Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

GLP-1 Prices March Toward 40 Dollars a Month as Lilly Extends Its Lead - The Race to the $40 GLP-1 - Week of August 24, 2026

Obesity-drug newsletter for the week of August 24, 2026. Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum argues GLP-1s can fall to 40 to 50 dollars a month by 2030 even as Eli Lilly outsells Novo Nordisk, while two-thirds of users quit within six months and the peptide supply chain runs through China.

The Race to the $40 GLP-1

Week of August 24, 2026: GLP-1 Prices March Toward 40 Dollars a Month as Lilly Extends Its Lead

The most interesting number in the obesity complex this week wasn't a trial result or a sales print. It was a price: forty to fifty dollars. That's what the CEO of the biggest telehealth player in the country says a month of GLP-1 therapy can actually cost to make and ship to your door. If he's even close to right, the whole complex is being repriced in slow motion, and the only thing holding the line is how much competition shows up.

TL;DR

  • Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum says GLP-1s can be delivered safely for $40–50 a month, and the only reason they aren't is a lack of competition, not manufacturing. He sees the price sliding to $99, then $79, then $40–50 by around 2030, when semaglutide loses patent protection.
  • Eli Lilly is still running the table on the numbers, one podcast pegged Mounjaro at $9.94B and Zepbound at $4.93B with raised guidance, but it's also fighting a black market around its next drug and playing catch-up to Novo in oral pills.
  • The bear case got louder in plain language this week: roughly two-thirds of users quit within six months, weight can come back fast, and a big Alzheimer's bet just missed.

What's new

The price wall is cracking, and an operator said the quiet part out loud. On Squawk Pod (Aug 18), Hims & Hers co-founder and CEO Andrew Dudum told Andrew Ross Sorkin that a month of GLP-1 therapy can be made and cold-shipped to your house for a fraction of today's price:

"You can manufacture these medicines safely and get them to consumers safely, cold store shipped to your house overnight for $40 to $50... It's only because of competitive dynamics that it doesn't exist today. It is not because of manufacturing constraints or supply chain issues."

He walked through the path: Hims brought compounded GLP-1s to market at $150–200 a month when branded versions were roughly $1,500, and prices "came down almost 80, 90% in just 12 months." His forecast is a steady grind to $99, then $79, and "by 2030... GLP-1s in the $40 to $50 a month range." Worth remembering who's talking: Hims makes money when these drugs get cheap and commoditized, and the FTC has sued the company over how it markets and sells subscriptions. This is an interested party, not a neutral one. But the direction of travel is hard to argue with.

Lilly is still winning the scoreboard. On DHUnplugged (Aug 19), host Marc Chacón ran through Eli Lilly's blockbuster quarter: Mounjaro (the diabetes label) "hit 9.94 billion," Zepbound (the weight-loss label) did "4.93 billion," and Lilly "raised their revenue guidance." His one-liner on the rivalry: "Definitely leading over Novo Nordisk." A reminder that Mounjaro and Zepbound are the same molecule, tirzepatide, sold under two names for two uses.

Lilly is also policing a black market before its next drug even launches. BioSpace (Aug 19) reported that demand for retatrutide, Lilly's next-generation triple-hormone drug, is so intense that compounding pharmacies, med spas, and online sellers are already hawking it "for research purposes." Lilly's response has been aggressive: it "sued six U.S. entities," "referred more than 200 other players to U.S. authorities," and flagged "14,000 websites, social media posts, advertisements, [and] online listings" across "100 countries," calling the situation "an urgent public health crisis... aided by criminal networks." The same episode flagged the flip side of Lilly's story: in oral pills, Novo Nordisk "is selling more of their oral Wegovy," while Lilly "is kind of playing catch up" with a molecule (orforglipron) consumers don't know yet.

A new competitor put up real Phase III data. NEJM This Week (Aug 19) summarized results for cervodotide, an investigational drug that hits both the glucagon and GLP-1 receptors. In a 725-patient trial of adults with obesity but not diabetes, average body weight fell 12.2% at the 3.6 mg dose and 13% at the 6 mg dose, versus 5.4% on placebo, at 76 weeks, with the usual stomach side effects (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea) more common than placebo. Another credible entrant crowding into a field Dudum says is about to get very busy: he name-checked "Kylera... Viking Therapeutics... new GLP-3 combos... [and] Chinese assets that will likely be acquired and moved domestically."

The addressable market keeps getting bigger on paper. Two podcasts sized it up. Keeping Current CME (Aug 19) noted that semaglutide 2.4 mg is now FDA-approved for MASH (a serious fatty-liver disease) in patients with moderate scarring, a fresh, large indication beyond weight and diabetes. And The Medical Journal of Australia (Aug 17) put hard numbers on eligibility: study co-author Jasmine Castrijon said "almost 40% of Australian adults... about 7.8 million people, would be eligible" for weight-management use, plus more than 330,000 for cardiovascular prevention, with the catch that the people most eligible are older and lower-income, exactly the ones who can least afford several hundred dollars a month out of pocket.

The debate

Both sides got a real airing this week. Here's the steel-man version of each.

The bull case: this is still early, and the uses keep multiplying. Lilly's numbers speak for themselves, and the label expansion story is compounding, MASH is now approved, and neurologists are openly excited about what's next. On NeurologyLive Mind Moments (Aug 21), Dr. Pezman Rouhani called stroke prevention "an easy, low-hanging fruit" for GLP-1s and rattled off Parkinson's, brain-pressure disorders, and addiction as plausible future markets. The pricing bulls actually agree with the bears on cheaper drugs, but flip the conclusion: on On The Pen (Aug 18), the host noted that both Lilly and Novo are openly "talking about making up for the lowering of prices... by expanding the volume," with a U.S. pool of "100 million people strong." Lower price per script, far more scripts. And there's a genuine unmet-need argument: on The Plus SideZ (Aug 19), host Kat Carter pointed out there are about "104 million people in America... struggling with the disease of obesity and about 11,500 obesity specialists", one per 9,000 patients, with "72% of GLP-1 users" saying they want more support. That gap is a demand signal.

The bear case: people don't stay on the drugs, and the halo is dimming. The single most damaging data point of the week came from The Watson Weekly (Aug 17), citing Numerator's household panel: "two-thirds of GLP-1 users quit in six months." If that holds, a lot of the volume the bulls are counting on leaks out the back door. The clinical color backs it up. On Habits and Hustle (Aug 18), nutrition scientist Dr. Joey Munoz said flatly that when people stop, "the hunger does come back and you start to gain weight," and host Jen Cohen described a friend who lost 50 pounds, then "gained another 20. And fast. It was like in a month." Rouhani, on NeurologyLive, made the same point from the clinic: GLP-1s "tend to become a lifelong medication" because of the rebound. And the pipeline isn't a straight line up, he noted the large EVOKE and EVOKE Plus Alzheimer's trials "did not meet their primary endpoints," a reminder that not every adjacent indication pays off. Finally, the pricing bears simply take Dudum at his word: if the true cost is $40–50 and competition is arriving, today's fat margins are living on borrowed time.

Read-throughs

Packaged food and restaurants, the appetite tax is showing up in the data. On Monetary Matters (Aug 18), ex-Goya COO Andy Unanue described the shift bluntly: "People are eating less caloric volume, but need protein and fiber." He sees the winners leaning into "high protein, high fiber," "cleaner labels," and "price pack architecture", think a 100-calorie bag of popcorn instead of 180, and singled out PepsiCo for getting ahead of it through deals like Siete and functional sodas (poppi, Olipop). The Watson Weekly added the grocery math: GLP-1 households "spend almost 4% less at the grocery store" after a year, and 22% of U.S. households now include a user, up from about 11% in October 2023. On the restaurant side, DHUnplugged tied soft McDonald's sales partly to "a lot more people on peptides."

API and supply chain, the China question nobody wants to answer. On The Pen spent real time on a Bloomberg report that WuXi AppTech "may have become... too big to ban," coining the phrase "the GLP-1 chokehold." The point: whether you get your GLP-1 branded, compounded, or from the gray market, the peptide supply chain runs heavily through China, and demand for peptide manufacturing "has absolutely exploded." That collides with Washington's push to cut pharma's dependence on China, and, as the host recalled Lilly's Dave Ricks saying, you can fund and build new plants, but "the human capital that it takes... is finite." A cheap-drug future needs enormous, fast, domestic capacity that doesn't exist yet.

Employers and payers, the bill is real. Dudum relayed that Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told him the bank now spends "$200+ million a year on GLP-1s for its employees," and that small towns are covering firefighters, police, and teachers "even though... they're not seeing, at least in the immediate sense, a payback." That tension of huge upfront cost, uncertain near-term ROI, and high drop-off is the payer story to watch as pricing falls.