Who runs this

This site is written by one person based in Shanghai. Not an agency, not a booking platform, and not a clinic with a content team.

How this makes money

We take no commission, referral fee, or payment of any kind from any clinic or hospital. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page and on every page it affects, before you pay us anything.

The income is from people buying the guide, and from a small number of people who pay for a personalised shortlist or help coordinating appointments. That is the whole model. It means the incentive is to be right, not to be encouraging — if the guide tells you to come and the trip is a waste of your money, you tell other people, and the business is over.

Where the information comes from

In order of how much weight it carries, and honestly labelled as to what exists today:

• Government pricing documents and public hospital price lists. This is where almost everything on the site currently comes from — Shanghai's medical insurance bureau pricing rules, centrally procured implant prices, and hospitals' published fee schedules, read in Chinese and quoted down to the treatment code.
• Government sources for visa and entry policy. Immigration administration pages, embassy notices, State Council regulations.
• Phone calls and visits to clinics. This is the next thing being built, and it has not been done yet. When a figure comes from a call, it will say so and carry the date of the call. Until then, nothing on this site claims to.
• English-language reviews and forum reports. Used only as signal about what the patient experience is like — never as the source for a price.

Every figure carries the date it was last checked. Where a number is assembled from official pricing components rather than observed at a clinic, it is labelled as a model, not a quote. Where there is no source good enough, the site says it does not know — there are several places where it currently does.

What this is not

This site provides logistics, cost, and decision-support information only. It is not medical advice. Diagnosis and treatment decisions belong to a licensed dentist who has examined you in person.

We do not book your appointments behind the scenes and take a cut, we do not have preferred clinics, and we are not qualified to tell you what treatment you need. What we can do is tell you what things cost, how long they take, which door to walk through, and when to stay home.

Corrections and disagreements: hello@shanghaidentalnavigator.com. If something here is wrong, saying so publicly is the whole point of the model.