What we counted, and what counting cannot tell you
For every provider in the directory we captured the public-facing pages — pricing, FAQ, terms, the eligibility copy — and checked for twelve specific disclosures. Does it say what the membership costs? What the medication costs on top? Which pharmacy fills the prescription? Whether lab work is required, and whether it is included? What the cancellation terms are? Who you actually speak to?
Then we counted, and we counted presence only. A provider gets credit for publishing a number, not for the number being low, and not for it being true. This is a measure of how much a company is willing to put in writing before you pay it, which is a narrower thing than quality and should not be read as a substitute for it.
The reverse is worth saying just as plainly. A provider that publishes nothing is not thereby a bad provider. Some are small clinics with a one-page site and a phone number, and the medicine inside may be excellent. What silence removes is your ability to check anything in advance, or to hold anyone to a figure later. That is the cost, and it lands entirely on you.
The median provider publishes two of twelve
Across 461 providers, the median disclosure count is two. The mean is 2.35. That is the single most important number here, and it is worth sitting with: the typical company selling you a prescription weight-loss programme puts two of twelve basic facts in public writing.
The distribution is worse than the median suggests, because it is heavily weighted at the bottom:
- 116 providers — a quarter of the directory — publish none of the twelve.
- 229, almost exactly half, publish one or none.
- Only 3 providers publish ten or more.
- The most forthcoming provider in the directory publishes 11. Nobody publishes all 12.
The fee they will tell you about is not the one that costs you
This is the finding that changed how we read pricing pages. 263 providers — 57% — publish a membership or programme fee. Only 129 — 28% — publish what the medication costs.
For almost everyone, the medication is the larger expense by a wide margin. So more than twice as many companies will tell you about the smaller cost as will tell you about the bigger one, and the smaller cost is the one that appears on the pricing page in large type with a dollar sign next to it.
That is not an accident of web design. A monthly figure that excludes the main cost is an advertised price that cannot be compared against anything, which is precisely what makes it useful to the advertiser. When you see a low headline number, the only question worth asking is what it excludes, and you will usually have to ask a salesperson to find out.
Eleven providers name the pharmacy
71 providers say something about pharmacy — usually a variant of “we work with licensed partner pharmacies.” Eleven name one.
Naming the pharmacy is the disclosure with the highest information value per word on any of these sites, because it is the only one that hands you something checkable. With a name you can look up state licensure, check whether it is a 503A compounding pharmacy or a 503B outsourcing facility, and search FDA inspection records. Without one you are being asked to accept a supply chain on trust, from a company that has declined to tell you what it is.
Two point four percent of this market will tell you. We built a list of those eleven, not because naming a pharmacy makes a provider good, but because it is the difference between being able to look and having to believe.
Cancellation terms are the least-published thing of all
Thirty-five providers out of 461 publish cancellation terms. That is 7.6%, the lowest figure of the eight fields we track individually, and it is lower than the rate for pharmacy, labs, eligibility or insurance.
It is also the field where non-disclosure most reliably predicts an unpleasant experience, because a subscription whose exit terms are unpublished is a subscription whose exit terms can be whatever the retention script says on the day. We have written a separate guide on cancelling one of these, and the reason it needed writing is this number.
If you take one operational habit from this piece: before you enter a card number, find the cancellation terms. If they are not on the site, ask in writing and keep the reply. An emailed answer is worth more than a published policy you did not read, and considerably more than a phone call nobody recorded.
The rest of the field, in order
For completeness, the share of the 461 publishing each disclosure:
- Membership or programme pricing — 263 (57%)
- Who conducts the consultation — 158 (34%)
- Anything about insurance — 139 (30%)
- Medication pricing — 129 (28%)
- Anything about pharmacy — 71 (15%), of which 11 name one
- Eligibility criteria — 55 (12%)
- Lab work requirements — 54 (12%)
- Cancellation terms — 35 (8%)
How to use this without over-reading it
Disclosure is a floor, not a ranking. A provider that publishes ten of twelve has told you a great deal and may still be expensive, clinically thin, or wrong for you. A provider that publishes two may be the local obesity medicine practice that will look after you properly for years.
What the count is genuinely good for is narrowing. If you are going to contact five companies, the ones that already answer half your questions in public will waste less of your time, and you will spend the call on the things that are actually specific to you rather than on extracting a price.
And when a provider does not publish something, treat that as a question to ask rather than a verdict to draw. Ask it in writing. The answer, and how readily it comes, tells you more than any number we could put on a page.