A record sheet, not a recommendation engine

What the site does

It keeps one sourced record per provider per product. From those records it builds a ledger, a set of guides and exactly one ranked page. A number that is not in the records does not appear on a page.

The guide covers payment terms, not treatment. It does not say which medicine is appropriate, which program is better clinically, or what a reader should do. Those are decisions for a licensed clinician.

What the set covers, and what it does not

This set is consumer menopause hormone-therapy programs that sell estradiol and progesterone to patients directly and publish a charge for it. It is not a census of HRT: pellet therapy at clinics, in-person gynecology, compounding pharmacies and retail-pharmacy fills paid through insurance are not in the set, and a program is not included or excluded on the strength of clinical evidence.

That boundary matters when reading a ranking. A program absent from the list is not thereby worse, cheaper or less established than one on it: it may sell a different form of treatment, price only at a pharmacy, or simply publish no charge. The list compares published charges inside a defined set. It is not a league table of hormone therapy.

How the score should be read

The Buyer Guide Score runs from 75 to 100, and the 75 is a fixed inclusion baseline rather than an achievement. A program only enters the set once its pricing page could be read, a charge recorded, a source named and a check date stamped. Every listed record therefore holds the same starting position, and the figure that actually varies is the detail points earned above it, out of 25.

Those 25 points come from five published components: price level, price completeness, required fees priced, terms on record, and whether dose and coverage are stated. Each is shown as earned on the record itself, so a two-digit total is never left to read as a grade out of a hundred when 75 of it is shared by everything on the list.

None of the five components reads a clinical claim. This score measures pricing disclosure completeness. It is not a measure of clinical quality, effectiveness or safety, and it is not a medical endorsement of any program. A high score means the pricing is legible, and nothing more than that.

What it refuses to do

It does not estimate a missing figure, average a blank across other programs, or describe a derived monthly number as a monthly charge. Where a provider has not published a price, the field reads not established and the record says so.

• No stars, no ratings and no invented reviews
• No referral commission anywhere in the guide, as at the check date
• No treatment recommendations
• No second ranked list

Who publishes it

HRT Buyer Guide is owned and operated by Open Water Rx LLC.

The publisher's commercial interests, including any program in the guide that the publisher operates, are disclosed in full on the disclosures page and summarized once in the footer of every page. Nothing else on the site repeats it, so it appears in one place a reader can check rather than scattered through the copy.

The method applies to every record the same way, including any record connected to the publisher: the charge is read from the provider's own pricing page, dated against each figure, and the score computed from the same published components. A connection buys no adjustment to a number, because the arithmetic is the same function for every record in the set.

How it is paid for

At the check date, no program pays for a record, for inclusion in a list, or for a referral. Advertising is sold separately and labeled wherever it appears: it never touches a recorded charge, a cadence or a score.

That statement is not copy alone. Affiliate commission and paid placement are flags in the data, and the funding notice on ledger and ranked pages is generated from them, so the wording changes the moment either one does.