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OpenLoop Health does not publish a price; its own FAQ says cost varies with the services you add. What is public: one OpenLoop services agreement filed with the SEC (amounts redacted, structure visible), two competitors' accounts of OpenLoop proposals ($1,500 a month plus $8,000 to $9,000 to start, unverified), and OpenLoop's own scale claims. Here is each, labeled by how much weight it can bear, plus the questions that turn an OpenLoop quote into a number you can compare.

Novo Nordisk says half of its US Wegovy business now comes through self-pay channels and 90% of Wegovy pill demand is direct cash purchase. Its Q3 report on November 4 showed the pill at DKK 5.4 billion and about 3.6 million US prescriptions in the quarter, while Lilly's Foundayo took about 4 in 10 US oral obesity starts. For a cash-pay telehealth brand, that settles what to offer in 2027: both pills and both injectables, with the pill as the entry point. It does not settle January pricing, which nobody has published yet.

Telehealth platforms charge for payments in four different ways: a percentage on top of processing (Fuse, 2% or 3%), an all-in rate (CareValidate, 3.7%), plain processor pricing on your own account (Healthie at 2.9% plus 30 cents, Rimo, Cuvo, Karpa), or the platform's own Stripe account with its fee deducted before you are paid. Which one you sign decides your cost at scale, who can freeze your revenue, and whether your stored cards leave with you. Here is each model, checked on vendor pages on November 4, 2026.

We took every white-label telehealth platform price we could verify on the vendor's own page on November 4, 2026 and modeled year one at 100, 500 and 1,000 active patients, with setup fees, monthly fees, per-consult fees, merchant fees and ID checks included and every assumption stated. At 1,000 patients the spread runs from about $42,000 (Telegra Plus, before its unpublished consult fee) to $145,000 (Cuvo Grow). Here is the math, what it leaves out, and what to ask the vendors who quote, including us.

On October 21, 2026 Hims added three testosterone products to the low-T program it opened in September 2025: a compounded twice-weekly injection, generic testosterone cypionate, and Kyzatrex, an FDA-approved oral capsule, all behind an at-home lab test and a live provider visit. That takes away the easy differentiator of 'we test first.' Here is what an independent TRT brand can still own, and what to have ready for December 31, when the DEA telemedicine flexibilities expire with no final rule and no extension published as of early November.

Peptide clinic software has a new spec since HHS's October 28 policy on six compounded peptides: one active ingredient per product, routes locked per peptide, adverse events reported to MedWatch and the states, a fixed label statement, and only cleared syringes in the box. Most of that is the pharmacy's job, but the software decides whether your catalog, intake and refills ever ask the pharmacy for something it cannot make. Here are the seven requirements, the questions to ask a vendor, and how an EHR build, an all-in-one platform and a pharmacy storefront compare.

On October 28, 2026, HHS said it does not intend to take enforcement action against state-licensed pharmacies, federal facilities and licensed physicians compounding BPC-157, TB-500, KPV, MOTS-c, Semax and Epitalon, if ten conditions are met. The notice calls the policy a draft and an interim policy, law firms disagree on whether it is operative today, and FDA's own reviewers recommended against all six. Here is each condition mapped to what the brand, the prescriber and the pharmacy have to do, what the policy does not allow, and what LegitScript changed on November 2.

Most health FSAs run on the calendar year, the 2026 contribution limit is $3,400, and whatever a patient has not spent by December 31 is forfeited unless their plan offers a carryover (up to $680 into 2027) or a grace period (up to two and a half months). That makes December a real buying moment for a cash-pay telehealth brand. It is also a moment where a careless message can promise eligibility you cannot deliver. Here is what qualifies, what the paperwork needs, and how to say it without pressure tactics.

Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26, Christmas and New Year's Day both fall on a Friday this year, and USPS recommends shipping Priority Mail by December 18 for delivery before Christmas. For a GLP-1 program, every refill due between November 24 and January 4 needs to move, and every pen in transit has a labeled temperature window. This is the date-by-date runbook: what to ship when, what the labels say about heat and cold, what to tell travelling patients, and how to staff the queue.

Yes, a telehealth brand can run a Black Friday sale on November 27, 2026, if the discount is on what the brand actually sells (the membership, the care fee, non-prescription products) and not a promise about a prescription the clinician has not written yet. The reference price has to be real, the countdown has to be true, the ad still needs LegitScript-backed approval, and a 'first month for $X' offer is the one most likely to come back as chargebacks in January. Here is each rule, verified, with what we would run instead.

Going into 2027, a cash-pay patient can buy Wegovy or Ozempic for $349 a month from NovoCare, the Wegovy pill from $149, Zepbound from $299 to $449 on LillyDirect and Foundayo from $149. Novo's list-price cut to $675 on January 1 helps insured patients with deductibles; it does not move those cash prices. So a telehealth brand's price is its program fee, and this post works out what that fee earns at $49, $99 and $149, and which structures we would use.

The Business Group on Health's August survey found 14% of employers have dropped or plan to drop GLP-1 weight-loss coverage by 2027, and coverage among surveyed employers fell from 72% in 2025 to 60% in 2026. Those employees are reading their benefits guides right now and lose coverage on January 1. Most will try to stay on the drug at cash prices. This is the operator view: which patients are in the wave, what each wants in the first week of January, and the four things a brand needs in place to keep their dose going.

Telegra publishes its prices: Plus at $2,999 a month plus $5,000 onboarding, Pro at $5,999 a month plus $10,000, both with a 21-day onboarding timeline. That makes year one about $41,000 or $82,000 before ID checks and medication. Turbopills does not publish a price yet. Here is what each Telegra plan includes, how the ownership questions come out, and when Telegra is the better pick.

There is no trustworthy public benchmark for support tickets per 1,000 telehealth patients, so we built a staffing model you can rebuild with your own numbers. With the assumptions stated below, a 1,000-patient brand without self-serve status needs about 1.2 support and clinical FTEs, and the same brand with portal status, self-serve billing and in-portal cancellation needs about 0.75. Most of the difference is shipping and billing questions that never had to be tickets.

A gym can put a GLP-1 program in front of its members without employing a single prescriber, as long as the medicine stays inside a physician-owned practice and the gym sticks to what gyms are good at: coaching, training, and the member relationship. There are three workable structures (referral, co-branded program run by an MSO and PC, and a licensed brand), and the corporate practice of medicine doctrine decides which one fits your states. The strongest clinical argument for the partnership is muscle: in SURMOUNT-1, about a quarter of the weight lost on tirzepatide was lean mass.

Rock Health counted 164 digital health M&A deals in the first nine months of 2026, so buyers exist. What they pay for in a DTC telehealth brand is mostly decided on the day the founder picks a structure: a patient relationship the brand owns, a merchant account and card tokens in its own name, retention cohorts it can prove, a clean MSO and PC arrangement, and no revenue that depends on compounded GLP-1 or on a platform it cannot leave. Here is the diligence list, in the order a buyer works through it, and what each item does to the price.

Before the first patient, a DTC telehealth brand needs seven documents: a telehealth informed consent from the medical practice, terms of service, a website privacy policy, a HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices if the practice is a covered entity, auto-renewal disclosures that satisfy ROSCA and state laws like California's, a consumer health data policy for Washington and Nevada, and pharmacy and medication terms. The tricky part is which entity issues which document. Here is the list, the laws behind each, and the mistakes we see.

Healthie is an EHR and practice platform with a strong GraphQL API, priced from $19 to $149+ a month, and it sits underneath a lot of DTC telehealth brands. Turbopills is the storefront-to-pharmacy platform a brand sells through. Comparing them head to head mostly shows that they do different jobs. Here is which one you need, when you need both, and how they connect.

The commission model is the compliance decision in a telehealth affiliate program. A flat bounty per paid membership, revenue share on non-prescription products, and volume tiers can all work; paying partners a percentage of prescription revenue, or more for a higher dose, is the arrangement state fee-splitting and patient-brokering laws and the federal anti-kickback statute were written for. This is the brand-side playbook: models, the legal lines, FTC disclosure, a claims library, and fraud controls.

A DTC telehealth brand can run with two founders and a handful of contractors up to roughly a thousand patients, provided software does the routing, billing and pharmacy work that used to need an operations team. What does not compress is clinical oversight, support escalations, marketing and compliance review. Here is the role-by-role plan at 0, 300 and 1,000 patients, which roles are contractors and which become hires, and where the platform line sits.