The parcel arrives, sometimes with ice packs, sometimes not. Nothing in the box explains how long the contents are good for, and the answer is not the one you are used to from a pharmacy shelf.
Compounded medicines do not carry an expiry date in the sense a manufactured drug does. They carry a beyond-use date, which is a different thing, set differently, and usually much sooner.
This applies to compounded NAD⁺ — the injections and nasal sprays written by a prescriber. Oral precursors bought as supplements are manufactured goods with an ordinary expiry date, and the rest of this page is not about them.
Expiry and beyond-use are not the same
An expiry date on a manufactured drug comes from stability testing on that exact formulation and packaging. A beyond-use date on a compounded preparation is assigned by the pharmacy under professional standards, without that product-specific testing behind it. It is a limit on how long the preparation is considered acceptable to use, and it is deliberately conservative.
Because it is assigned rather than tested, it is also shorter. Months, not years.
Which pharmacy made it matters here too, and 503A and 503B facilities work to different standards.
Two clocks, and the earlier one wins
One seller we cover publishes its policy explicitly: discard the vial 90 days after compounding, or 28 days after first puncture. Those are two separate limits and whichever arrives first is the one that applies.
The first clock matters more than it looks, because it does not start when you receive the vial. It starts when the pharmacy made it. A vial compounded two weeks before it shipped arrives with part of its life already spent, and nothing on the outside of the box tells you how much.
One seller addresses this directly and it is worth knowing such a policy exists: a beyond-use date of 90 days from compounding, with a guarantee of at least 60 days from arrival. That second half is the meaningful commitment — it transfers the shipping delay from you to them. It is also why their longer plans ship in two-month increments rather than sending six months at once, which is a real constraint dressed as an inconvenience.
What multi-month prepay actually buys
This is where storage stops being a technical detail and starts costing money. If a vial must be discarded 90 days after compounding, a seller cannot hand you a year of product in one box. So a twelve-month prepay plan is a commitment to twelve months of billing, not a delivery of twelve months of medicine.
Worth asking before you commit: how often does it ship, and what happens to the remaining months if you stop. A prepay ladder that looks like a discount is a subscription with the payments moved forward — see how those headline prices are built.
Cold chain, where anyone mentions it
Some products need refrigeration and some sellers say so. One tells you its nasal spray must ship two-day or overnight because it needs to stay cold. One supplement ships with ice packs and asks you to refrigerate on arrival. On one site the only clue that a product is temperature-sensitive is an instruction at checkout to refrigerate it — which is late to find out if you are having it delivered to an office.
A practical consequence nobody advertises: if a cold parcel sits on a doorstep through a hot afternoon, no one can tell you what that did. There is no test you can run at home. It is worth arranging delivery for a day you will be in.
How rare this information is
We looked for it across every seller we cover. 7 of 161 say anything at all about storage, shelf life or cold shipping.
That is the finding, and it is not a small one. This is a prescription product that arrives by post, and for most sellers the question of how long it lasts is simply not addressed anywhere a buyer can read before paying.
What to ask before you buy
- What is the beyond-use date, and does it run from compounding or from delivery?
- How many days will be left when it arrives?
- Does it need refrigerating, and how is it shipped?
- On a multi-month plan, how often does it actually ship?
- After the first puncture, how long is the vial good for?
A seller who can answer all five has thought about the product reaching you in usable condition. Our provider reviews note who publishes this and who does not, and the safety piece covers the risks that actually have evidence behind them.
One thing this page cannot do is tell you whether your own vial is still usable. That depends on the label it came with and the pharmacy that made it. If the date has passed or the parcel arrived warm, ask them rather than guessing.