How the numbers are made

The quote checker measures one thing: the gap between what a Seoul skin clinic quotes a patient who consults in Korean and what it quotes a patient who consults in another language, for the same treatment and quantity.

1. Local benchmarks

Each treatment has a Seoul median: what Korean consumers are offered. Every Monday we page through Gangnam Unni's listings for each treatment and keep Seoul clinics whose headline option names the product and the benchmark quantity (for example Ultherapy 300 lines, filler 1cc). Bundles, partial-area deals and imported-brand toxin are excluded, one price per clinic. The median needs at least 5 prices from 3 clinics; until then the treatment shows an estimate from published price guides, labelled as such.

These are event prices: many are first-visit or trial offers, and each sits next to the clinic's stated regular price, which we also record. Read how Korean clinic prices work before using them to judge a quote.

2. Quotes and receipts

Anyone can submit a quote. A submission with a photo is read by an AI vision model (clinic, treatment, quantity, price), and the reader’s confidence is stored with the row. Photos are kept in private storage and never published. A quote becomes verified only after a human confirms the photo shows the clinic name, the line item and the total. Typed-in quotes without a photo stay unverified.

The foreigner tax on a quote is quoted ÷ local median − 1. Site-wide medians use only quotes given in a non-Korean consultation. Korean-consultation quotes are kept as a control group.

3. Clinic checks

Every clinic named in a verified receipt is looked up in the KHIDI (Medical Korea) foreign-patient registry and the Korean Dermatological Association board (전문의) directory. Both results are shown on the clinic page as found / not found / not yet checked.

4. Verdicts

• Fair: within 15% of the local median.
• Tourist price: 15–50% above.
• Overcharged: more than 50% above.

5. What we don’t do

• We do not take money from clinics, and no clinic can pay to change or remove a quote.
• We do not store anything that identifies a submitter beyond a salted hash of their IP address, kept for abuse review.
• We do not rank clinics. We publish quotes and medians.

Current benchmarks

Exchange rate used for USD figures: 1 USD = ₩1,380. Data is published under CC BY 4.0: cite “Glow Lab” with a link.