Methodology
A price comparison site is only worth anything if you can tell where its numbers came from. Here is every rule we follow, including the ones that make the site look emptier than it could.
Two kinds of number, never mixed
PAID is a real person reporting what they actually spent. BENCHMARK is someone else’s published figure, with a citation and a label saying what it includes. These never go into the same average. A great deal of the confusion in this market comes from aggregators quietly blending the two.
Why a surgeon fee is not a price
Professional bodies publish “average fees” that exclude anesthesia, the operating room, pre-operative testing and garments. Those exclusions add roughly 40–50% to the number. Every benchmark on this site is tagged with its basis — surgeon fee only, surgeon plus facility, or all-in — so you can see when you are being shown half a price.
Small samples are suppressed
Below 5 reports we show the count and no median. Two reasons, both of which matter:
- A median of three numbers is an anecdote wearing a lab coat. Publishing it would make us exactly as useless as the pages we are trying to replace.
- Procedure plus region plus month is a narrow group. With two reports, a surgeon could identify who submitted.
Combined operations are excluded by default
A $24,000 tummy tuck that also included an arm lift and a breast lift is not a tummy tuck price. Reports flagged as combined operations are visible individually but kept out of single-procedure statistics unless you opt them in.
What “updated” means
A cost page and a procedure page show the date of the newest approved, single-procedure report in that scope. The date is a UTC calendar day. A correction takes the report off the public page until someone reviews it again, so the date moves when a public report changes. Benchmark tables keep their own as-of date, on the row, separate from this one.
Age flagging
Reports older than 36 months are shown with a visible date warning. Body contouring prices moved substantially after 2020 and a 2017 figure needs adjusting upward.
Where directory data comes from
Practice listings come from the Google Places API under licence, refreshed on a 30-day cycle, with Google’s own ratings attributed to Google. Price mentions we find in public discussion come through the official Reddit API, are capped at a short excerpt, and go into a human review queue — they are never published as if they were submissions and never counted in statistics.
What we refuse to do
- Scrape Google Reviews. It violates Google’s terms. We use the licensed API instead, even though it returns less.
- Seed the database with invented reports. The entire value of this site is that the numbers are real. We would rather launch looking sparse.
- Host surgeon complaints. We publish prices. Clinical grievances belong somewhere with a proper right of reply.
- Let money change a number. A practice can claim its directory profile. That lets them add a description we have checked. It does not alter, hide, or reorder a reported price, and the queue is not sorted to favour claimed practices. That is the line.