What happens in month two: 22 of 36 GLP-1 clinics won't say

Every GLP-1 clinic tells you what month one costs. It is the number on the button, in the ad, in the comparison table. It is also, for most people, the least important number in the transaction, because almost nobody takes a GLP-1 for one month.

So we read all 36 clinics we ranked on 22 September for a different thing: what do you pay in month two, and does the page say?

Twelve of 36 answer it. Twenty-two do not.

One thing to be precise about before the numbers, because it changes how you should read them: 36 is the number of clinics we rank, not the number that exist. Several large names are not in it. Hims, Ro, Noom and WeightWatchers among them. Because we have not reviewed them yet, not because they passed or failed anything here. If you check one of those against this article you will find it missing, and that is the reason. Hims, for what it is worth, publishes its step-up openly: $39 for the first month, then a $149/month membership on top of the medication. On the test in this article it would land in the disclosing group, not the silent one.

The three states a price can be in

Once you start looking for month two specifically, clinic pricing sorts into three groups, and only one of them is honest by default.

Eight clinics advertise a price that explicitly rises. Their headline is an entry rate. A first-month figure, usually under a countdown or a struck-through "was" price. Pallas Health, Welludr (formerly Wellmedr), HealthRX, Enhance.MD, Embody, SnagRx, SkinnyRx and Sprout Health all sit here. This is not dishonest. It becomes dishonest only when the page shows the entry number and not the other one.

Twelve clinics say what the ongoing rate is. Some are unusually good about it. Pallas Health prints both figures in the same sentence: "Compounded Semaglutide — $139 first month · then $199/mo avg." Sprout Health does the same — "Starting at $299/month" next to "Now from $149 / first month." Enhance.MD publishes the whole grid rather than an entry price at all: $212/mo on twelve months, $224 on six, $237 on three, $249 month-to-month, so the ongoing rate is whichever tier you picked.

HealthRX deserves a specific mention, because it is the only clinic we found where the surprise goes the other way: its published renewal is lower than its signup price ($190 renewing at $165, $399 renewing at $374) via a standing $25 credit. That is a clinic publishing a fact against its own short-term interest, and it is the clearest case on the site of a page that is simply telling you the truth.

Twenty-two clinics say nothing. No step-up flagged, no ongoing rate published, no statement either way. The headline price sits alone and you find out what month two costs in month two.

Why the silence is the finding, not the step-up

It would be easy to write this as "watch out for teaser pricing." That is the wrong lesson and it points at the wrong clinics.

A clinic that advertises $139 and prints "then $199" beside it has told you everything. Your month-two cost is knowable before you hand over a card. The price rises, and the rise is disclosed. That is a functioning transaction.

A clinic that advertises $99 and says nothing else has told you the cheapest true sentence available to it. You cannot tell whether $99 holds, whether it doubles, or whether it was a first-month rate all along. And neither can we, which is the point. Silence is not evidence that the price holds. It is evidence that the page will not commit.

Twenty-two of thirty-six is not a few bad actors. It is still the norm.

The commitment question underneath it

There is a second axis that interacts badly with the first. Fourteen of the 36 lock you into a multi-month term to get the advertised rate. Three, six or twelve months, paid up front or billed on a schedule you cannot exit.

Stack the two and you get the shape worth avoiding: a headline entry price, a term you cannot leave, and no published statement of what the rate becomes. Two clinics in our ranking are in all three states at once.

The inverse, a published ongoing rate and no lock, is what you actually want, and it is rarer than the marketing suggests.

What we could not do

We read what the pages say. We did not sign up, get to month two, and compare a bank statement against a claim. So this measures disclosure, not conduct.

And we could not read every page. Of the 36, 24 pricing pages opened for us on the day we checked; ten refused automated requests or failed to respond, and two returned a block page. For those we kept the classification we already held rather than guessing, which means ten of the twenty-two "says nothing" clinics are carried forward unverified. Wellorithm, bmiMD, Synergy RX, TMates, Hume Care, Strut, Ageless, CoreAge Rx, FeelGood and MangoRx. If one of them does publish an ongoing rate somewhere we could not reach, the true figure is lower than 22. It is not higher.

This is also why the number in this article moved before publication. An earlier pass put it at twenty-seven, counted from fields recorded in our own database rather than from the pages themselves. Opening the pages one at a time moved five clinics. MEDGm, Fridays, Yucca Health, Bodybuilding Health and Sesame Care — out of the silent group, because each does publish what you pay later and our record had not caught up. Those corrections are in our provider data, with the quotes, before this sentence went live.

A clinic in the silent twenty-seven may well charge you the same $99 forever. We have no evidence it does not. What we can say precisely is that it has not put that in writing where a shopper can read it before paying, while nine of its competitors have.

Where we do have evidence of a gap between what a page says and what a customer pays, we publish it separately as a finding. Including three cases where the price on the page our own affiliate link lands on differs from the price on the clinic's public site.

How to check it yourself in thirty seconds

Before you enter a card, on the clinic's own page, look for one of these:

1. A second number next to the first ("then $X/mo", "renews at $X").
2. A plan grid where each term has its own price, rather than one headline.
3. An explicit sentence that the rate does not change.

If none of the three is present, you do not know what month two costs. And the clinic has chosen not to tell you. Twenty-two of the thirty-six we rank made that choice.