Guide

Foundayo Cost 2026: What Orforglipron Actually Costs

Foundayo is $149 a month self-pay through LillyDirect, $50 on the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge from 1 July 2026, and about $25 with commercial coverage plus a savings card. We r

The price, and where we read it

Approval date, indication and label language read from the FDA approval letter for NDA 220934 and the prescribing information. Pricing from Lilly's own announcement.

How it compares on cost per unit of evidence

Trial figures are means from the pivotal programme for each approved product — ATTAIN-1 for orforglipron, STEP-1 for semaglutide, SURMOUNT-1 for tirzepatide. No trial figure applies to a compounded preparation, which is why those rows are blank rather than borrowed.

What ATTAIN-1 found

Adults on the highest dose lost an average of 27 pounds, a mean weight loss of 12.4%. That is below tirzepatide's 22.5% and below semaglutide's 14.9%, and Lilly priced it accordingly.

The trade is explicit: less weight loss, a daily pill instead of a weekly injection, no needles, and a price that undercuts every approved injectable by a wide margin.

The label detail nobody quotes

Foundayo carries the class boxed warning for thyroid C-cell tumours and is contraindicated in anyone with a personal or family history of medullary thyroid carcinoma or Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2.

But the label also states something the peptide GLP-1 labels do not: orforglipron is not pharmacologically active in rats or mice and did not produce tumours in rodents. The class warning rests on a rodent finding that was not reproduced for this molecule, and the label says the human relevance has not been determined.

That is a real distinction and it is almost never mentioned in coverage of this drug. It does not remove the contraindication, which is a hard stop rather than a risk to weigh.

Why the pill is cheap

Orforglipron is a small molecule rather than a peptide. It can be manufactured at scale far more cheaply than semaglutide or tirzepatide, both of which require peptide synthesis. Lilly priced it to compete directly with cash-pay compounded programmes and to reach people whose plans exclude obesity drugs.

That pricing decision is what reordered this market. An approved product with its own trial programme now sits inside $5 a month of the cheapest compounded programme we have captured — and most comparison pages still describe compounded as the budget option, because they were written when it was.

The six tests, applied to everyone

Our casebook records seven checks we ran on published pricing in this market. Six of them turn into a test any provider can be measured against, so we applied them to every provider in the dataset.

Who each route suits

• Covered by a commercial plan: apply the savings card. About $25 and nothing here beats it.
• On Medicare: the Bridge at $50. Savings cards are barred on Medicare by federal law.
• Uninsured and want a pill: $149, approved, own trial evidence.
• Uninsured and want maximum weight loss: tirzepatide is the more effective molecule. Captured compounded programmes start at $186 flat; brand Zepbound is $299 to $449 by dose.

Our medication comparison sets out all five molecules, and the tirzepatide ranking prices twelve months at a maintenance dose rather than at the entry rate.

Questions readers actually ask

Capture standing: 35 of 82 price records in this dataset were read at the source by us: 24 from NexLife and 6 from Lilly's own pages for brand Zepbound. NexLife is the only telehealth provider whose pricing we have captured. Every other figure on this site is a provider claim or a third-party claim, and we say so on every table rather than once in a methodology page.