Thanks a lot for creating this doc; I can confirm it’s tremendous work. Hopefully, it can help to increase competition, drive the price down, and improve the quality of the service.
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Also, something that’s hard to quantify is the response time. I messaged Jagdish (RL Pharma), Rite Care, Holystics, and Oddway on Saturday. Holystics answered in a few minutes. Rite Care and Oddway answered on Monday after 48 hours. Jagdish still hasn’t got back to me.
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Ah - thats so variable and random though, n=1 doesn’t mean much in this situation. There is probably quite a variation in size of these businesses, I suspect. Oddway seems pretty large by these types of shop standards (i.e. more than a dozen people) and reasonably professional, but more expensive. Many of the other ones seem like just small single person businesses… working out of their apartments. It may be like the startup world here in the Bay Area where many of them used to work for Oddway and decided to spin out and start their own businesses (just like there are a ton of spinouts from Google and Facebook here).
But the smaller ones - if they are home and working when they get your message I bet they respond quickly, if they are busy (sleeping?) or on vacation, then they will take longer, or if they are really busy they may never get back to you.
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Of course it’s n=1, that’s why I’d love to gather feedback from others on who’s most responsive. Ideally we want an Amazon-like experience: good quality, responsive, instant payment, speedy delivery. Long way to go but I’m sure increasing competition will help. Hopefully for instance, one India pharma will specialize in longevity drugs (basically those in the list) from good labs (TBD) and will cater only to non-Indians (with I guess a focus on US + Europe) to provide a better service at a better price.
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I have never had a problem with responses from any of the pharmas. Jagdish usually responds the same day depending on your time zone. He has never taken more than two days to respond. N=1
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I guess it’s because I messaged him on Telegram instead of WhatsApp. But his contact details show Telegram and the app says “last seen today” so… Good to know, I’ll try WhatsApp or email next time!
I have emailed jagdish as I don’t do the other apps and he has always gotten back to me in 2 days max. usually 1 day.
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I think WhatsApp is the default communications tool for virtually all the vendors. They always tell me to contact them via WhatsApp and are very communicative there (to a fault… contacting and calling me almost every day after I ask for a quote.
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I have been buying from Jagdish for 2 years. , he is very reliable and great prices for all drugs
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Luckily (for those of us that don’t want our metadata leaked to Meta/Facebook) many of the more tech savvy vendors now use Signal as well. It’s true that WhatsApp is far more common, but there are better options for privacy/security focused users:
I expect that Signal will slowly start to capture more market share once the username feature (which will allow you to keep your phone number private) leaves staging and is released to the masses.
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Looks like hooking LLMs to Spreadsheets is non-trivial compared to things like PDFs and other non-structured text. (Kind of the opposite of traditional programming).
Here’s a couple of resources if someone wants to dive in;
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Sometimes Jagdish misses an email of mine. If you email him again, he will probably respond.
Thanks. I messaged him on WhatsApp, and he answered right away and said he prefers email. Good to know.
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I can add my distributor Safe Overseas for Rapacan 1mg by Biocon. Their price per tablet is ~ $0.62. I’ve purchased from them for close to a year and find them to be very efficient with good customer service skills.
Email: safeoverseas22@gmail.com
Website: https://www.safeoverseas.in/
Another distributor is Lifebelt Sales. Their price per tablet back in August 2023 was ~ $0.54. They are also very efficient and have purchased from them for over a year, but they use only WISE for payment services. YOU MUST NEVER USE “SUPPLEMENTS” OR “MEDICINAL” AS THE REASON FOR PURCHASE (even when told by the Lifebelt Sales Rep). WISE WILL BAN YOU FOR LIFE (which is why I now use Safe Overseas 
)
Email: sales@lifebeltcorporation.com
Website: http://www.lifebeltmedicinedropshipper.com/
Of course shipping is additional and have found it to be no more than ~$45.00 for both distributors.
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That is a helpful tool for ordering meds from India. I think I paid around $85 + $35 shipping for 100, 1mg tablets of Biocon Rapamycin from G.P. Pharma.
A pet peeve of mine, working in tech industry from 1981-2019. There is no AI. That is a marketing term designed to generate interest and increase sales of hardware and software products. Database programs have been around since like, FORTRAN and BASIC in the 1960’s and 70’s. The term AI is it is used now would be like saying that IBM mainframes that controlled air transportation in the 1970’s used AI. What is incorrectly called AI now are simply database computer programs, with a fancy front end that is better at understanding human language input, and providing human readable output. Under the hood, it’s still structured query with look up tables, arrays and records and cross referencing. The term AI used correctly denotes artificially intelligent software, i.e. software that thinks on it’s own and acts with it’s own sense of agency.
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agree 100% that a lot of what is termed “AI”, especially in med tech, is just linked databases, structured & queried well.
I expect some of the “next big things” to be from the big guys that bought the most data - Apple has all that Apple Health personal data, Google bought Fitbit & its decades of personal data, then the smaller ones like Ancestry, 23andMe, Oura, Zoe, Whoop, Viome, etc, mostly paid services by the consumer, who give up their data for free.
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I have only used Vallabh/Shreeji.
All prices are per pill (ex Tretinoin) and from the last six months.
Minoxidil 5 mg () .20
Acarbose (Knoll) 50 mg .12
Sirolimus (biocon) 1mg .60
Canagliflozin 100mg (Ivokana) .65
Canagliflozin 300mg (Motivyst) 1.65
Trazadone 50mg (Trazocan) .25
Tretinoin cream .05% (tretiheal) 20g = .125/gram
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Large language models (aka AI, like ChatGPT and Bard) use a trained transformer which is very different from a structured query mechanism. Probabilistic responses at such a large scale are something I have trouble conceptualizing.
Yes - its already done…
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