
Sources. Publicly posted pricing, membership and cancellation terms from the providers reviewed on this site, checked during our September 2026 refresh; Chan JL, Masini I, Pisarska MD, The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 136(12), 15 June 2026, for the PMOS (PCOS) metabolic screening intervals referenced above.