Why a three-month plan often isn't three months

Because a month is whatever the company decides it is. 13 of the 51 companies published here sell a "month" that is not a calendar month, and on the four-week ones that difference is one extra payment every year — money nobody advertises and nobody deducts.

What does a GLP-1 company mean by a month?

Four different things, and only some of them say so on the page carrying the price. The four patterns, in the companies' own words:

What does a four-week month cost across a year?

One extra supply. 5 companies here publish a four-week or 28-day supply and price it as a month; thirteen of those fill a 364-day year, so a full year costs thirteen payments rather than twelve. The arithmetic below is ours, done on each company's own figure and its own stated unit, and neither number has been rounded into existence.

The difference is always exactly one supply, which is the tidiest way to remember it: whatever a four-week "month" costs, that is what the unit costs you over a year. On Gala Health it is $249.

What does a renewal every 11 weeks do to a three-month plan?

It bills 4.7 times a year instead of four. Brello Health advertises $166 a month and its own product page states the mechanism: Billed $499 today Then $499 every 11 weeks. A 52-week year holds 4.7 of those charges, so the year costs $2,359 — about $197 a calendar month, not $166.

Brello's footnote says the same thing in the sentence a shopper is least likely to read: All plans require a 3-month minimum commitment and automatically renew every 11 weeks at the applicable recurring rate charged at checkout. Three months minimum, renewing every eleven weeks. Those are not the same length, and the second one is the one your card obeys.

Two other companies run the clock without renaming the plan. ShedRx's terms say Billing may occur either every twenty-eight (28) days or on a monthly basis, depending on your specific program. Gimme Care bills on a calendar month and ships every 28 days — two rhythms, and nothing on its site reconciles them. Lavender Sky Health goes the other way, and says so: Monthly Plans are typically dispensed as a single vial and are intended for use within five weeks.

Is a 12-week subscription a quarter?

No — a 52-week year holds 4.33 of them, not four. That is the whole finding, and it costs one extra charge a year on every plan below.

Noom writes the trap into one sentence: Noom GLP-1Rx Program: A low-dose semaglutide plan starting at $79 for the first 4-week supply, then $537 every 12 weeks ($179 per month). The multiplication holds — $199 × 3 is $597 — but a twelve-week subscription is not a quarter. Across a 52-week year there are 4.33 of them, which is $2,587. Read as $199 a month for twelve months, it looks like $2,388. The difference, $199, is exactly one more of Noom's own monthly figures.

EllieMD does something stranger. Its selection screen prices a twelve-week supply and its summary screen, two screens later, relabels the same figure "$299 per cycle" beside "$897 12-Week Supply". One number, two names, two screens apart, and only one of them tells you what you are buying. On PeterMD the card reads Level 2 · $139/Month · $834 Total · Estimated 8-12 week supply — a figure divided into six months, against a supply the same card estimates at two to three.

Does anyone name one unit and then use another?

Yes, and the clearest case is Rixa Health, whose pricing page opens with a single unit for everything below it: The prices below cover everything for 4 weeks, including medication, shipping and any provider interactions you need between refills. We counted every priced row underneath. Twenty-three of them: nine really are four weeks, two are five weeks, and twelve are thirty or ninety days. The heading names one unit and the table uses four.

WeightCare is the one where the unit is doing the advertising. Its six-month card prints a daily rate beside the plan, and the daily rate is built on a longer year than the one you live in: $1,290 ÷ $6.94 is 185.9 days, so the divisor is 186 — six thirty-one-day months. Six calendar months averages 182.6 days, which puts the same $1,290 at $7.06 a day. Twelve cents a day is not a scandal. Choosing the longer month to compute it is a choice somebody made.

So what should you actually compare?

One number, and it is not the monthly rate: what 52 weeks of treatment costs. Take the company's own charge, take the company's own unit, and divide 52 by the unit. That is the whole method behind every table on this page, and it is the only comparison that survives a company redefining a month.

Then check the other two things a monthly figure hides: whether the prepay actually saves you anything if you stop early, and what the rate becomes after month one. The real cost calculator prices every plan in this roster against a single month, with the arithmetic shown.

What else do people ask about GLP-1 billing cycles?

• Is a 4-week supply the same as a month?No. Thirteen four-week supplies fill a 364-day year and twelve monthly payments do not, so a four-week supply billed as a month costs one extra supply a year. Across the 5 companies here that price one, the extra runs from $116 at Maximus to $249 at Gala Health. Both figures are our multiplication of those companies' own published prices, read on August 31, 2026.
• How many of these companies sell a month that is not a calendar month?13 of the 51 published on this site say so somewhere in their own material — four-week supplies, 28-day refills, an 11-week renewal, 12-week cycles, a five-week vial. Every one of those companies is named on this page with the sentence it comes from.
• Does a shorter billing cycle mean I get less medication?Not necessarily — a four-week supply is four weekly doses, which is what a month of weekly injections is. The difference is not in the vial, it is in the calendar: you are billed thirteen times a year rather than twelve, so the annual cost is one payment higher than the monthly rate implies.
• Which company's month is longest?Lavender Sky Health's, and it says so: its monthly plans are dispensed as a single vial and, in its own words, intended for use within five weeks. That is the opposite problem to a four-week month, and it is worth knowing before you compare its monthly figure against a competitor's.

What we read, and where

Every sentence below was read on the company's own domain, or off a screen we reached ourselves, on August 31, 2026, and is quoted verbatim. The annual figures on this page are our multiplication of the prices and units in those sentences; we have not divided any company's total into a per-month rate it does not publish.

Scope: a company appears here only where its own material states the unit. A company that says nothing about the length of a month is selling a calendar month as far as this page is concerned, and is not counted against the 51. Assuming four weeks where nobody said four weeks would manufacture a finding, so we do not.

Some companies named here pay us a commission when a reader starts care through a marked link. The one marked link on this page is one of them, picked by rule and disclosed beside it. Nothing above is ordered by who pays — the tables are ordered by the size of the annual difference, which you can re-derive from each review's ladder. Who pays us · how we review · every review.

Kevin Turner · Reviews Editor · Checked August 2026