What to ask before your first order, and where the answer lives
Ten questions, each one put here because a seller we reviewed failed it. Every answer is on the seller's own site or in a public register, and checking all ten takes about twenty minutes.
This is not a list of warning signs. Every company named below is a licensed, functioning telehealth business, several of them large, and none of them is hiding in the sense that matters — the answers are published. They are just published somewhere other than the page that asks for your card.
We read these sites for the provider reviews and the price tracker, which means the ten questions here are not hypothetical. Each one is on the list because a real seller answered it badly, in public, on a date we can give you. Asking all ten takes about twenty minutes, and you only have to do it once per company.
Which pharmacy makes this, and what is it called on its licence?
Compounded medication is made by a pharmacy, not by the telehealth brand you bought it from. That pharmacy holds a state licence, and its inspection and disciplinary record is public — but only if you know the name to search.
The spread here is wider than any other question on this list. Lavender Sky names twelve pharmacies and lets you pick, with a price for each. Strut Health names none — and the FDA's February 2026 warning letter to the company said its own name on the label implies it compounds drugs it does not [1]. Invigor Medical names five without saying which state licenses them or whether they are 503A or 503B — two different regulatory animals, and the FDA publishes a register of the 503B outsourcing facilities [2].
And a company can name pharmacies and still leave you stuck. MadeMed names four on its terms and about page — Absolute RX, Strive Pharmacy, ERX Hub and Southend Pharmacy — with no address, no licensed name and nothing to say which one fills your prescription. On our September read its pages named three, again under brand names: "Red Rock Pharmacy" is licensed as CD Pharmacy, LLC; "AbsoluteRx" as Absolute Pharmacy, LLC. You cannot look a pharmacy up without the licensed name, and the site does not give it.
What a good answer looks like: a pharmacy name you can put into your state board's licence lookup and get a hit.
How many milligrams, for that price?
A price with no quantity attached is not a price. It is very common.
Invigor Medical publishes 26 treatment plans and not one states a dose — no milligrams, no millilitres, no vial size, including on the product it calls micro-dose GLP-1. On its GLP-1 pages the molecule itself is never named.
The counter-example is on the same shelf. MadeMed prints its NAD+ injection as 200 mg/mL and its nasal spray as 300 mg/mL beside the price. That is not generosity; it is the minimum that makes two prices comparable. The same site shows how easily it goes: until October its sermorelin page printed 9mg/3mL, and since its rebuild it prints no strength at all.
What a good answer looks like: a number and a unit, on the product page, next to the figure.
Is this the price I keep paying?
The first month is frequently not the price of treatment, and the gap can be most of the cost. Our own price tracker exists because of it: we publish one ongoing month with everything required, and how we measure a price is the whole rule.
Three shapes to watch for, all documented. A first-month rate: TrimRx advertised $179 while its own terms priced the ongoing consultation at $299. A dose-limited rate: Ro's $199 applies to the two starting doses, and the therapeutic range is $349 before membership. A prepaid-term rate: MadeMed's $143 sermorelin is billed $1,718 for 360 days at once, and AgelessRx advertises sub-$100 figures on sermorelin and NAD+ that are prepaid intro rates, both settling at $149 a month.
What's actually in a GLP-1 price works through all six of the mechanisms with the sellers' own sentences.
What a good answer looks like: a figure the page attaches to month four, not month one.
What is not in that figure?
Three things routinely sit outside the headline: the membership, the consultation, and the labs.
Hims prices its Wegovy pen at $199 with a $149 monthly membership required, so the month is $348. Lavender Sky's per-vial price excludes the consultation — $65 new, $40 for the follow-up it requires twice a year. MadeMed requires an IGF-1 result before prescribing sermorelin and a metabolic panel before NAD+, tells you to obtain both at Labcorp or Quest, and prices neither.
None of that is hidden. All of it is on a different page from the number.
What a good answer looks like: you can name every charge that has to happen before the medicine ships.
Is this the FDA-approved drug, or a compounded version of it?
These are different products with different legal status, and the distinction is the single most consequential thing on this list. A compounded preparation is made by a pharmacy for a patient; it is not an FDA-approved finished product, it has not been through FDA review for safety and efficacy, and it is not available in every state. Compounded versus branded covers the whole framework.
The reason to ask rather than assume is that sellers have blurred it. The FDA's letter to Strut Health quoted three statements from the site verbatim, including "Generic Zepbound, Mounjaro", and said claims implying a compounded drug is the approved one make it misbranded [1]. MadeMed's troche page states that PT-141 "is FDA-approved for low sexual desire" — bremelanotide is approved, as an autoinjector for premenopausal women with a specific diagnosis, and the compounded troche being sold is approved for nothing.
Some platforms have moved the other way. Hims pivoted most of its weight-loss business to branded FDA-approved medication sourced through manufacturer partnerships.
What a good answer looks like: the page says which it is, without borrowing the approved drug's name.
Who writes the prescription, and can I check them myself?
Every state board publishes a licence lookup, free, and most answer in under a minute. The question is whether the company gives you enough to use one.
PeterMD names no prescriber anywhere on the site and no legal entity either. MadeMed used to do the opposite: until October a credentials page published its medical director with four licence numbers, each beside a "Verification Link" that pointed back at the same page. We ran two of the four against the boards ourselves and both came back current, which is the point: the check was easy, and the site simply had not done it. That page is gone; the terms now name a medical group, MDI Medical Group PC, and no physician. Defy Medical names its medical director and runs an hour of clinician time into the first appointment.
What a good answer looks like: a name and a licence number, which you then verify on the board's own site rather than the company's.
Does the study actually say what the page says it says?
When a seller cites research it is checkable, which makes it one of the more productive things to check.
PeterMD's tirzepatide page claims an average 26% weight loss in a year and footnotes it to trials of a dose belonging to a different drug. AgelessRx advertises "11+ clinical trials with 9 peer-reviewed publications" — we put that through PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov by sponsor and affiliation rather than by topic, and the review reports what the publication types actually are.
A citation is not evidence that a claim is supported. It is an invitation to read the thing cited.
What a good answer looks like: the linked study is about the same drug, at the same dose, in a comparable population.
What does the record outside the company say?
Company-run rating widgets are not third-party data. On our September read, MadeMed's own pages showed 0.0 out of 5 on the sermorelin product and 4.2 on the tadalafil one; both widgets went with the October rebuild.
Outside records vary in the way you would expect and in ways you would not. Mochi Health has 20,135 Trustpilot reviews at 4.5 out of 5 (November 2026) while its BBB customer review rating is 1.29 out of 5 across 317 reviews, and it is defendant in two active federal lawsuits brought by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. TrimRx is Trustpilot 3.5 across 4,868 reviews (November 2026), rated F and not accredited by the BBB (October 2026), and defendant in Laplante v. Metafit Pharma Solutions LLC in the Southern District of California. PeterMD's Trustpilot profile was removed by Trustpilot for breaching its guidelines.
And an empty record is a fact of its own rather than a bad sign. MadeMed has no Trustpilot profile and no BBB profile, which is what you would expect of a company that began selling peptides last year.
What a good answer looks like: you have looked at Trustpilot, the BBB, and a search for the legal entity's name plus "lawsuit", and you know what you are choosing.
Is this product available in my state — this product, not the company?
Availability is set per product by where the pharmacy is licensed to ship and where the prescriber is licensed to practise, so one company can serve your state for one drug and not for another.
MadeMed answers product by product, and not on every product. Its sermorelin and troche pages say 40 states and name the ten they do not serve; its NAD+, glutathione and GHK-Cu pages publish no list. On our September read its about page answered "what states does MadeMed serve" with 40 while its NAD+ page listed 23, with Missouri, New Mexico and New York on opposite sides. On Lavender Sky, cross-referencing the company's own price list against its own state-exclusion table narrows the pharmacy choice considerably depending on where you live.
What a good answer looks like: you read the state list on the page for the product you want, not the one on the about page.
What happens when I want to stop?
Ask before the first charge, not after the third.
MadeMed's terms say you can cancel at any time, that cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and that prorated refunds are not offered — and on its 90- and 360-day plans the billing period is paid in advance. Henry Meds notes that multi-month plans may require paying out the remaining balance. LillyDirect's Zepbound pricing carries a refill window: at 7.5 mg and above, reorder within 45 days or the same doses cost more.
What a good answer looks like: you can state, before ordering, what leaving costs.
What this does not settle
These ten questions are about the transaction, not the treatment. They will tell you what you are buying, from whom, at what price, under what law. They will not tell you whether you should take it, what it will do, or whether it is right for your body — those are questions for a clinician who knows your history, and nothing on this page substitutes for that.
They also cannot tell you that a company that answers all ten well is a good one. A clean answer means the claim is checkable and checks out; it is not a guarantee of service, supply, or outcome. What it does rule out is the specific failure this list is built from — finding out after the charge that the price was for one month, the dose was unstated, the pharmacy was unnamed, or the drug was not what the page implied.
Frequently asked
Do I really need to do all ten?
The first five cost you almost nothing and cover most of the money. Questions 1, 3 and 4 between them explain nearly every case where people report paying much more than they expected.
Is it rude to ask a company these things?
No, and the answer to that is itself informative. Every question here is about something a legitimate provider has already published or can state in a sentence. A support team that cannot say which pharmacy fills your prescription has told you something.
How do I check a pharmacy licence?
Search the licensed entity name in the state board of pharmacy's lookup for the state the pharmacy is in. The records are free and public, and they show licence status, expiry, and whether any discipline is on file. The hard part is usually getting the entity name, which is why question 1 asks for it specifically.
What if the company will not name the pharmacy?
That is a complete answer to question 1. Some sellers route to a partner pharmacy by default but let you nominate your own — worth asking, because a pharmacy you choose is one you can check.
Does a cheaper price mean a worse product?
Not by itself, but a figure far below everyone else usually means a real cost was removed, and with an injectable the candidates are active ingredient, sterility and testing. The more common pattern is not a cheap product but an incomplete price — see question 3.