How we work out what a unit costs
A price map is only worth anything if the numbers on it mean the same thing. Three things get in the way of that, and each one is handled explicitly rather than averaged away.
A Dysport unit is not a Botox unit
Dysport is dosed in smaller units — roughly two and a half of them to one Botox unit, anchored to the FDA glabellar labelling where 20 units of Botox and 50 of Dysport are the equivalent dose. A clinic advertising “$5 a unit” for Dysport is not undercutting the $12 clinic down the road; it is charging about the same. Put those two numbers on one map without converting and the map is actively lying.
So every price is converted to a Botox-equivalent unit before it is compared to anything.
Plenty of clinics don't price by the unit at all
Many publish a flat price per treatment area — “$260 for crow’s feet” — which cannot be compared to a per-unit rate without assuming how many units that area typically takes. We do make that assumption, using a table of typical doses per area, and we mark every price derived that way as estimated and dock its confidence.
We refuse the conversion entirely below ten units. A lip flip or a chin is small enough that dividing out a flat fee produces a number with no useful meaning.
This matters more than it sounds. The lowest number in the Boston set is an estimate, not a published rate — which is exactly why the estimate is labelled everywhere it appears instead of being quietly allowed to top the list.
A headline price can't blend tiers
When a clinic publishes several prices we take the best-quality tier available and never mix tiers together: a standing per-unit rate beats a member or promotional rate, which beats a per-area estimate. Within that one tier we take the median.
Averaging across tiers is how “$120 for a treatment” quietly becomes a bogus “$30 a unit” headline.
Where the numbers come from
Public pages. We read 3,142 pages across 911 clinic websites in the Boston metro and found published, comparable pricing at 93 of them. The rest mostly don’t post prices at all.
Every price keeps the sentence it came from, the URL, and the date we read it, and you can see all of that on any clinic’s page. We crawl politely — robots.txt is honoured, one request at a time per site — because these businesses are neighbours, not targets.
No clinic pays to be listed and no clinic can pay to appear cheaper. Sponsorship, when we sell it, buys a richer listing and a badge. It never touches a price or a ranking. If it ever did, the index would be worthless and so would the sponsorship.
When we're wrong
Prices change and pages get stale. We re-read every site weekly, but the fastest correction is someone telling us. Nothing submitted goes straight onto the map — it lands in a queue and gets checked against the clinic’s own page first.
Common questions
- How much does Botox cost in Boston?
- Across the clinics in this index that publish comparable pricing, the median is $13 per Botox-equivalent unit, with half the market between $11 and $15. A typical forehead and frown-line treatment runs 20 to 40 units, so most people are looking at roughly $260 to $520 per session at median pricing.
- Why is one clinic $9 a unit and another $28?
- Price per unit reflects who injects, where they practise, what they paid for product, and how they compete locally. We deliberately do not claim that a more expensive unit is a better one — we have price data, not outcome data, and pretending otherwise would be the same overreach we built this to avoid.
- Is a cheap price per unit a red flag?
- It can be, because a unit is only a fixed quantity if the product is reconstituted to the standard dilution. A heavily diluted unit costs less and does less. We cannot detect dilution from a published price, so we do not try to — we show what is advertised, and the basis it was advertised on.
- Why do some clinics show no price?
- Most clinics in the registry do not publish pricing anywhere public. We would rather show them as unpriced than guess. If you know what one charges, tell us and we will check it.
- Are these prices current?
- Every clinic page shows the date we last read its pricing. We re-crawl weekly, but a clinic can change a price without changing its page, so always confirm before booking.
Questions about the method? hello@toxfinder.com · Back to the map