Methodology

Where the prices come from

We regularly observe publicly available discount-card prices at major pharmacy chains. These are the kinds of cash and coupon prices a shopper could look up themselves through publicly accessible savings programs. We organize those observations by medication and package size so they can be compared in one place.

Each medication is identified by its National Drug Code (NDC), an 11-digit code that uniquely identifies a specific product and package. Matching is done on this exact code — never by fuzzy guessing — so a price is only ever shown against the exact product it was observed for.

Every price is dated

Prices are not live quotes. Each price on FineRx carries the date it was observed, and we label how fresh it is:

• Fresh — observed within the last week.
• Aging — observed within the last two weeks.
• Stale — older than two weeks; these are held back from “lowest price” summaries and search until refreshed.

We update our data regularly. When newer observations arrive, they replace older ones for the same product, pharmacy, and savings program.

How the comparison is built

For a given product and quantity, we show the observed price from each combination of pharmacy chain and independent savings program, sorted from lowest to highest, with the lowest recently observed price highlighted. This lets you see the range of what the same medication has recently cost, not just a single number.

What the prices are — and are not

Prices shown by FineRx are estimates based on recently observed pricing data and may change at any time. Final price is determined by the pharmacy or applicable savings provider.

In other words, our numbers are estimates meant to inform a conversation with your pharmacist. Your actual price depends on the pharmacy, the savings program you use, and the day you fill your prescription. We never describe a price as “guaranteed” or as the “best” price, because we cannot promise either.

How we make money

FineRx runs no advertising and sells no data. We are an affiliate of LowerMyRx, a free prescription discount-card program: if you use the free card or a LowerMyRx coupon shown here and fill a prescription with it, LowerMyRx may pay us a small commission, at no extra cost to you. That commission never changes which prices we show, how they are ranked, or which option comes out cheapest — the ranking is driven by the observed numbers alone. Pharmacy chains pay us nothing: chain and program names appear only to identify the source of an observed price. The full terms are on our affiliate disclosure page, and we label the actions that can earn us a commission.

Coverage and known limits

• We cover a selection of common medications and the pharmacy chains and savings programs for which we have data — not every drug, pharmacy, or program exists in our data.
• Prices are chain-level, not store-level: we do not show location-specific pricing, so a nearby pharmacy's price may differ. What happens to a ZIP code or address you type into the “pharmacies near you” list is spelled out below.
• We do not factor in insurance. The prices shown are cash or discount-card style prices, which are sometimes lower and sometimes higher than an insurance copay.
• Where we cannot confidently match or parse a price, we exclude it rather than show something uncertain.

ZIP codes and the “pharmacies near you” list

That list is the one place FineRx asks where you are, so here is exactly what happens to what you type. The ZIP code, address, or device location is used for that single request, to sort nearby stores by distance. There is no account to attach it to: we do not write it to our database, we do not link it to the medication you were looking at, and we do not put it in our analytics — the analytics event records only that a nearby lookup ran and whether it started from a ZIP, an address, or the device.

A five-digit ZIP is resolved against our own table of ZIP centroids and never leaves our servers. A typed address is different: our server — not your browser — forwards the text to an OpenStreetMap-based geocoding service, so that service sees our server and never your device's IP address. Those geocoding results sit in memory for a day so the same address is not looked up twice, and are gone when the service restarts.

One caveat we would rather state than hide: like every web server, the proxy in front of FineRx writes one access-log line per request, and that line contains the requested URL — which for this lookup carries the ZIP or address. Those lines record a truncated IP address, are kept only as long as we need them to keep the site secure and working, and are never joined to our analytics or to anything else. Our application logs record the path only, never the query. So: not stored, not in analytics, not tied to what you searched — but present, briefly, in an operational log, and we would rather say so than write “never logged.”

Corrections

If a price or product looks wrong, tell us — we take corrections seriously. See our contact page.