Why this site exists
Most Thailand advice online is either written by people who spent two weeks here, or copied from guides that were out of date before the pandemic. Prices have moved sharply since 2020. Visa rules change several times a year — sometimes with a fortnight's notice. Yet the same "live in Thailand on $500 a month" claims keep circulating, and people plan real moves around them.
ThaiNiverse exists to give numbers and rules you can actually plan around: calculators built from current prices, visa guidance checked against Thai government sources rather than against other blogs, and a date on every page so you can see for yourself how fresh it is.
Who I am
I'm Moris. I'm Polish, I live in Chiang Mai, and my three children were all born in Thailand.
My connection to this country goes back about two decades, though not as one unbroken stretch — there have been stretches in Europe in between. I've been arriving in, leaving, and coming back to Thailand for most of my adult life, and I'm here full-time again now. I'd rather describe that accurately than round it up into something tidier. It's a different kind of knowledge than two decades of continuous residence: less "I remember when Nimman was rice fields", more knowing what it costs to raise children here, which hospital to drive to at 2am, and how a family's paperwork actually works when it's your own family.
That family is the reason most of this exists. Choosing schools, working out what a month really costs once you're feeding five people rather than one, deciding whether a place is somewhere you visit or somewhere you build a life — those questions produced the calculators on this site long before they were a website. The other reason is simpler: I love it here. The north in cool season, the food, the way Thai culture handles things that Europe handles badly. Twenty years on I still find it interesting, which is not something I can say about everywhere I've lived.
I build websites for a living. That's why ThaiNiverse is mostly tools rather than essays — when I couldn't find a cost calculator that used real current prices, building one was the obvious move.
What I'm not
This matters as much as the rest, so I'd rather say it plainly than bury it:
- I'm not a lawyer, immigration agent or tax adviser. Nothing here is legal or financial advice, and I have no professional qualification in any of it.
- I'm in Thailand on a family-based visa, not the DTV. Most readers of this site are weighing up the DTV, and I haven't personally been through that application. So the DTV pages here are built on official Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents and embassy checklists, cited on the page, rather than on "trust me, I live here." I think that's the honest way round — and it's why those pages carry review dates.
- I know the north far better than the south. Chiang Mai is home. The island and beach content is researched carefully, but if you want someone who has lived on Koh Phangan for a decade, that isn't me.
- I'm not neutral about Thailand. I chose it, repeatedly. I try to keep that from colouring the numbers, which is why the calculators lean pessimistic rather than optimistic.
How the information here is produced
- Costs come from current local prices and from actually living on them, not from averaging other websites. Where a figure is a range, that reflects real variation between neighbourhoods and lifestyles rather than hedging.
- Visa information is checked against the Thai e-Visa portal and Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents, which are linked on the page so you can check them yourself. Every visa page carries the date it was last checked and the date of its next scheduled review.
- When rules change, affected pages are updated and the change is logged on the page — not quietly edited so it looks like it always said that.
- When something is uncertain — a rule that's approved but not yet in force, a requirement that varies by embassy — it's stated as uncertain. A lot of Thailand advice fails precisely by sounding more certain than the situation warrants.
Immigration officers and embassies apply rules with discretion, and requirements differ depending on where you apply. Confirm anything that matters with the embassy or consulate you'll actually use.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I want to know — particularly on the visa pages. Email hello@thainiverse.com or use the contact page. Verified errors are corrected promptly and recorded in the change log on the affected page, with the date. I'd rather be publicly corrected than quietly wrong.
The other sites
ThaiNiverse is the hub. These cover specific ground in more depth:
- TopMuayThai.com — training camps and Muay Thai in Thailand
- ChiangMaiCookery.com — Thai cooking classes and food
- ElledeeTravel.com — travel planning