Compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide in 2026: what it costs, and where it legally stands

The short version. The market split in two this year. The venture-backed platforms moved to branded drugs and now sell Wegovy and Zepbound with a membership on top, from $149 a month before the membership. The independents still sell compounded semaglutide at $99 a month. That $99 is real, and it is also the part of the market the FDA has spent two years closing: the shortages that made large-scale compounding lawful were declared over in October 2024 and February 2025, and in April 2026 the agency proposed excluding semaglutide, tirzepatide and liraglutide from the 503B Bulks List outright. Patient-specific compounding at a 503A pharmacy remains lawful. So the question is not whether $99 is genuine. It is what you are choosing when you take it.

01 / 06The market split in two, and the split is the story

A year ago almost every large weight-loss telehealth brand sold compounded semaglutide, because the drug was in declared shortage and compounding it was permitted at scale. Read the same brands today and the picture has inverted.

Hims sells branded. Its weight-loss page offers the Wegovy pill from $149 a month, the Wegovy pen from $199, and the Zepbound vial from $299, each marked “membership required”. The word “compound” does not appear on that page at all, and neither does any reference to 503A or 503B pharmacies. Ro sells branded too, listing Wegovy, Zepbound, Ozempic, Foundayo and Saxenda, with no mention of compounding anywhere on the page we read.

The independents did not follow. Trimi still publishes compounded semaglutide at $99 a month, and it is not alone in the wider market. That is not a rounding difference against a $149 branded pill, and it is not a like-for-like product either, which is the whole of what follows.

02 / 06What the five actually publish

Provider	What it sells	Medication	Published from	What the headline price requires
Trimi	compounded	Semaglutide	$99 / mo	12-month commitment, $1,188 billed yearly
Trimi	compounded	Semaglutide, no commitment	$175 / mo	nothing
Trimi	compounded	Tirzepatide	$125 / mo	12-month commitment, $1,500 billed yearly
Trimi	compounded	Tirzepatide, no commitment	$235 / mo	nothing
HHims	branded	Wegovy pill	$149 / mo	membership, fee not included
HHims	branded	Wegovy pen	$199 / mo	membership, fee not included
HHims	branded	Zepbound vial	$299 / mo	membership, fee not included
Ro	branded	not published on the page read	not published	membership $39 first month, then $74 to $149; medication not included
Henry Meds	compounded	not published where we could read it	not published	not stated
Strut Health	compounded	not published where we could read it	not published	not stated

Read from each provider’s own live pages on 22 September 2026. Where a provider does not publish a figure on the pages we could reach, we say so rather than substituting an estimate. Hims refused automated requests, so its page was read in an ordinary browser.

03 / 06The headline price and the commitment are different facts

The $99 in that table is annual. Trimi’s $99 is a 12-month commitment billed yearly at $1,188, and the same medication without the commitment is $175. That is a 77% difference between the number on the banner and the number you pay if you want to stop in March, from one provider, on one page.

The branded side does the same thing in a different place. Hims prices are marked “membership required” and the footnote states the membership fee is not included, so $149 is a floor you add to rather than a total. Ro is the clearest case: the membership is $39 for the first month and $74 to $149 after that, and the page says in plain words that the cost of the GLP-1 medication is not included in it.

04 / 06Where compounded GLP-1 legally stands, with the dates

This is the part most product pages leave vague, and it is the part that decides whether the supply you are buying today still exists next year. The sequence, from FDA’s own documents:

What that means in ordinary language. Compounded semaglutide is not an unlawful product, and a provider selling it is not necessarily doing anything wrong. What changed is the basis. Compounding is no longer justified by a shortage; it now has to rest on a documented clinical need specific to you, prepared by a state-licensed 503A pharmacy. That is a narrower door than the one the market walked through in 2023, and the April 2026 proposal is the agency moving to narrow it further.

05 / 06Who tells you that plainly, and who does not

Since the legal basis now rests on a distinction most buyers have never heard of, the single most useful thing a provider can do is state it without being asked. They do not all do it, and the differences are not small.

Provider	Says “not FDA-approved”	Names 503A / 503B	Names the actual pharmacy
Trimi	plainly	yes, 503A	yes, two named
Henry Meds	plainly, on the product page	no	no
Strut Health	none found	no	no
HHims	n/a, sells branded	n/a	n/a
Ro	n/a, sells branded	n/a	n/a

Trimi sets the standard here and it is worth quoting. Its page says “Compounded medications are not FDA-approved. The FDA does not review them for safety, effectiveness, or quality,” and then names the pharmacies that make them: BelieveRx and GreenwichRx, state-licensed 503A. That is the most complete disclosure we found, because it lets a reader check the pharmacy rather than trust an adjective.

Henry Meds is softer on the home page and much stronger on the product page, and the difference is worth knowing. Its general wording is that the medications “are not FDA-approved in the same way as commercial drugs, but they do use FDA-approved ingredients”, which reads as a technicality, and the ingredients point is not the point: the FDA reviews finished products, not ingredient lists. On the product page itself the same company states that compounded medications “do not undergo pre-market review or an FDA-approval process”, that they may differ in efficacy, safety and side-effect profile, and that “data from clinical trials on FDA-approved medications should not be used to make assessments related to compounded medications.” That last clause is the strongest disclosure sentence we found on any provider in this category. ★ The lesson generalises: grade a company on the page where the money changes hands, not on the one written for search. On Strut Health we found no statement at all that compounded medication is not FDA-approved, only the phrase “pharmacy-compounded”.

06 / 06What this means for your decision

If you want the lowest genuine monthly cost and you are comfortable with a compounded product and an annual commitment, the two $99 offers are the floor of this market, and Trimi publishes a a no-commitment price beside it. If you want an FDA-approved product, you are buying branded from Hims or Ro and your real number is the medication plus a membership, not the figure on the card.

And whichever you choose, the disclosure column is the one to read first. A provider that tells you the regulatory position before you ask is a provider that will tell you when it changes, and on current evidence it is going to change again.