The price collector

What it is

The Dose Club lists what GPhC registered pharmacies charge for Wegovy and Mounjaro, by dose, as a complete monthly cost. The price collector is the program that keeps those tables current. About every two hours it reads the public price pages of each provider listed on the providers page, works out the complete monthly cost of every dose it finds, and records a figure only when it has read it on the page in that same run. It never carries a figure forward or fills a gap. The prices themselves appear only under prices and on each provider's page, never here.

How it identifies itself

Every request carries this user agent:

DoseClubBot/1.0 (+https://thedoseclub.com/collector; collector@thedoseclub.com)

The string never changes. The collector uses no proxy and no residential address, and it never works around a block or a challenge page. Requests come from the server that runs this site.

What it reads and keeps

Public pages only: the same product and fee pages any visitor sees. It never signs in, adds to a basket, starts a consultation or a checkout, or fills in a form, and it keeps no cookies from one run to the next. Pages are found from the site's sitemap where there is one, and the structured data on a page is read before the page itself.

It keeps the prices, the public consultation and delivery fee rules that go with them, the address of the page each figure came from and, when a figure changes, a screenshot of that page as evidence for our staff. Screenshots are stored privately, shown only to signed in staff and deleted after twelve months. No personal data is collected, because none is on the pages it reads.

robots.txt and rate

The collector reads robots.txt before anything else and honours it for DoseClubBot and for *, including Crawl-delay. A disallowed page is never requested. It makes one request at a time to a site, at least five seconds apart, waits longer after a 429 or a 5xx response, and gives up on a site for the run after three failures. A full run reads roughly three to six pages per provider, so a provider sees about one request from the collector every twenty minutes on average.

Standard prices only

The figure recorded for a dose is the standard price of one month's supply plus the compulsory consultation fee and the delivery fee charged on that order. Promotional banners, codes, first order offers and subscription discounts are ignored. A figure that moves more than 20% against the one already published is held for a member of staff to check against the page before it appears.

To adjust or pause it

Write to collector@thedoseclub.com with your domain and what you would like: a slower schedule, a pause or a stop. Staff pause the provider in the registry and the collector stops requesting its pages within one run, for as long as the pause lasts. A permanent request is honoured by retiring the provider from the price tables.

Submitting prices instead

A provider can supply its prices directly. Email the standard price per dose, the consultation and delivery fees with their rules, the page each figure appears on and your GPhC registration number to collector@thedoseclub.com, or use the contact form. Staff check the figures against the public page and enter them, and the same review rules apply as to a collected figure. A provider account for submitting prices is planned; until it exists, the mailbox is the route.