Sesame Care for ED: Pricing, How It Works, and Is It Actually Worth It

Most of the providers on this page built their business around one thing: getting you an ED prescription as fast as possible, from a provider they picked. Sesame Care works differently. It's a marketplace — founded in 2018, based in New York, backed by venture funding — where independent, licensed clinicians list their own availability and pricing, and you choose who you see. ED is one category among many on the platform, not the whole business.

That structural difference is the whole story here. Everything else — the price, the medication options, the experience — flows from the fact that you're picking a doctor from a marketplace, not signing up for a single company's funnel.

What Sesame Care Actually Is

Sesame is a telehealth marketplace, not a pharmacy or a single medical practice. The clinicians on the platform aren't Sesame employees — they're independent physicians and nurse practitioners who use Sesame to reach patients and set their own appointment pricing. Sesame's pitch is that cutting out insurance middlemen and letting providers compete on price gets you a visit for less than a typical urgent-care or primary-care copay.

For ED specifically, that means you're browsing a list of real clinicians — with their own profiles, ratings, and prices — rather than being routed to whichever provider a company has under contract.

How the ED Visit Works, Step by Step

1. Search by condition or provider type. Sesame's platform surfaces available clinicians who treat ED in your area, with same-day slots often visible before you book.
2. Compare price and availability before committing. This is the part that's genuinely different from most of the other providers on this page — you see the visit price upfront, not after an intake form.
3. Have a video visit. Most ED visits run around 15 minutes. You'll go over symptoms, medical history, and any relevant medications.
4. Get a prescription if appropriate. The clinician sends it to your local pharmacy or an online pharmacy for delivery, your choice.

What It Actually Costs

Because pricing is set provider-by-provider, there's a range rather than one fixed number — but ED visits on Sesame commonly start in the $34–$45 ballpark, well below a typical uninsured urgent-care or primary-care visit. That's the consultation fee only; medication is billed separately once it's prescribed and filled.

There's no subscription requirement. You pay for the visit you book. Sesame also offers an optional paid membership, Sesame Plus, that discounts future visits across the platform if you expect to use it more than once — worth it if you're also planning to use Sesame for hair loss or another category, less useful if this is a one-time ED visit.

Sesame doesn't accept insurance directly, but it will provide a receipt (a "superbill") you can submit to your insurer for possible out-of-network reimbursement. That's a meaningfully different model from providers who tell you upfront that insurance simply isn't part of the conversation.

What You Can Get Prescribed

Clinicians on Sesame can prescribe the standard PDE5 inhibitor lineup: sildenafil (generic Viagra), tadalafil (generic Cialis), and in some cases vardenafil or avanafil. These are the same FDA-approved active ingredients you'd get from a brand-name pharmacy, just without the brand markup — and without a compounding pharmacy in the loop.

The Marketplace Trade-Off

Choosing your own provider cuts both ways. The upside: you can price-shop, read a clinician's profile before booking, and often find same-day availability without waiting on a single company's intake queue. The downside: quality and bedside manner will vary by clinician, since they're independent practitioners rather than a single trained-and-branded team. If a fully standardized, one-provider experience matters more to you than picking your own doctor, a dedicated platform like BraveRX or a single-brand pharmacy like Healthymale will feel more consistent.