How we grade
Reviewed by Ellis Brandt. Sources checked September 2026.
A letter grade is a compression. It is worth nothing if you cannot decompress it, so no grade is published on this site without the four numbers it was built from beside it — and the weights that would combine them are below. We publish the category scores separately so you can see which information each provider makes available. We do not combine them into an overall rating.
The four sub-scores
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures | How the points are awarded |
|---|---|---|---|
| price transparency | Weight35% | What it measuresWhat the seller attaches to the figure: whether a reader can see it without starting an intake, whether the seller says what every one of its figures buys, and whether it says beside the price whether the drug is compounded or branded. | How the points are awarded
|
| pharmacy disclosure | Weight25% | What it measuresWhether a dispensing pharmacy is named on the page for this drug. A pharmacy named on a different drug's page is recorded as a near miss and does not count as a disclosure for this one. | How the points are awarded
|
| what's included | Weight25% | What it measuresWhether the price says what it covers, item by item rather than as a bundle word — and above all whether it says the medication itself is inside the figure, which is the item that decides whether the price buys the drug. | How the points are awarded
|
| cancellation terms | Weight15% | What it measuresWhether a reader can find out how to leave before entering a card. Terms buried in the page's code, where no reader sees them, score as an absence; terms behind a tab or an accordion a reader can open are published. | How the points are awarded
|
Every point above is awarded for something a seller published on its own page. None of these four sub-scores reads the price itself, the medicine, or anything about the company beyond what it printed. A seller that is good and says little scores low here, and that is the measurement rather than a defect in it.
The letter bands
Each sub-score runs 0 to 10. The weighted total would map to a letter at fixed floors, and grades are set in type, in ink — they are not color-coded, here or anywhere on this site: a red F is an editorial opinion pretending to be data.
We do not assign letter grades. Compare the four category scores separately; they describe the information a provider publishes, not the quality or suitability of medical treatment.
How a missing value is handled
A value we could not find is scored at the floor for that dimension, not omitted and not averaged away. A provider that does not publish a price has not earned a neutral score on price transparency; it has failed to publish a price, and the sub-score says so.
What a commercial relationship changes
Nothing about a score: the sub-scores are read from what a provider publishes, and nothing that computes them reads whether a seller pays us. It does change the order. On every board and in the list of every seller, partners are listed first and marked “Partner”, and each board’s caption says so; within each group the rows are listed alphabetically by provider name. How this site is paid is set out on the disclosure page.
Checking for updates
Every figure on this site carries the date it was read, printed beside it, and the board title carries the edition it belongs to. A price with no reading date is not published here. Prices and policies can change after that date. Confirm the current terms with the provider before paying, and use our corrections page to report a change.