How we collect and verify prices

Every price on this site is read from a page that is published and that anyone can open. We do not call pharmacies, and we do not collect prices by phone. There are two kinds of source, and each row on every price table tells you which one it came from.

The seller’s own published price. Online pharmacies and telehealth providers — Pocketpills, XYON and Felix — publish what they charge on their own product pages. We read the listed price from that page and store a link to it. These sellers quote a single all-in figure, so there is no separate dispensing fee to record.

A published pharmacy survey. Retail chain prices — Costco, Walmart, Rexall and Shoppers Drug Mart — come from the price tables published by TeleTest.ca, a Canadian telehealth company that surveys those pharmacies and publishes the results with the medication cost and the dispensing fee broken out separately. We did not survey those pharmacies ourselves. We cite TeleTest’s table as the source, and we show TeleTest’s own survey date rather than the date we read it, so the age of the figure is the age of the underlying survey.

Where a source breaks out a dispensing fee, we store it and show it in its own column. Where a source does not, that column shows “—”, which means the fee was not disclosed separately — not that there is no fee.

The Total column is what a cash-paying customer without insurance would be quoted: the medication cost plus the pharmacy's standard dispensing fee. Provincial sales tax is not applied to prescription drugs in Canada and is therefore excluded.

Where a source breaks out a fee, the Price and Dispensing Fee columns show the two halves and Total shows their sum. The fee is a part of the total, never an amount added on top of it — so reading only the Total column is always safe, and the columns can never disagree.