Does South Lake Compounding charge a software fee on top of drug cost?

In a direct-compounder model like South Lake Pharmacy, the main cost layers are: in-house compounding cost (USP 795/797/800 cleanroom, FDA-registered cGMP raw materials, two-lab third-party testing for potency, sterility, and endotoxin), shipping and handling from the Zephyrhills, Florida facility, and any portal or access costs associated with the LifeFile ordering system. Ask South Lake Compounding whether there is a separate recurring charge for LifeFile portal access, whether it is per clinic or per user, and whether it scales at any threshold. Then ask whether that cost is included in your per-vial clinic agreement rate or itemized separately. A blended rate that includes portal access costs is effectively a combined drug-plus-software price — not wrong, but important to understand when comparing to alternatives.

Also consider total cost of ownership over time. If a recurring LifeFile access fee is separate from drug cost, your effective cost per vial increases as you scale. If it is bundled into the per-vial rate, the effective cost per portal user is high on low volume and low on high volume. Neither structure is inherently better — but you need to know which applies to compute a meaningful comparison.

Fizy Health structures its costs to be legible: drug cost passes through and is shown as resolved per-vial 503A cost on each catalog and cart line before checkout, and the platform's economics are a single facilitation fee disclosed separately at payment. There is no hidden portal access charge folded into the drug rate, so total cost of ownership is the visible drug cost plus the named fee — a number you can compute before you order.

That makes a like-for-like comparison straightforward. Add any South Lake Compounding portal or access fee to its per-vial drug rate over a representative month, then set that total against the visible per-vial cost plus disclosed facilitation fee for the same SKUs and volume. Comparing total-to-total — not drug-rate-to-drug-rate — is the only way to see which model actually costs less to run.