I think the difference here is that there are hundreds of places to buy peps. Novo and Lilly are the only place to get branded, and yes, their pricing is sickening.
With peps, I could get them far cheaper than I get them from Nexa, but I pay for convenience of not having to use crypto. Nexa isn't the only peptide supplier, I know I could get them a lot cheaper if money is an issue. Nexa doesn't own the peptide market, we have choices. With Novo and Lilly, this isn't at all true.
Just my ten cents, for what it's worth🙂
I'm a bit jaded in that when I first started out in this hobby, the main "gray" choices were Peptide Sciences and SAF. Both were absurdly overpriced, and offered little to no testing; but they took card payments and shipped from within the US so they were the de facto entry point for 99% of people looking for an alternative to big pharma at the time.
In a few short months, they became the "nexa" of that era; everyone had an opinion and felt compelled to share it. The main difference being that neither of those companies could be bothered with trying to engage customers publicly; they were smart enough to ignore the noise and focus on the big picture: making all the money. As time wore on, and even to this very day, because they accepted cards and shipped domestically they continued to have their supporters and loyal customers. To most people now however, neither would even be included in consideration today, even for those who have never purchased from them.
As time went on, the domestic vendor scene began to change rapidly, with countless startups sprouting up all over the place as people discovered they could buy kits from QSC, Senwayer, Tri-Trust, and the whole gang of Chinese that most here have never heard of, and turn around and sell kits or individual vials for hundreds or thousands of percent markup and enjoy almost overnight success.
That's when the differences in vendor approaches and personalities started to become something for the whole world to see. Several vendors with great prices and quality products would ultimately fail because of shitty customer service, shipping problems, always running out of inventory, and often due do problematic personalities (remember Phat Strength?) allowing themselves to be seen for the questionable type of people customers were dealing with.
Other vendors followed a different path. Arctic is my go-to example because even though they had a number of public disasters early on (mostly underfilled vials, shipping/inventory and customer service problems), they took the approach of learning from those mistakes and doing everything they could to overcome them and improve every day. Eventually they got to the point of almost universal respect, even though their prices were well above what many people who were becoming familiar with China-direct purchasing were willing to pay. Sure, they had occasional bad reviews, but they were all "feels" complaints; never did you hear someone complain about being ripped off or the owners being assholes. Eventually, other vendors like Skye, Polaris, etc. would follow the same model and many are still around today with the same near-universal admiration and respect. The owners of those types of companies were/are decent people, or at the very least able to keep any negative personality traits private and not let them interfere with how they conducted business. (I didn't include BB/Aminos Research because while they were the cat's meow for quite a while, their spectacular failure quickly erased all of the good will they built up.)
Then of course were the "less-than" vendors, those people who see the peptide business as a money factory and nothing else; only caring about their customers to the extent of convincing them to keep coming back to spend more. Astro, HVY, Xcel, Helix, Cantides, the list goes on and on. They were caught lying over and over again. They would never made good on bad product. They did all the wrong things, almost always having to do with the personalities of their proprietors.
Even with the worst vendors at their worst moments, I don't recall any of them ever rubbing their "success" in the faces of the very customers who made that success possible. Ironically, the most successful long-term vendors seem to be the ones who realize that public interactions with customers/potential customers is ill-advised and minimize or eliminate their public participation once they've become established. It's the ones who keep needing to remind the world how wonderful they are that almost always end up being the names brought up as examples of how not to do things.
Vendors will continue to come and go, and a year from now we'll be talking about an entirely different set of names. One of the core missions of this forum is to give members the information and tools to help empower informed decision-making for everyone's unique situation and circumstances, and much of that is accomplished by people sharing their experiences and opinions openly and honestly (without being paid or incentivized). I don't especially care whether someone supports a vendor or not; positive or negative feedback doesn't matter as much as its sincerity, provided the discussion is always conducted genuinely and respectfully and without attempting to invalidate or intimidate dissenting opinions.
Anyway, this should really be a separate post, maybe a "Gonk's Chronicles of Grey Market Peptide History" kind of thing at some point, so I'll leave it as food for thought for now. Always remember that this forum as a general rule remains staunchly vendor-neutral unless and until a vendor has given us reasons to set that neutrality aside, such as when their actions put the health or finances of our members in jeopardy.