Benchmarks you can actually trust
Every founder deck we see cites unit economics from somewhere: a podcast, a Slack rumor, a vendor's case study. Most of it is unverifiable. Meanwhile the public companies file audited numbers every quarter, manufacturers publish cash prices on their own websites, and Rock Health counts every funding round. That data is free, dated, and checkable.
So this post uses only that. Every number below comes from Q2 2026 guidance, company disclosures, or published price lists, and the derivations are labeled as derivations. If you want the framework for reading these releases yourself, start with our earnings-season listening guide; this is the follow-through with the numbers on the table.
The benchmark table
| Signal | Number | What it tells an operator |
|---|---|---|
| Hims & Hers Q2 2026 revenue guidance | $680-700M, 25-28% YoY growth | Category demand still compounds at national scale |
| Hims & Hers Q2 adjusted EBITDA guidance | $35-55M | Roughly 5-8% of revenue: margins are thin even for the leader |
| Branded semaglutide shipments | 125,000+ in the first six weeks | The compounded-to-branded pivot converts at volume |
| Omada Health membership | 1M+ members, up 51% YoY | The employer channel is growing as fast as DTC |
| Omada GLP-1 members | 150,000+ | GLP-1 support and wraparound care is a category of its own |
| Rock Health H1 2026 funding | $7.4B across 244 deals | Capital returned, but selectively |
| Megadeal concentration | 45% of capital in 20 deals | The average outcome is far smaller than the headlines |
| Median deal size | $14M | Most funded companies raise workmanlike rounds, not war chests |
And the price floors, published by the manufacturers and retailers themselves:
| Offer | Published cash price |
|---|---|
| Wegovy, manufacturer direct | ~$199/month |
| Wegovy oral pill | $149/month |
| Zepbound single-dose vials | $299-449/month |
| Amazon One Medical weight programs | $149/month orals, $299/month injectables |
| Walgreens telehealth visit | $49 |
Those two tables are the whole industry in miniature. Everything below is what they imply.
The price floors cap your ARPU
When the manufacturer sells Wegovy directly for about $199 a month and Amazon bundles orals with care for $149, your pricing power has a published ceiling. You can charge a premium for genuinely better care, but the premium is measured in tens of dollars, not hundreds, and every patient can verify the floor in one search.
Run the subscriber math from there. A weight-loss patient at a floor-anchored $199 is worth $597 if they stay three months and $2,388 if they stay twelve. Nothing else in your model moves value fourfold. Not conversion optimization, not AOV tricks, not upsells. Months retained is the multiplier, which is why we keep arguing that subscriber counts without quality cohorts are vanity.
The 125,000 branded shipments in six weeks make the same point from the demand side: patients moved to branded supply fast when the price and the pathway were clear. Clarity converts. Opacity now reads as a markup.
Marketing is the dominant cost line
Across years of public filings, marketing has been the largest operating expense at every DTC telehealth company at scale, commonly approaching half of revenue during growth phases. That is the structural reason the EBITDA guidance above looks the way it does: $35-55M on $680-700M of revenue is a 5 to 8 percent adjusted EBITDA margin, guided by the category leader, with national brand recognition, vertical pharmacy capacity, and a decade of funnel tuning.
Sit with that for a second as a small operator. If the best-resourced company in the category converts 25-28 percent growth into single-digit EBITDA margins, a plan that models 30 percent margins on the same products with paid traffic is not ambitious, it is arithmetic that ignores the filings. Margin in this category comes from somewhere specific: a niche with less auction competition, owned and earned channels, service attach, or retention that amortizes acquisition over more months.
Retention beats acquisition at these floors
Combine the two sections above and the strategy writes itself. Price is capped by published floors. Acquisition is the dominant cost and is priced by auction against the biggest spenders in health. The only variable left that compounds in your favor is how long patients stay.
This is also what the Omada numbers are quietly saying: 1M+ members, up 51 percent, with 150,000+ GLP-1 members arriving through employers. Patients increasingly have a subsidized alternative, which means DTC programs keep patients by being better care, not by being the only option. The mechanics of keeping them are unglamorous and knowable: the month-two cliff, refill operations, and re-engagement, which we detailed in the month-2 churn playbook.
The funding data completes the picture. $7.4B across 244 deals sounds like a boom, but 45 percent of it sat in 20 megadeals and the median round was $14M. The median funded company cannot buy growth for long. It has to earn economics, which in this category means retention.
What these numbers cannot tell a 500-patient brand
Honest limits, because benchmark abuse is its own disease:
- Your CAC is not their CAC. Auction dynamics at $50k a month of spend are different from $100M a quarter, in both directions: you lack their brand halo, but you can win niches they will not bother to segment.
- Your COGS are not their COGS. Vertical pharmacy and negotiated volume terms change gross margin structurally. At 500 patients you are paying rate card.
- Blended numbers hide the mix. Public revenue blends weight loss with dermatology, sexual health, and mental health at very different price points. No public number tells you what your niche's economics are.
- Cohort maturity is invisible. Guidance reflects years-old cohorts still paying. A young brand's blended churn always looks worse than a mature book.
Use public numbers for direction and ceilings: price floors you cannot ignore, margin expectations you should not exceed on identical products, and proof that retention is where the model lives. Then instrument your own truth, which is the discipline we outlined in evaluating ROI without vanity metrics. For the wider mid-year context around these numbers, the state of DTC telehealth field report still holds up.
FAQ
What revenue does a DTC telehealth subscriber generate in 2026? For weight-loss programs, published cash floors anchor pricing: about $199 a month for manufacturer-direct Wegovy, $149 for the oral pill and Amazon's oral programs, and $299-449 for Zepbound vials. Subscriber value is that floor-anchored price times months retained, so a patient kept twelve months is worth roughly four times one kept three.
What profit margins do DTC telehealth companies actually make? The category leader guided Q2 2026 to $35-55M of adjusted EBITDA on $680-700M of revenue, a 5 to 8 percent margin at national scale. Smaller operators on the same products should not model fatter margins; better economics come from niche selection, owned channels, service attach, and retention.
Why is retention more important than acquisition in telehealth? Because published price floors cap what you can charge and marketing is the dominant cost line, historically near half of revenue at the public companies. With price and CAC largely set by the market, months retained is the only major variable an operator controls, and it multiplies subscriber value several times over.
Can a small telehealth brand use public-company benchmarks? Directionally yes, absolutely not as absolutes. Public numbers reliably show price ceilings, margin reality, and the shift toward branded supply and employer channels, but they blend categories, reflect negotiated COGS, and hide cohort maturity. A 500-patient brand should treat them as boundaries and build its own cohort data inside them.