How We Rank Online Providers
Last updated: September 5, 2026
Our ranking is a 100-point score built from facts you can check yourself. What a provider pays us counts for zero points. Providers whose affiliate program pays the highest referral fee appear in a labelled Featured lane above the list — extra visibility, never position, and every Featured card still shows the rank it earned. Nobody pays us for that slot.
The 100 points
| Factor | Points | What earns them |
|---|---|---|
| Price transparency | 30 | A specific all-in monthly price published openly, with no quiz or consultation required to see it. Partial or "starting at" pricing scores half. |
| Medication included | 10 | Whether the published price covers the medication or bills it separately — the single biggest source of surprise cost in this market. |
| Real monthly cost | 15 | Actual entry cost, scored against the other providers in the same category. Cheaper scores higher. |
| Clinical access | 15 | A live visit with a licensed clinician (6), ongoing provider messaging (4), and lab work included rather than billed on top (5). |
| Independent reputation | 20 | Trustpilot rating, weighted by review volume — see below. |
| Coverage & continuity | 10 | How many states they serve (5), and whether you can cancel month-to-month or are pushed into a multi-month prepay (5). |
| Affiliate commission | 0 | Deliberately excluded. |
Why we don't just use Trustpilot
Review scores are useful, but they are badly skewed by sample size. A perfect 5.0 from three customers is not stronger evidence than a 4.6 from eight hundred — it usually just means the provider is new. So we weight every rating by its review volume: a score with few reviews behind it is pulled toward the category average until it has earned enough reviews to stand on its own.
Reviews also measure the wrong thing on their own. They capture customer service — shipping speed, billing, responsiveness — far better than they capture clinical quality or honest pricing. That is why reputation is 20 of 100 points here rather than the whole score, and why we always link out to the Trustpilot profile so you can read the reviews yourself rather than take our number for it.
How the Featured lane works
Some providers run affiliate programs that pay us a referral fee when a reader signs up. Where that fee reaches our threshold, the provider appears in a labelled Featured lane above the ranked list, capped at two slots per category so it stays meaningful. Featured cards are visually distinct, marked "Featured," and display the score and rank they earned on the same method as everyone else — so if a Featured provider ranks seventh on merit, the card says seventh.
We want to be precise about what this is, because the usual word for it would be misleading. No provider buys this placement. There is no rate card, no invoice, and nothing a company can pay us to appear here. What the lane reflects is our own commercial interest: these are the providers whose programs pay us the most if you choose them. That is a real bias and you deserve to know about it, which is why the lane is labelled, capped, and separated from the ranking rather than blended into it. We call it Featured rather than Sponsored because "Sponsored" would tell you a company paid for the position, and none of them did.
The Featured lane never changes a score, never changes the ranked order, and never changes the honest limitations we publish on each card. See our Affiliate Disclosure for how we make money overall.
When this can be wrong
Scores are only as current as the facts behind them. Providers change pricing, add states, and rebrand constantly — we re-check every provider quarterly and after any change we're told about. Where a provider doesn't publish something, we score it as not published rather than guessing, which means a provider can raise its own score simply by being more transparent. That is the incentive we want to create.
Spotted something wrong? Tell us through the contact options on this site and we'll re-check it.