Nine Vendors Closed This Year. Prices Didn't Do What You'd Expect

What the price data actually shows

Nine research-peptide vendors have closed since mid-2025, and if you've read anything about it, you've probably read the list. We track per-mg pricing across the vendors still standing every day, so instead of writing the tenth version of that list, we went and checked the number everybody's assuming moved. Did fewer vendors actually mean higher prices?

For most compounds, no. Looking at our own daily price snapshots, comparing the first days of July 2026 against the first days of August, the price per milligram fell for the great majority of compounds we track, several of them sharply. BPC-157 dropped about 24 percent. Semaglutide dropped about 25 percent. Tirzepatide dropped 36 percent. Retatrutide dropped 21 percent. Epithalon dropped 42 percent. A handful of compounds did get more expensive over the same stretch, mostly smaller, less-searched items like the sermorelin and ipamorelin blend, up about 12 percent, and CJC-1295, up about 9 percent. But the loud, obvious story, that a wave of closures squeezed supply and pushed prices up across the board, is not what our own numbers show.

Who actually closed, and why

The list is worth naming rather than glossing over. Peptide Sciences, a vendor that had operated since 1990, announced its shutdown on March 6, 2026, and stopped filling orders immediately, with no public explanation beyond a brief closure notice.¹ Amino Asylum had its warehouse raided by the FDA in June 2025 after ignoring earlier warning letters and selling prescription-only medications alongside its peptide catalog.² Paradigm Peptides' founders pled guilty to federal charges in December 2025, after products sold as SARMs were found to actually contain testosterone, a controlled substance.² Science.bio closed voluntarily on January 27, 2026, without a raid or charges, reportedly reading the regulatory climate and choosing to exit before it got worse.³ Strate Labs, which had run for roughly a decade, began winding down on July 1, 2026, posting clearance pricing across its catalog as it closed.⁴ Royal Research, Peptide Tech Labs, American Research Labs, and Unchained Compounds all went offline in the same rough window, part of the broader wave, with fewer public details available on each.²

Behind the individual closures sits a shared set of pressures. FDA enforcement moved from warning letters to warehouse raids and criminal prosecutions. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk filed lawsuits against suppliers of compounded GLP-1 ingredients. And import lead times that used to run about two weeks stretched to six or eight weeks, sometimes longer, as customs stepped up interception of large peptide shipments.⁵ For a vendor already running on thin margins with a small inventory buffer, a shipment stuck at the border for two extra months is often the thing that finishes what the FDA started.

Why prices fell instead of rising

The instinct is to treat vendor count and price like simple supply and demand, fewer sellers, less competition, higher prices. That's not what we're seeing. The vendors that closed weren't the only price-setters in the market, and the ones still standing are competing hard for the customers those closures left behind. A shopper who lost her usual vendor to a shutdown notice didn't stop buying, she went looking for a new one, and the surviving vendors have every reason to win her with a better price rather than a higher one. Consolidation can raise prices when it removes competition. It doesn't automatically do that when the survivors are still racing each other for the same shrinking pool of trustworthy names.

One more thing is worth naming plainly. Our tracking window opens in July, after most of these closures had already happened and their immediate aftermath had already settled. Prices may have spiked briefly right after Peptide Sciences or Science.bio closed, and we simply don't have that data. What we can say without guessing is what happened in the month we did track, and there, the trend ran the opposite direction from the headline.

What this means for you right now

If you're buying research-use peptides, the closures are real and worth knowing about, but the price panic that usually follows this kind of news isn't backed up by what we're actually seeing. You're not necessarily paying more because a vendor you never used shut down. What you are more exposed to is a smaller, more concentrated field of sellers, which makes vendor vetting matter more than it did a year ago, not less. A shortage-driven price spike is still possible if the closures keep coming, just not one the numbers show yet.

The practical move is the same one we'd recommend regardless of the headlines. Compare the actual per-mg price across current vendors rather than assuming a shortage story means everyone raised prices, and lean harder on third-party testing and vendor reputation now that there are fewer sellers to choose from. Our price comparison tool and vendor directory are built for exactly this, checking who's actually competitive today rather than relying on what a vendor charged six months ago.

What to watch next

If another major vendor closes, or if import delays get materially worse, we'll pull this same comparison again. A single closure that removes a genuinely large share of supply for one specific compound could move that compound's price on its own, even while the broader market keeps trending down. We'll keep tracking daily and report it if that shift shows up.