The vendor landscape

Who actually makes peptides, who resells them, and why one site charges $30 and another charges $90 for the same vial.

Here is the first thing to understand about peptide vendors: almost none of them make peptides. The actual manufacturing happens at a small number of chemical factories, mostly in China. Everyone else buys powder from those factories in bulk, has it put into little vials, and sticks a label on. The brand you see is a label and a website. What matters is what's behind it.

The four kinds of seller

• Bulk manufacturers. They sell by the gram to businesses. They rarely sell to individuals. If a website claims to be a manufacturer and sells single vials, it isn't one.
• Established resellers. They buy bulk, contract out the vial-filling, test every batch, and publish the results. The good ones have been around for years, and their lab reports come from a named independent lab you can look up.
• Drop-ship brands. A website, a checkout page, and a supplier they've never seen. Their lab report, if they have one, came from the supplier and nobody checked it. Most of the market looks like this.
• Telehealth clinics and compounding pharmacies. For the few approved peptides, a doctor and a licensed pharmacy is the only route with real manufacturing standards behind it. For everything else, that route doesn't exist.

Why prices are all over the place

Bulk peptide is cheap. A vial that sells for $60 might contain a few dollars of actual compound. The difference between vendors is testing, filling standards, insurance against their payment processor shutting them down, and profit. A very low price usually means a drop-ship brand skipping the testing. A very high price is often just a brand name.

So the useful question is never "what does it cost?" It's "what did they test, who tested it, and can I see it?" The next lesson teaches you to read the answer.