About Seoul Cut
I run a global business. I spend much of the year in other people's countries, and my clients come to mine. When they land in Seoul I am the one who meets them, moves them around, and hears what went wrong — the card that would not top up, the app that only worked in Korean, the "ten-minute walk" that was three subway exits away.
I have been on the other side too. Seventy-plus countries, and the same thing in most of them: the information existed, it just was not written for someone like me.
Then there is the part that bothers me more. The clearest example I ever saw was not in Korea — it was a Korean toast shop in the Netherlands. The queue ran over an hour and I stood in all of it on purpose, because I wanted to know what was at the end. Everyone in that line was a foreign visitor. Not one Dutch customer, not one Korean. They had come from a clip on Instagram or Snapchat.
I have repeated that in a few other places since, and the pattern holds: what is being optimised is the clip, not the food. The customer being designed for comes once, photographs it, and never returns — so there is no second visit left to disappoint. A beautiful room is real skill and not the problem; the problem is when it is the entire product. Korea is not exempt, and it runs in both directions: abroad, foreigners queue for "Korean" food no Korean would recognise; here, foreigners queue outside places most Koreans have never heard of and would not think to try.
Both fail the same quick test, and it is the one I now use everywhere: look at whether the people who live there are eating there too. It is not perfect — some genuinely good places get discovered and stay good — but it is the fastest read available while you are still standing outside deciding.
So a fair share of what this site does is subtraction: taking the marketing off something and reporting what is actually underneath. Not the polished version of Korea — the inside of it, put in front of anyone who wants it, free.
Who writes this
One person, anonymously. Not for mystique: who I am should not be the reason you trust a fare estimate. How that number got onto the page should be. For the record — twenty years of trade work across Europe and Asia, Korea as home base. Everything else you need in order to judge this site is in the rules below.
How a guide gets made
Topics come from real friction, not keyword tools — something a visitor struggled with in front of me, or something that tripped me up abroad.
Facts are checked against primary sources: ministries, city agencies, transit operators, the organisation that actually sets the price. When official sources contradict each other, which happens often, the guide says so instead of quietly picking the tidier one.
Where nothing is published, I ask people who work inside the process — and the guide tells you that is where it came from.
What cannot be verified is marked, not smoothed over. You will see the labels: verified, published estimate, confirm on-site. A guide that presents a guess as fact is worse than one that admits its edges.
Dates mean something. If a guide says it was verified on a date, it was re-checked against the source that day.
Two speeds
Articles go up when they are finished, not on a schedule — some weeks several, some weeks none. This is not a content business; it is a side effect of a working one, and the working one comes first. What never gets cut for time is the sourcing.
Guides take as long as they take, because being wrong there costs you money: a health screening as a foreign patient, registering a company, signing a lease in a rental system that works nothing like the one at home. Each is built from Korean statutes and published fee schedules, taken to people who handle that process professionally, then re-checked — and then read once more from the outside. Which step assumes a resident registration number you do not have. Which form exists only in Korean. Where a foreign applicant stalls with nobody explaining why. That last pass is the slow one, and a guide written from the inside never has to make it.
What this site does not do
- No sponsored placements, ever. Not a temporary position while the site is small. A sponsor is someone you have to keep happy, and the moment there is anyone to keep happy other than the reader, the recommendations stop being worth reading.
- No affiliate-driven recommendations. Nothing is recommended because someone pays per click.
- No stock photography. If there is a photo of a place, it is that place.
- No invented detail. Prices, addresses and hours come from a source, or they do not go in.
The paid guides
I write and sell a small set of PDF guides. That is the only commercial relationship on this site, and it is mine.
The free articles are not teasers. Several run past eight thousand words with every figure sourced — open one and check. Nothing is held back from an article to make a paid guide look necessary.
The guides go deeper, and that is what the price is for: weeks of statute work and conversations with practitioners, on subjects that in most cases have never been assembled in English in one place. The rule I write them to is concrete. A guide has to be worth at least twice what it cost, the first time you use it — measured in what it saves you. One wrong hospital package, one filing submitted twice, one fare you never needed to pay. If it cannot clear that, it does not get published at that price.
Corrections
seoulcut.official@gmail.com — corrections are genuinely welcome. If a price moved or a rule changed, tell me. I would rather fix it than leave it sitting there being wrong.
