The basic idea is simple: instead of comparing bottle price or “price per serving” from the title, it reads Supplement Facts labels and normalizes products by cost per active dose. That matters a lot for categories like NMN, CoQ10, fish oil, spermidine, Ca-AKG, resveratrol, creatine, and magnesium, where serving sizes and label conventions can make two products look similar when the actual monthly cost is very different.
A few relevant pages:
Disclosure: I built this, and the site uses Amazon affiliate links. I’m sharing it because supplement cost comparisons come up a lot in longevity stack discussions, and I thought the underlying data might be useful to this community.
If there are categories people here care about that are missing or need better handling, I’d be happy to prioritize them.
The Thalacy spermidine calls it a 6 pack but the cost is for a single bottle.
I think most people prefer to buy from places other than Amazon. And pricing jumps around. I paid $12.95 for some Nutricost lithium 2 months ago from iherb that was $20 on Amazon. Now it is $15 on both iherb and Amazon.
I haven’t experienced any issues purchasing name brand supplements (e.g., NOW, Life Extension, Nutricost, Double Wood, Bulk Supplements) on Amazon. The only time I wandered into an unknown brand, I think I got burned. Many of the brands listed are pop-up companies. “Third party tested” can mean that the capsules are tested for potency and purity or – more often – it certifies only that a sample from one of the company’s batch purchases was tested for impurities.
I like the idea here - great effort. But the biggest issue I see is that many of the brands/products listed are not reputable sources that I would actually believe are providing valid products. Perhaps you could use AI or Consumer Reports to identify all the trusted brands , and either highlight these vendors, or provide two groupings … lowest prices from reputable vendors, and the absolute lowest cost without any quality filter?
This is excellent, thanks for providing it. I really like the ‘third party tested’ filter too. I wrote a similar tool as part of a personal health dashboard, it was surprisingly complex to work out price per mg. You could use Playwright and Codex to scrape iHerb for similar info, and probably Walmart as well. If you have tokens to spare, that would be of real value.
I see on iHerb that Nutricost and Double Wood brand supplements are very economical (cheap) compared to other popular brands such as Now foods,etc.
How are they so cheap? I want to know views and experiences about their quality and efficacy from people in this group. This will help me a lot. Thank you in advance!!
determine max fill of the cap in mg (generally just the “lower” part of the cap)
if the active is less than the fill capacity do some math to determine the active to excipient ratio - there are stock excipients you can buy in bulk
mix thoroughly - I like to have 1 off white compound for visual confirmation of mix - I use a small V Mixer but a good dual whisk Bosch style mixer will do the job.
fill away
That is basically how it’s done in mass production and works for small batch prototyping.
Hey there - one source I use to check for purity and value is a site called “Consumerlab” (not sure if it’s one word or two). They test for impurities, and they also compare brands for value. They will also report if a company has third party testing (the genuine third party testing). This company has reports on most supplements (definitely not all - but most). I have used their testing and reporting services for a number of years
used this when I was prototyping our senolytic formula