The assumption a reader usually arrives with is that a tablet should be cheaper than an injection — no needle, no cold chain, no sharps. On this corpus that assumption is wrong more often than it is right, and the cleanest way to show it is to compare sellers against themselves rather than against each other.
The paired result
73 sellers on this desk publish a figure for both compounded semaglutide by injection and an oral semaglutide — a subset of the market mapped in the full price distribution. Of those, 39 price the tablet higher — 53% of the paired set. The median difference is $20 a month in the tablet’s direction.
Tirzepatide shows the same shape on a smaller sample: 36 sellers publish both formats and 14 charge more for the tablet, with a median difference of $0.
What the premium is actually buying
A daily tablet instead of a weekly injection, which for some people is the whole decision and for others is worth nothing. What it is not buying is a lower bill — and it is not the only premium that hides in a headline, as the gap between advertised and billed shows. Where a seller does price the tablet below the injection, that is worth noticing as the exception rather than assuming it as the rule.
There is a second reason not to read the two figures as interchangeable. Several oral lines on this desk are sublingual formulations, and sublingual milligrams do not read across to injected ones. A tablet priced near an injection is not the same dose at a similar price; it is a different product whose equivalence the seller usually does not state — one more thing most sellers leave unpublished.
Checking a specific pair
The head-to-head pages carry several sellers where the format premium runs in opposite directions, and the six-month totals show what each choice compounds to. Figures are computed from this site’s own price records at build time, most recently read September 2026.