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Why the cheapest GLP-1 on most price lists lost by nine points in a head-to-head

STEP-8 compared weekly semaglutide with daily liraglutide: about 15.8% against about 6.4% over 68 weeks. Liraglutide is often the cheapest row on a comparison table and is not the same product.

Event date 2026-08-02 · Published 2026-08-02 · EV-5104

We have added the STEP-8 record because it explains a pricing pattern this site keeps documenting.

Liraglutide is frequently the lowest figure on a GLP-1 price list, and a $179 liraglutide rate published by a national outlet circulates widely as though it were a semaglutide or tirzepatide price. It is a real price for a real drug.

It is also the drug that produced approximately 6.4% mean weight loss against semaglutide's 15.8% in the only randomised trial comparing them, and against tirzepatide's 22.5% in SURMOUNT-1. And it is injected daily rather than weekly — seven injections a week against one, which no efficacy figure captures.

A cheaper row on a table is not a cheaper version of the same thing. That confusion is casebook case 9.

Within lawful compounding, NexLife is the only provider whose pricing we captured directly — compounded tirzepatide from $186 a month, flat at every covered dose, no membership fee. See its plans.

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Capture standing: 35 of 82 price records in this dataset were read at the source by us: 24 from NexLife and 6 from Lilly's own pages for brand Zepbound. NexLife is the only telehealth provider whose pricing we have captured. Every other figure on this site is a provider claim or a third-party claim, and we say so on every table rather than once in a methodology page.