How Project Biohacking Rates Research Peptide Vendors
Why this page exists
Every vendor in the Project Biohacking directory carries a rating out of five. This page explains exactly how that number is produced, what evidence goes into it, and what does not.
We publish this for one reason: we earn affiliate commission from the vendors we rate. That is a conflict of interest, and the only meaningful response to it is to make the scoring method checkable. Everything below can be verified against the vendor pages on this site and against the vendors' own published documentation.
The rating measures documentation quality, business accountability, and operational reliability. It does not measure whether any compound is safe, effective, or suitable for any use in humans or animals. All products discussed on this site are research materials sold for laboratory use only.
The four scoring layers
Vendors are scored out of 100 points across four layers. That total is the
Standards Score, and it converts to the published five-star value using the formula in the star rating section below.
| Layer | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Analytical documentation | 50% | What the vendor tests for, who tests it, and whether you can see the results before you buy |
| Ownership and accountability | 20% | Who is behind the business and whether they can be identified |
| Commercial and operational | 20% | Shipping, returns, support, payment stability, catalog |
| Community track record | 10% | Complaint patterns normalized against the industry, regulatory record |
Layer 1: Analytical documentation (50 points)
This layer carries half the total, because it is the only one that speaks to whether the material in the vial is what the label says.
We score assays we have observed on a certificate we opened, or that a vendor has confirmed to us in writing. A claim on a website does not score. During this audit two vendors described testing on their own pages that their certificates do not show, and one of them confirmed as much when we asked. That is why the standard exists.
Why identity and purity earn only 6 of 22 points
Almost every vendor in this market publishes purity and identity, and almost all report 99% or higher. A figure everyone reports at the same level cannot separate them.
So identity and purity are the floor rather than the credit. A company that documents neither is not listed in our [peptide company directory] at all. What earns points is the testing that happens beyond those two, and that is where the spread across this market turns out to be enormous.
One company in our directory documents ten assay types on a single lot. Another documents two.
Assay depth (22 points)
The largest single criterion in the rubric. Scored cumulatively on assays observed on a certificate.
| Assay | Points | Panel |
|---|---|---|
| Identity and purity | 6 | Core |
| Endotoxin | 5 | Core |
| Sterility | 3 | Core |
| Heavy metals | 3 | Core |
| Trifluoroacetic acid / counterion | 2 | Extended |
| Residual solvents | 2 | Extended |
| Container closure integrity | 1 | Extended |
| Solubility | 1 | Extended |
| Per-vial or batch conformity | 1 | Extended |
| Dual-method sterility | 1 | Extended |
| Core panel total | 14 | Identity, purity, endotoxin, sterility, heavy metals |
| Extended panel total | 8 | Characterisation depth beyond the core |
The core panel is what tells you the material is what it says and will not confound a basic experiment. The extended panel is characterisation depth, and it separates a competent testing programme from a comprehensive one.
Trifluoroacetic acid is scored because it matters and almost nobody tests it. TFA is used in the HPLC purification of peptides and carries over into the finished product, where it is a documented confound in cell-based assays. A rubric that only scores tests everyone already runs cannot distinguish anyone.
Sterility is scored below endotoxin because it is arguably not applicable to lyophilized powder. One company told us directly that its standard panel is identity, purity, weight and endotoxin, and that sterility is not performed. That is a defensible position for freeze-dried material, and the rubric reflects it.
Certificate accessibility (6 points)
| Access level | Points |
|---|---|
| Public, no account, no gate beyond age verification | 6 |
| Public but requires account creation | 3 |
| Available on request only | 1 |
| Not available | 0 |
Age verification does not reduce the score. It is a legal requirement in this category, not an access barrier.
Lot traceability and certificate authenticity (7 points)
| Documentation level | Points |
|---|---|
| Per-lot, matches the vial, and independently verifiable at the issuing laboratory | 7 |
| Per-lot and lot-matched, authenticity not confirmable at the laboratory | 5 |
| Per-product, representative rather than per-lot | 3 |
| Undated or unattributable to a batch | 0 |
Why authenticity sits here. Lot traceability asks whether a document can be tied to the vial in your hand. Verification at the issuing laboratory is the same question one step further: whether the document itself can be trusted. A PDF hosted by the seller is an assertion. A certificate you can confirm on the testing laboratory's own site is evidence.
Vial-to-document link (2 points)
| Condition | Points |
|---|---|
| Scannable code on the vial resolving to the batch-specific certificate | 2 |
| Scannable code on the vial resolving to the product page | 1 |
| No vial-level link | 0 |
Whether you can get from the vial in your hand to the document without knowing what to search for. Two vendors in our directory print a scannable code on the vial. One of them resolves to the certificate for that specific batch
Independent laboratory cross-verification (2 points)
| Condition | Points |
|---|---|
| Two or more named laboratories, certificates from each public and independently verifiable | 2 |
| Multiple laboratories evidenced but only partially verifiable or unnamed | 1 |
| Single laboratory, or laboratories claimed but not named | 0 |
A laboratory change over time is not cross-verification. This scores only where two laboratories test concurrently, or where the same product or lot carries certificates from both.
Laboratories that are claimed but not named score zero, however many are claimed. You cannot verify a laboratory that is not identified.
Accredited laboratory (3 points)
| Condition | Points |
|---|---|
| Certificate names an accredited laboratory with a checkable accreditation number | 3 |
| Laboratory named, accreditation claimed but not evidenced on the certificate | 1 |
| No accreditation stated | 0 |
An accreditation number you can look up is worth more than the word "accredited" on a website.
Purity performance against stated specification (5 points)
| Condition | Points |
|---|---|
| Results consistently meet or exceed the stated specification | 5 |
| Mostly meet, one or more shortfalls | 2 |
| Below stated specification, or no specification stated | 0 |
Scored against the vendor's own specification, not against an absolute number. A vendor claiming 98% and delivering 99.4% is performing. A vendor claiming 99.98% and delivering 98.4% is not.
Where no specification appears on the certificate, this scores zero. Excellent results with nothing to measure them against cannot be assessed as performance.
Certificate library scale and organization (3 points)
| Condition | Points |
|---|---|
| Comprehensive public library organised by product and lot | 3 |
| Certificates on product pages covering most of the catalogue | 2 |
| Partial coverage, some products only | 1 |
| No library | 0 |
Ownership and accountability (20 points)
Who is behind the transaction, and whether you can find out.
Identity disclosure (12 points, highest applicable tier only)
| Disclosure level | Points |
|---|---|
| Named, publicly identifiable leadership | 12 |
| Registered corporate entity named | 8 |
| Physical business address and direct contact channel, on the site or in the terms | 5 |
| None of the above | −6 |
Public accountability (8 points)
Whether identified leadership is verifiably attached to the business in public: author profiles, published work, named commentary in trade press, or membership in an industry body that lists members publicly.
| Accountability level | Points |
|---|---|
| Named leadership publicly attached to the business through author profiles, published work, named trade commentary, or a publicly listed industry body membership | 8 |
| Named leadership, with public presence limited to the company's own site | 5 |
| Corporate entity named, no individual publicly attached | 2 |
| No individual or entity publicly attached to the business | 0 |
Why we disclose operating tenure but do not score it
We record how long each vendor has been trading where that is verifiable, and we state it on the vendor's page. We do not score it.
When we checked, seven of the eight vendors in our directory first appeared online inside a single twelve-month window. A scoring band applied to that distribution returns the same result for nearly everyone and tells you nothing. This category is too young for tenure to separate anyone.
Where a founding date is not publicly verifiable, we say so rather than estimating it.
Layer 3: Commercial and operational (20 points)
| Component | Points | What is assessed |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping disclosure accuracy | 5 | Whether stated processing and transit times reflect actual published tiers rather than the fastest one |
| Return and replacement policy | 5 | Whether a policy exists, is stated in days, and is findable |
| Support responsiveness and channels | 4 | Direct contact routes and documented response patterns |
| Payment and fulfillment resilience | 3 | Multiple payment rails maintained, stable order processing |
| Catalog depth and specialty availability | 3 | Range, and access to compounds that are difficult to source |
What is deliberately not scored here
Catalog access controls are not penalized. A number of vendors now require an account to browse pricing or products. This increasingly reflects payment processing and regulatory pressure rather than a vendor's own quality standards, and scoring vendors down for constraints imposed on them by acquirers and processors would measure the wrong thing.
We still disclose it. Where a vendor requires login before you can see the catalog, the vendor's review page says so, because it changes your experience even though it does not change the rating.
A note on manufacturing. No vendor in this category manufactures its own active pharmaceutical ingredient. There is no domestic API manufacture for these compounds, and every vendor in this market sources raw material and then synthesises, purifies, fills and finishes. This criterion measures domestic synthesis and fill, not manufacturing origin. A full score here is not a claim about where the raw material came from.
Layer 4: Community track record (10 points)
Normalized complaint profile (6 points)
Raw review scores are not aggregated into our rating. Platforms that allow vendors to solicit reviews automatically at the point of purchase measure how systematically a vendor asks for reviews as much as they measure satisfaction. A vendor that emails every completed order will accumulate a higher score than an equally good vendor that does not, and comparing the two directly rewards the marketing operation rather than the business.
Instead, complaints are read against two adjustments.
Base-rate normalization. Complaint rates are compared against the observable rate across this product category rather than against an absolute standard. Research peptides are bought by a population that includes many people new to handling lyophilized material, and the category's baseline complaint pattern reflects that. A vendor is assessed against its peers, not against a general retail benchmark.
Root-cause categorization. Complaints are sorted before they are counted:
| Complaint type | Counts against the vendor |
|---|---|
| Buyer handling error (reconstitution, storage, dosing) | No |
| Customs seizure or import refusal | No |
| Carrier delivery failure | Partially |
| Fulfillment error, wrong or missing item | Yes |
| Support non-response | Yes |
| Product quality or potency dispute | Yes |
| Billing, refund, or checkout failure | Yes |
A negative review describing a reconstitution mistake tells you something about the buyer's experience level. It does not tell you anything about the vendor. A negative review describing an unanswered support ticket does.
We also weight recent reports more heavily than older ones, because a vendor's operations two years ago may not describe how it runs today.
Review authenticity checks (2 points)
Review sets are assessed for patterns that indicate coordinated posting rather than organic feedback: clusters posted within a single day, reviewer accounts with no other review history, near-identical phrasing across multiple entries, volume spikes unconnected to a product launch or promotion, and platform-flagged entries.
We apply these checks to inform our own scoring. We do not publish allegations about any named company's review practices.
Regulatory record (2 points)
Publicly listed regulatory actions, including FDA warning letters, checked at each review cycle.
Category-wide regulatory advisories are not scored. Where an advisory names a vendor only by virtue of operating in this category, it tells you nothing about that vendor specifically. Firm-specific enforcement is scored: warning letters, import alerts, seizure actions and findings against a named entity.
The two numbers we publish
Every vendor page carries two figures. They answer different questions and neither is useful without the other.
The Standards Score is absolute. It is the 100-point total from the four layers above, measured against the complete standard described in section 7b. It does not move when other vendors change. It answers: how close is this vendor to what a research peptide supplier should document?
The star rating is relative. It places a vendor against the other vetted vendors in this directory. It answers the question a buyer actually has, which is not "is this vendor perfect" but "of the suppliers I can actually order from, where does this one stand?"
We publish both because either one alone misleads. A star rating on its own hides how far the category is from where it should be. A Standards Score on its own tells a reader nothing about which of eight real vendors to choose.
How the star rating is calculated
The Standards Score out of 100 converts to stars using fixed anchors:
Stars = 2.5 + 2.5 × (Standards Score − 30) ÷ 50
Rounded to one decimal place.
A score of 30 produces 2.5 stars. A score of 80 produces 5.0 stars. The anchors are fixed rather than set against the current directory, so a vendor's rating does not move because another vendor joined or left.
A Standards Score below 30 returns no star value. Where that happens we publish the Standards Score alone and state why.
The formula produces these thresholds. A vendor needs the Standards Score shown to reach each star value.
| Star rating | Standards Score required |
|---|---|
| 5.0 | 80 |
| 4.5 | 70 |
| 4.0 | 60 |
| 3.5 | 50 |
| 3.0 | 40 |
| 2.5 | 30 |
What a five-star vendor looks like
A five-star rating requires a Standards Score of 80. On the current criteria that means a vendor documenting the full core assay panel and most of the extended panel, publishing a per-lot certificate library that is independently verifiable at the issuing laboratory, using more than one named accredited laboratory, disclosing its ownership publicly, and carrying a clean community and regulatory record.
Why no vendor meets it yet
The highest Standards Score in our directory is 76, which is 4.8 stars.
No vendor currently combines comprehensive analytical documentation with full ownership disclosure. The vendors with the deepest testing tend to publish least about who owns them. The vendors with the clearest ownership tend to run narrower testing panels. A five-star rating requires both.
| Requirement | Already in practice somewhere in this directory |
|---|---|
| Active ISO/IEC 17025 accredited laboratory | Yes |
| Blind sample submission | Yes |
| Two independent laboratories | Yes |
| Certificates searchable on the laboratory's own domain | Yes |
| Named, publicly identifiable leadership | Yes |
| Heavy metals and dual-laboratory sterility testing | Yes |
| GMP contract manufacturing from an FDA-registered source | Yes |
This is a finding about the category, not a criticism of any one supplier. The standard is not theoretical and it is not out of reach. It describes a vendor that could exist as soon as one operator combines practices its competitors already run.
Directory entry requirements and disqualifiers
A vendor is not listed, regardless of any other score, where any of the following apply:
- No purity or identity documentation available at any level
- Therapeutic, curative, or human-use claims made in marketing
- Documented history of moving between corporate entities or domains without disclosure
- Refusal to identify the testing laboratory
Conflict of interest
Commission does not dictate ratings. We earn a commission when someone orders through our links. That commission plays no part in the criteria, the weightings, or any score.
The ranking is the evidence.
| Rank | Vendor | Standards Score | Stars | Full review |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peptidology | 76 | 4.8 | Peptidology review |
| 2 | Biolongevity Labs | 74 | 4.7 | Biolongevity Labs review |
| 3 | Ascension Peptides | 64 | 4.2 | Ascension Peptides review |
| 4 | BioEdge Research Labs | 62 | 4.1 | BioEdge Research Labs review |
| 5 | Limitless Biotech | 59 | 4.0 | Limitless Biotech review |
| 6 | Ameano Peptides | 45 | 3.2 | Ameano Peptides review |
| 7 | Apollo Peptide Sciences | 37 | 2.9 | Apollo Peptide Sciences review |
| 8 | CanLab International | 33 | 2.6 | CanLab International review |
Our two largest commercial relationships rank second and fifth, fifteen points apart. If revenue drove the scoring they would not sit on opposite sides of the table.
The highest-scoring vendor is not our largest partner. It leads on documentation: full marks on assay depth, two ISO 17025 accredited laboratories, a batch-level quality scorecard, and a code on the vial that resolves to the certificate for the lot in your hand.
Every score is checkable. Each vendor's page states which assays we observed, on which certificate, from which laboratory, on which batch. If you disagree with a score, open the same documents.
Where a score is low, the reason is specific and stated on that vendor's page. Three vendors score below 50, each for a different documentation reason: one publishes no reachable certificate, one publishes certificates on some products and not others, and one tests identity and purity without endotoxin, sterility or heavy metals.
Full scores and the evidence behind them are on each vendor's page, linked from the
peptide vendor directory.
Research Peptide Vendor FAQ
How is the Project Biohacking vendor rating calculated?
Each vendor is scored out of 100 points across four weighted layers: analytical documentation at 50%, ownership and accountability at 20%, commercial and operational factors at 20%, and community track record at 10%. That total is the Standards Score, and it converts to stars using fixed anchors where 30 produces 2.5 stars and 80 produces 5.0. Every component is listed on this page with its point value.
How much does purity affect the rating?
Purity does affect it, but less than most people expect. Identity and purity together earn 6 points of the 22 available for assay depth, because almost every vendor reports 99% or higher and a figure everyone shares cannot separate them. A further 5 points are available for how consistently results meet the vendor's own stated specification. The larger share of the score goes to what a vendor tests beyond purity: endotoxin, sterility, heavy metals, residual solvents and counterion content.
Do you test the products yourselves?
No. We evaluate vendors on documentation that can be independently verified: named testing laboratories, laboratory accreditation, certificate accessibility, and whether certificate identifiers can be checked on the testing laboratory's own site. We do not claim to independently test products from every vendor.
Why does your rating differ from a vendor's Trustpilot score?
The two measure different things. Review platform scores reflect how systematically a vendor solicits reviews as well as customer satisfaction. Our rating weights documented analytical testing at 50% and uses complaint data only after sorting complaints by root cause and comparing rates against the category baseline.
Does affiliate commission affect the ratings?
No. Commission is earned when someone orders through our links, it is disclosed on every page, and it plays no part in the criteria, the weightings or the scores. Our two largest commercial relationships rank second and fifth of eight. The vendor at the top of our table is not our largest partner. Every score is derived from documents anyone can open.
Why does a vendor have both a star rating and a Standards Score?
They measure different things. The Standards Score out of 100 is absolute: it compares a vendor against the full standard described in the star rating section, which no vendor in this directory currently meets. The star rating is relative: it places a vendor against the other vetted suppliers in this directory, which is the choice a buyer is actually making. Absolute ceilings prevent a high star rating where the Standards Score does not support it.
Why is no vendor rated five stars?
Five stars requires a Standards Score at the top of the published standard, and no supplier in this directory has reached it. Every individual requirement is already met by some vendor here, but none has assembled all of them. How the start rating is calculated section lists exactly what would be required.
Do these ratings mean a product is safe to use?
No. The rating assesses documentation quality, business accountability, and operational reliability. All products are research materials sold for laboratory use only and are not intended for human or veterinary use. Nothing here is medical advice.