What the price collector is and how a pharmacy can work with it

Every figure under /prices was read from a pharmacy's public page by a program The Dose Club calls the price collector. The collector has a page of its own at /collector, written for the people who run pharmacy websites. This article explains the same facts for everyone else and sets out how a pharmacy can work with it.

What it does

The collector reads the public price pages of each provider listed on the providers page about every two hours, 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. If a page cannot be read, nothing is written, and after 24 hours without a confirmed check the cell in the table shows "checking" in place of a number. A broken collector therefore cannot put a wrong price on the site. The worst it can do is stop, and stopping is visible.

The figure it records 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.

How it identifies itself and what it keeps

Every request carries the user agent DoseClubBot/1.0, followed by the address of the collector page and the collector mailbox, collector@thedoseclub.com. The string never changes. The collector uses no proxy and no residential address, never works around a block or a challenge page, and sends its requests from the server that runs this site.

It reads 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 visible text.

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. 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.

How it behaves on a provider's server

The collector reads robots.txt before anything else and honours it for DoseClubBot and for the wildcard user agent, including any 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.

How a pharmacy can work with it

There are three routes, all through the collector mailbox or the contact form.

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. A robots.txt rule that disallows DoseClubBot has a similar effect without an email: the collector records the block and requests nothing, and the provider's cells show "checking" after 24 hours until the pharmacy agrees access or supplies its prices another way.

To submit prices instead, email the standard price per dose, the consultation and delivery fees with their rules, the page each figure appears on and the pharmacy's GPhC registration number. 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.

To be listed at all, a pharmacy needs a GPhC registration, which is checked against the register and shown on the provider page. The Dose Club takes no payment for a listing, and a provider's position in the table depends on its price and nothing else.

What the collector will not do

It never reads retatrutide or any medicine without a UK licence, so no unlicensed seller is ever read or listed. It records no promotional price. It stores nothing from a checkout, because it never reaches one. And it writes nothing to the tables directly: every figure passes through the website's own rules, including the hold on large moves, before it appears.

Sources

• The Dose Club, The price collector: /collector
• The Dose Club, How The Dose Club checks pharmacy prices, and What happens when a price moves more than 20 percent (articles on this site)
• General Pharmaceutical Council, Search the register for a pharmacy: pharmacyregulation.org/registers/pharmacy

This article is information, not medical advice. Talk to your prescriber about your treatment.