A few months ago I started to plan for a new purchase cycle of medicine, and also wanted to look at all the prices of things I might want to try in the near future. I was also curious about how all the vendors compared in terms of their pricing. So, I sent a list of medicines I was interested in, and asked for pricing given a 6 month to 12 month purchase volume on each of the medications (from the vendors on our list, and others that people have mentioned).
I put all the resulting information into a spreadsheet to make it easier to compare prices and get a feel for which vendors might work better for my shorter and longer term needs. At some point it became obvious that this is more work than I had hoped for… so I’m putting it out there and hoping that we can get some crowdsourced effort on this so we can complete the spreadsheet and everyone can benefit from it.
Some of the issues I’ve realize that we face with this type of effort, that we can easily overcome with a little research, are as follows:
- We really don’t have a good list of the best/most reliable/highest quality Indian Pharma companies right now. We need to pull together this list. Perhaps starting with this list: Pharma - Top 10 Pharma Companies in India by Market Capitalization - GlobalData
While I know the vendors / Pharma companies I want to use for some medicines, but not for others… so while I might like Sirolimus from Zydus and Biocon, beyond that I’m not sure who to trust, and which one is a backyard “Pharma” company in India or a guy putting medicines together in his bathroom. See the list further down in this thread of the major Indian Pharma companies that export to the USA and Europe and generally meet those country quality standards. Its a list of about 10 companies.
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When you ask these guys in India for a quote, even if you know the brand name you want, they will come back with a quote and a price for something that is from a Pharma company you’ve never heard of. It takes time and effort to research each of these “new” companies to see if you can find any data on the quality of the company behind them (and of course, even then its hard to judge). Again - I would only go with the major Indian Pharma companies that sell in the USA and Europe.
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When ultimately deciding on what vendor to choose, it gets complicated if your purchase plan is for anything more than 1 or 2 medications. You have to factor in which vendor has which of the more preferable brands that you want, you have to decide how to compare the slightly lower price of one medicine from a lesser known brand, with the higher price from a better known brand. You have to figure out how many tablets, etc. you can reasonably expect to import into your country without problems (a guess at the best of times).
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Refrigeration for Medications: Some medications (typically injection medication) like Repatha, Secukinumab (see this skin aging article, I’m considering using this for micro needling in skin) need to be refrigerated. Many vendors seem to not know this, or not pay attention to this… so I would really wonder if its going to be still an active medication when you get it, (given the typical heat levels in India, and over a 2 to 4 week shipment period). I wonder how much degradation you see in the bioavailability of these types of product. Some (larger) vendors seem to know about this need, let you know, and don’t suggest you ship to your country if further away from India (it may be fine if you’re shipping from India to Dubai, but not so great when shipping to the USA). It would be great to build up a knowledgebase on vendors and quality of these injectables and how well they survive shipment times. For years I’ve thrown out medications after their expiry date, but how much money did I waste doing this: Drug Expiration Dates — Do They Mean Anything? - Harvard Health. Repatha is about $400+ per month, and hard to get in the USA vs. $140/month in India - so the savings could be significant if it travels better than advertised.
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You have to factor in cost of shipment (some companies charge high rates for the shipment, to make up for lower price), and what payment approaches the vendor supports (Crypto, Zelle, wire transfer/wise, PayPal, etc.).
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The person giving you a quote makes mistakes… they sometimes give you the basic version of the drug (e.g. regular metformin) when you want the Slow Release, or “Extended Release” version… and it takes a few back and forth emails to figure this out.
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Ultimately if you’re purchasing more than a couple of medications you may want to split up the purchase between multiple vendors that have the medications you want, from the brands you prefer.
So - I thought I’d share the spreadsheet as it is. And I’d like to invite one or two people who may be interested, to help manage and update this spreadsheet a bit over the coming year. Let me know (send me a DM) if you might be willing to volunteer for this effort.
Special thanks to @adssx because he was the first person I’ve shared this spreadsheet with, he’s done some upgrades to it, but ultimately we both realized this is more work than we have time for right now, but he convinced me that the community here would likely benefit from it even in its current state.
Longer term I think we may want to do these types of price comparison summaries for every longevity product category (blood testing - as we’ve sort of done here for blood sirolimus levels), Exogenous Ketone Ester drinks and supplements and more (Ketone drink info here), Dexa Scans, Full Body MRIs, Skin Treatment Products/services, etc.
If you’re interested in helping me in this effort (if you’re buying the product or service already, and doing your own pricing comparison, why not share it with everyone in a spreadsheet that others can add to and update?), please DM me. If you have ideas on how to improve the spreadsheet - please post them below.
Perhaps this is the type of thing that AI will help us with - in terms of organizing the data, and querying the data in the spreadsheet? It would be nice to be able to ask AI (given the data we provide in the spreadsheet), “What are the two least expensive vendors for canagliflozing from a high quality manufacturer?” It seems like AI is going to be very useful for these situations where you want to get answers back based on queries of private datasets… if you see an App or website that is optimized around this sort of thing, please post some information on it below.
The simple fact is that for most of us, there are far many more longevity treatment drugs, supplements , tests and services than we have disposable income to spend, so we need to find the best deals we can, after identifying the best categories we want to use. Good price comparisons will help us do this.
Here is the spreadsheet as it is right now:
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