This site exists to compare sellers of compounded GLP-1 drugs. The study below contains a finding about those sellers that does not flatter them, and about the category this site makes its money from. It is here because a comparison that omits the uncomfortable result is not a comparison.
Who was asked
Researchers screened 7,035 people and surveyed 440 US adults who had started and then stopped a GLP-1 receptor agonist [1]. Half were female, 42.3% were aged 18 to 34, and 23.8% had type 2 diabetes.
More than half — 54.6% — had stopped within six months of starting, and 79.7% within twelve. That is a steeper curve than most sellers' pricing pages appear to anticipate, and it lines up with the discontinuation record in two-thirds stop within a year.
Why they stopped
Cost was the most common reason at 36.1%, followed by side effects at 33.3%, lack of insurance coverage at 28.2%, and reaching a weight-loss goal at 26.1%. Two of the top three are about money rather than medicine, which is the same conclusion the arithmetic reaches in what a GLP-1 actually costs.
Respondents with diabetes were significantly likelier than those without to stop because of side effects — 50.1% against 28.1%. How people paid was unusual too: 31.3% first filled a prescription without insurance at all, 35.4% used a copayment coupon, 22.0% a free sample, and 14.4% got the drug from a friend or family member.
What could explain it
Several things, none of them established here. Compounded products are prepared to order and are not reviewed by the FDA as finished articles. Many are sold at doses the seller does not publish, which is the silence counted in nobody says what happens at a higher dose — and a microdose tier that works less well is a product working as designed rather than a product failing. Expectations may also differ: someone paying cash online may be measuring against trial headlines that used branded drug at a labeled dose.
The study does not distinguish between those, and neither can this page. What it can do is put the number in front of a reader who is about to choose between exactly these routes.
What to do with it
Two things. First, if cost is the commonest reason people stop, then the relevant price is the one that still applies in month seven — not the introductory figure, which is the distinction drawn in the headline is not the bill. Across the 432 injected semaglutide figures here the median billed rate is $179 a month, read September 2026 — $2,148 for a year that four in five people do not complete.
Second, ask a seller what dose you will actually receive and what it costs when it rises. A product that disappoints because it was a smaller dose than the buyer imagined is a disclosure failure rather than a pharmacological one, and disclosure is the thing a buyer can check before paying.