Methodology
How Prices Are Calculated
A headline pill price is not a price. By the time a prescription medicine reaches your door it may have collected a consultation fee, a prescription writing fee, and delivery, and the provider advertising the lowest headline figure can easily turn out to be the most expensive of the set.
So we calculate the complete cost of a standard treatment course: everything you have to pay in order to receive the medicine, totalled on the same basis for every provider. The figure in our table is the figure you should expect at checkout, not a starting point that grows on the way there.
What goes into the calculated total
Four components, applied identically to every provider. The test for inclusion is simple: if paying it is unavoidable in order to receive the medicine, it is in the total.
Always included
Medicine cost
The provider’s own price for the medicine at the dose and quantity being compared. This is the figure most sites show on its own, and on its own it is rarely what you end up paying.
Where mandatory
Consultation fees
Where a provider requires a paid consultation before it will issue a prescription, that fee is part of the cost of obtaining the medicine and is included. Where a consultation is genuinely optional, it is not.
Where charged
Prescription fees
Private prescription writing fees, charged by some providers for issuing the script itself rather than folding that cost into the medicine price.
Cheapest trackable
Delivery
The lowest-cost trackable standard delivery the provider offers. Untracked options are not used as the baseline even when they are cheaper, because a tracked service is the realistic minimum for a prescription medicine.
Exclusions
What we leave out, and why
Optional extras sit outside the baseline calculation. Next-day or named-day delivery, subscription and auto-refill discounts, bundled add-ons, and introductory offers open only to new customers are all excluded from the calculated total.
Not because they are unimportant. A subscription discount may well be the right choice for you. They are excluded because they are not available to every reader on the same terms, and including them would mean comparing one provider’s best case against another’s standard case. That is the exact distortion the calculated total exists to prevent.
Where an optional saving is substantial, we note it alongside the listing rather than folding it into the ranked figure, so you can see the offer without it quietly moving a provider up the table.