GLP-1 Cost Without Insurance: The Cash Prices

A GLP-1 bought without insurance does not have one price. It has four, and they answer different questions: what the drug's maker charges you directly, what a savings card does when your commercial plan refuses to cover the drug, what a compounding pharmacy charges through a telehealth clinic, and what Medicare pays for one narrow group of people. Mixing them up is how a reader ends up comparing a first-month teaser against a maintenance-dose invoice. Prices checked 2026-08-29; every brand figure below was read on the manufacturer's own page that day and is quoted as it was written there.

What the brand makers charge in cash

Novo Nordisk sells Wegovy and Ozempic directly through its own pharmacy. The terms published there say patients new to the offer "pay $199 for each month of 0.25 mg and 0.5 mg," and that the price is an "offer... for 2 monthly fills through December 31, 2026, then $349 per month for Wegovy 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg, 1 mg, 1.7 mg or 2.4 mg and $399 per month for Wegovy HD (semaglutide) injection 7.2 mg"¹. Ozempic runs on the same structure with a different ceiling: the same $199 opening on the two lowest doses, "then $349 per month for Ozempic 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg or 1 mg and $499 per month for Ozempic 2 mg"¹. Oral semaglutide is priced by dose as well, at "$149 for each month of 1.5 mg, $199 per month for 4 mg and $299 per month for 9 mg and 25 mg," where a month is one bottle of 30 tablets¹.

Lilly publishes a comparable ladder for Zepbound. Its savings page states: "Regular price for a 1-month supply of Zepbound single-patient-use KwikPen is $299 for 2.5 mg, $399 for 5 mg, $499 for 7.5 mg, $699 for 10 mg, $699 for 12.5 mg, and $699 for 15 mg"². The oral GLP-1 is priced the same way: "Regular price for a 1-month supply of Foundayo dosages is $149 for 0.8 mg, $199 for 2.5 mg, $299 for 5.5 mg and 9 mg, and $349 for 14.5 mg and 17.2 mg"³.

Mounjaro is the exception, and the exception is worth knowing about. Its page publishes savings-card terms rather than a cash ladder, and the lowest figure on it still requires a commercial plan: patients whose commercial insurance does not cover the drug "pay as low as $499 for a 1-month prescription fill of Mounjaro single-dose pen"⁴. If you have no insurance at all, that number is not available to you.

Notice the shape every one of those ladders shares. The price climbs with the dose. A headline figure is almost always the starting strength, not the maintenance strength you will be on six months later, which is the single most common reason a brand quote turns out to be wrong by the time it matters.

Savings cards are an insurance product

The $25 numbers in GLP-1 advertising are not cash prices. Novo Nordisk's Wegovy offer says a patient may "pay as little as $25, subject to a maximum savings of $100/month," and its eligibility text excludes anyone in a government program, listing "Medicare, Medigap, VA, DOD, TRICARE, Medicaid, or any other state or federal medical/pharmaceutical benefit or assistance program"⁵. Lilly's Foundayo card carries the mirror-image requirement, that you "are enrolled in a commercial drug insurance plan" and "not enrolled in any state, federal, or government funded healthcare program"³.

So the card is for the insured person whose plan will not pay, not for the uninsured one. If you have no coverage, the manufacturer's self-pay price is your price, and on Foundayo that is published as "Starting at $149 per month" for self-pay³.

What compounded actually costs on our ranking

Compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are the other half of the cash market, and they are not FDA-approved: the agency does not verify a compounded drug's safety, effectiveness or quality before it reaches a patient⁶. What they are is cheaper, and the spread is enormous.

Across the 508 providers tracked here, 158 file a dated, unconditional month-to-month semaglutide price. Those run from $89 to $449, with a median of $198. For tirzepatide, 157 rows qualify, running $126 to $599 with a median of $269. Every other row is excluded from those figures for a stated reason rather than quietly averaged in: 172 semaglutide cells carry a condition that makes the number something other than a standing monthly rate, 18 are brand-name prices, 14 carry no verification date, and 146 publish no price at all.

Set that against the brand ladders above and the trade is legible. The median compounded semaglutide row sits below every brand maintenance-dose figure quoted above and above the lowest-dose tablet price, and it buys a product the FDA has not reviewed. Whether that trade is right for you is a clinical conversation; whether the number is real is the part this site can check. The sorted ladders are at cheapest semaglutide and cheapest tirzepatide, and the general field is at best GLP-1 for weight loss.

What "per month" hides

Of the 696 price cells on this site that parse to a dollar figure, only 350 are a flat month-to-month rate. The rest are something else wearing a monthly label. 218 are dose floors, quoted at the starting strength. 46 are prepay plans, where the monthly figure exists only because an annual or quarterly charge was divided. 23 are promotional rates. 14 require a separate membership fee on top. 9 are first-month rates that step up on the second bill.

Two examples make the difference concrete without any arithmetic. One provider on this ranking publishes its headline semaglutide rate only as a twelve-month plan paid in full, in a single charge, with no month-to-month price published at all; you can read how that is filed on the CoreAge Rx review. Another quotes a low care-membership fee that sits beside the medication charge rather than including it, which is why the Sesame Care review prints the membership condition in the price cell instead of stripping it out. The condition is part of the price. A comparison that drops it is not a comparison.

Medicare is a separate track entirely

If you are on Medicare, none of the commercial savings cards apply to you by their own terms. What does apply, since July 1, 2026, is a federal demonstration: CMS describes the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge as "a short-term demonstration run by CMS that will provide eligible Medicare Part D beneficiaries with access to certain GLP-1 drugs between July 1, 2026, and December 31, 2027," with a $50 copay⁷. Medicare.gov lists the covered products as Foundayo tablets, Wegovy injection or tablet, and the Zepbound KwikPen only, and says the program does not cover single-dose Zepbound vials or pens⁸. The rules, the eligibility test and what the program deliberately leaves out are in Medicare GLP-1 coverage.

How to compare a cash price honestly

Ask four questions of any number you are quoted, in this order. What dose is it for. What billing term buys it. What is charged separately. And when was it last true. A quote that survives all four is comparable to another quote that survives all four, and nothing else is.

For the compounded side, the two cost breakdowns are compounded semaglutide cost and compounded tirzepatide cost. For the pill, Foundayo cost covers what Lilly and the FDA have actually published. If you want the brand-versus-compounded decision rather than the arithmetic, start at compounded vs brand-name GLP-1, and every source behind these pages is indexed in our research library.