Analysis

What Tirzepatide Actually Costs at a Maintenance Dose: Five Ladders, Compared

Five providers publish what happens when the dose rises, and every one of them charges more. The steepest published ladder runs $399 to $524, a 31% increase from starter

What does each published ladder actually do?

The advertised price is almost always the starting dose. Labelling directs increases every four weeks to a maintenance dose of 10 or 15 mg over roughly 20 to 24 weeks, and states 2.5 mg is treatment initiation and is not approved as a maintenance dosage. So the figure most comparison tables rank on is a figure that stops applying in month two.

Reported rows come from a competitor's published comparison, which attributes each figure to a third-party review. We record them as reported rather than captured because we have not read them on the provider's own page. Not one published ladder goes down.

What does that do to a year?

The programme advertising $13 less than the flat plan costs $1,104 more over the year. The one advertising $213 more costs $3,668 more.

Which structures are honest about it?

This is worth separating from the arithmetic, because the two are not the same thing.

• A flat rate stated on the provider's own page is the clearest structure: the advertised figure is the maintenance figure.
• “$199 first month, then $299 all doses” is an intro rate, and a provider printing both numbers in the same sentence has disclosed it properly. The ongoing figure is the one to compare.
• A published dose ladder — $399, then $499, then $524 — is also honest disclosure. It is more expensive and more transparent than a single teaser figure.
• A medication price quoted without a mandatory membership is the structure that misleads most, because both numbers are accurate and only one is what you pay.

We rank on the maintenance figure. We do not treat disclosure as a penalty, and a provider that publishes its ladder is doing something the ones with a single unexplained headline are not.

Flat at every covered dose within each protocol, read on the provider’s own plan pages. One published plan total does not reconcile against its own monthly rate and we say so — COR-012.

What should I ask?

1. What will I pay per month at 10 mg, on the plan I would sign? One number means flat. A range means a ladder, and the top of the range is your real cost.
2. Is that in writing? A landing page can change tomorrow; an email cannot.
3. Is anything billed separately? Membership, consultation, labs, shipping, dose-increase surcharges.
4. Is the first month a promotional rate? If so, what is the ongoing figure?

How does every provider score on the six tests?

Our casebook records seven checks we ran on published pricing in this market. Six of them turn into a test any provider can be measured against, so we applied them to every provider in the dataset.

Frequently asked questions

Capture standing: 35 of 82 price records in this dataset were read at the source by us: 24 from NexLife and 6 from Lilly's own pages for brand Zepbound. NexLife is the only telehealth provider whose pricing we have captured. Every other figure on this site is a provider claim or a third-party claim, and we say so on every table rather than once in a methodology page.