How rankings work

Every ranking on this site is a claim, and claims deserve a methods section. Here’s mine, short enough that you’ll actually read it.

The DOSE SCORE

Every vendor gets a DOSE SCORE out of 10. It is not a user-review average (I don’t run reviews), not an algorithm, and not for sale. It’s my judgment, built from four sub-scores you’ll see on every vendor card:

Purity — third-party COAs that exist, match the batch, and come from a lab I can look up. The heaviest of the four; a vendor can’t charm its way past this one.
Pricing — per milligram, not per sticker. A cheap vial at half the stated dose is the most expensive thing you can buy.
Shipping — speed, packaging that respects a fragile molecule, and honesty when something is out of stock.
Support — what happens when a vial arrives cracked. Everyone is lovely before the payment clears; this measures after.

The headline score is not a mechanical average. Some failures are disqualifying — a faked COA zeroes the whole thing, and no shipping speed buys it back.

Scores come before deals

Some links here are affiliate links, and that order matters: a vendor’s score is set before any affiliate relationship exists, and signing a deal afterward moves it by exactly nothing. A vendor that stops earning its score loses it, commission or not. If I ever break that rule, this page is the receipt to wave at me. The rest of the fine print lives on the disclosure page.

The evidence tiers

Compounds don’t get scores — they get an honesty chip. The tier answers one question: how much human data actually backs this thing?

top pick

Real human evidence, a sane risk profile, and I'd take it (or do). The strongest claim I make, and the rarest.

most data

The best-studied option in its lane — actual human trials, real sample sizes. It may not be my pick, but the receipts are the deepest.

weak data

Animal work, in-vitro results, or tiny human studies. Interesting is the right word; proven is not.

guinea pig

No meaningful human data. If you take it, you are the trial. This chip is a warning label, never a recommendation — it exists so I can cover a compound honestly instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

A compound I haven’t reviewed yet carries no chip at all. No chip means no judgment made — not a quiet endorsement.

Liveness checks

Vendors in this niche die constantly — FDA letters, frozen payment processors, plain exit scams. So my system sweeps every listed vendor nightly: is the catalog up, does checkout resolve, what do the prices say. The “verified” timestamp you see on a vendor card is the real result of the last sweep, not decoration. A vendor that stops responding gets flagged; one that dies gets marked dead and pulled from every ranking the same day. Stale directories are how people lose money; mine tells you when it last checked.

The fine print

Scores and tiers are my editorial judgment — one person reading the studies, ordering the products, and keeping receipts. I don’t run a lab, and I don’t claim to. When the evidence is thin I say so plainly, and when I change my mind, the page changes with a fresh “updated” date.