This May, thedigital search company JustAnswer made an odd pivot: It started selling weight loss drugs. Launching an online pharmacy to peddle GLP-1s wasn’t the obvious next step for a business that offers paid guidance from experts, but chief executive Andy Kurtzig says the decision was partly driven by advice from ChatGPT and partly by avid customer interest. The number of queries related to the drugs more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, he says.

Plus, it was easy to find help: A company called WhiteLabelMD handles customer service, provides software, and connects patients with clinicians who prescribe drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide. “We wouldn’t have gotten into this if we had to build it all from scratch,” Kurtzig says.

JustAnswer is part of a growing movement of newbie virtual clinic owners who rely on so-called turnkey telehealth services to jump-start their medical brands. These middlemen do the grunt work, from finding rosters of doctors and nurses to ensuring regulatory compliance. Instead of starting a complex health business from the ground up, prospective clients can purchase ready-built software and infrastructure and get started quickly—sometimes shockingly quickly. Fuse Health, a newer turnkey startup specializing in peptides, boasts that it can help brands go live in three hours. “Yes, we timed it,” its website reads.

Like JustAnswer, some of these newbie telehealth offerings come from companies that are already established in other fields. The gay dating app Grindr launched a telehealth arm, Woodwork, in 2025; it uses OpenLoop, a major turnkey business, to supply erectile dysfunction medication, the peptide Sermorelin, and GLP-1 drugs. But the rise of turnkeys also means that pretty much anyone with a website and some money can get in on the game.

“Anybody can now get into telehealth because of infrastructure companies like ours,” says Jiten Chhabra, the chief medical officer of another leading turnkey firm, CareValidate, who describes this as an era of “telehealth for everything.” CareValidate has created topic-specific guides for clients who want to jump into especially popular verticals, including GLP-1s, peptides, prescription skin care, and hormone replacement therapy. Chhabra says the company often works with fitness centers, gyms, and other health-related brands, including Bodybuilding.com. But it also works with nontraditional clients, including a cosmetics brand and a company that rents out chairs to hairdressers.

One client with a digital marketing background decided to operate a virtual clinic for onychomycosis—toe fungus. “They don’t have any clinical experience, but they know that there’s demand online, people searching for prescription medication for toe fungus,” Chhabra says.

The rate at which new brands are launching, he says, is astronomical. “At minimum, we launch one a day.”

“It’s going to change the game,” says Scott Roth, the chief executive of LegitScript, a company that provides certifications for telehealth providers and pharmacies. “Anyone who has an audience could potentially get into this—a gym, an influencer, you name it.” Some influencers have already jumped in. Reality television star and MAGA podcaster Savannah Chrisley started Good Girl RX, focused on GLP-1, in 2025; in its terms of service, it references connecting patients with providers from Beluga Health, another turnkey company.

So, how many of these companies are there? It’s difficult to say: The FDA doesn’t require registration, and the explosive growth is hard to keep up with. Sabina Hemmi, the cofounder and chief executive of the GLP-1 provider comparison startup GLP Winner, says she no longer even attempts to track new startups, because there are simply too many.

“We’re seeing a lot of vibe-coded sites,” she says. “There’s been a rise of what I call ‘marketing bros’ getting into the space.” These operators see an opportunity for profit but have no background or interest in the medicine or customer experience, she says. She calls it the “Temu experience of telehealth,” a reference to the notoriously ersatz Chinese ecommerce giant.

The GLP-1 clinic Medvi used turnkey companies to propel itself to over $400 million in sales in 2025 without ever hiring anyone who worked in health care. (Its founder is an entrepreneur who had previously worked in wristwatch-focused ecommerce.) A buzzy New York Times profile touted its achievements, but also sparked conversation about issues related to how it was marketed, including a February Food and Drug Administration warning letter addressed to the company. (Medvi has claimed the letter was intended for an affiliate marketer.) It was also the subject of an April class action lawsuit alleging the company violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and has an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau. Medvi did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment.

Chrisley, too, has a dearth of previous health care experience, and GoodGirlRX has had some growing pains: It received a warning letter from the FDA—which has recently started taking a more aggressive approach to the compounded weight loss space—for allegedly making “false or misleading” claims about its products. GoodGirlRX did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

There’s a wide spectrum in quality for virtual clinics, and it can be difficult for regular people to tell which ones provide robust support and which ones are doing the bare minimum. Two different clinics will offer “nutrition support,” Hemmi says, but one will offer unlimited phone calls with registered dieticians, while the other will simply email along “an AI slop PDF” on what to eat and call it a day. “To me, those are two completely different standards of care,” she says.

For consumers looking for help if things go wrong, clinics using turnkeys may not provide answers—or be on the hook—because they don’t actually employ the prescribing clinicians. A person would typically sue the clinician rather than the clinic, says Brown University chair of health services, policy, and practice Ateev Mehrotra, who studies telemedicine. “It’s on the clinician, but I wouldn't be surprised in the coming years, because they're pushing the boundaries, that lawsuits might actually go after the companies—but we haven't seen it so far.”

Using a turnkey service doesn’t necessarily connote a lack of quality—many trustworthy, thoughtfully designed telehealth platforms use them, too. Roth says that while they can draw in people without any experience in health care, these companies also provide a scaffolding to help clients “do it the right way.”

JustAnswer—which is separately facing an ongoing lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission over its subscription enrollment practices on the question-and-answer side—plans to further expand its pharmacy business. (Kurtzig declined to provide sales figures.)

This month, OpenLoop debuted a service called Launchpad, which is aimed at businesses and individual creators without experience in the space. To start, it allows customers to open virtual clinics for erectile dysfunction medications, hair loss and hormone therapies, “metabolic cellular optimization,” and weight loss drugs.

Within days of launching, the company says it heard from nearly 50 prospective customers.