More memory-driven price rises
Two months ago, we announced increases to the prices of some Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 products. These were driven by an unprecedented rise in the cost of LPDDR4 memory, thanks to competition for memory fab capacity from the AI infrastructure roll-out.
Price rises have accelerated as we enter 2026, and the cost of some parts has more than doubled over the last quarter. As a result, we now need to make further increases to our own pricing, affecting all Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, and Compute Module 4 and 5, products that have 2GB or more of memory.
| Memory density | Price increase |
| 1GB | – |
| 2GB | $10 |
| 4GB | $15 |
| 8GB | $30 |
| 16GB | $60 |
Raspberry Pi 500 and 500+ are affected, but not Raspberry Pi 400, which remains our lowest-cost all-in-one PC at $60. We have also been able to protect the pricing of 1GB products, including the $35 1GB Raspberry Pi 4 variant, and the $45 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 variant that we launched in December.
We don’t anticipate any changes to the price of Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 3, and other older products, as we currently hold several years’ inventory of the LPDDR2 memory that they use.
Looking ahead
2026 looks likely to be another challenging year for memory pricing, but we are working hard to limit the impact. We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: the current situation is ultimately a temporary one, and we look forward to unwinding these price increases once it abates.
35 comments
Jump to the comment form
Liam
When will the prices go up, or has this already happened for new orders? I assume it’ll take a bit of time to filter through to all the resellers.
Anders
My usual suppliers in the UK have already raised the prices, but I noticed CPC as I write this are still at the January price so I have grabbed a couple.
Jeff Newbill
As you probably already found out, you’re too late.
a ham radio d00d
I purchased a 500+ from Micro Center here in Phoenix, Arizona (freshly opened a few months back) at a still $199 price to lock it in expecting this to happen: just 2 days later, here’s the announcement! A friend just bought parts to assemble a new PC and he definitely paid way too much compared to even 6 months ago. The promised eye-watering price increases not only in DRAM but SSD NAND is on full display, and seems to hit harder when looking at them in person vs online, at least for me. The 16GB Pi-5 was on sale for $140, but they said they change prices every month so it might be $200 this morning!
Sigh, this ridiculous bubble can’t burst fast enough!
Smalldog602
I was at MicroCenter in Phoenix yesterday too, and I was shocked at the price of the 16gb RPi 5’s. I went back online this morning thinking I might get a couple and saw that they were $199.. I went into incognito mode thinking that maybe their system caught up to all of the $99 RPi 5’s that I bought since their grand opening when it was limit 1 per household.
After all of the RAM prices eventually come back down, I seriously doubt that we’ll see those changed flow through to consumers.
I wonder how these price hikes impact the people that wanted to build an inexpensive SBC using a Raspberry Pi? It’s a shame to see retailers and distributors with current stock sticking it to us when they didn’t suffer the higher cost.
Thepikid
I love your optimism , but prices don’t ever come back down when corporate greed is involved… recent historical citations beer, milk, eggs, gas, gpus… just highlighting the more important ones
Russell
I’m not happy about it either, and perhaps RAM will not come back down soon, or ever. I’ve never seen beer prices retreat. But eggs and gasoline have, at least in the USA. So let’s not paint too broad of a brush.
Jeff Geerling
Note that Raspberry Pi has, indeed, lowered prices once or twice in response to component prices falling in the past. I imagine they also like to have competitive prices (while maintaining a useful margin to fund their business). Priced too high relative to any competition, they are not attractive anymore.
Right now prices are rising across the board, even on used hardware :(
Raspberry Pi Staff Helen Lynn
That last line is there because we mean it; we’ve done it before. Time will tell.
Rich
Resellers have to follow the RRP set by Raspberry Pi, so your assumption is incorrect.
Rob
makes the RPI 400 seems a bargain (and cheaper than the RPI 4). Maybe one day you can release an 8GB RPI 400 to fill the gap when prices stablise.
Annoyingly I thought about purchasing an RPI 500 last week!!
mrlinux2u
As I’ve mentioned previously regarding the current ‘AI’ madness the sooner all ‘AI’ (and all large corporations promoting the latest snake oil) is sucked into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy the better :D
Gareth Qually
I managed to pick up a bundle from Pimoroni at the old price. Pihut has updated theirs already. Was planing on getting the 500+ later in the year, but I guess I get my new toy early!!
Ray Allen
Lets hope its going to burst soon, this AI is good but not the AI they want to push us into. Its affecting many aspects of normal life now. Been saving for the Pi500+ and checking this morning the 500+ (not desktop kit) is now just a smidge under $400 CND sadly I need to put that on hold for now. Hope it does not hurt Pi too much.
Thepikid
I mean let’s just stop playing and make variants that take sodimms already… if the whole thing could at one time be assembled on a sodimm then I mean surely someone could just put a so dimm variant out … I think everyone forgot the original purpose of this now company then project. To serve the under served and out computers in the hands of the next generation who would have an affordable usable computing platform… all this smells like now is consumer conformist bologna. The thing doesn’t even compete against its competitors at this point. People buy the brand. It’s the Nike of sbc … good job Eben, we are glad you made it… now return to the smart guy who made something we love and make something else we love.
Anders
No, there is no price increase on 1GB variant, the Pi4 is still $35 and the Pi5 $45. This is probably subsidised by the higher RAM variants, so they obviously haven’t forgotten anything.
James Hughes
The SOC does not support SODIMMS, it’s not just a matter of slapping a connector on the board (and…where?). As for the customer base – we’ve sold 70% or more devices of our devices to industry for at least 7 years. And those sales mean we can keep prioces low for everyone else. Did you know that we do not give quantity discounts or have industrial prices? Everyone pays the same. As for competitors – they are going to struggle with price rises as well, no-one gets a free pass on this one. Apple have already pushed up prices, expect EVERYONE to follow.
YKN
😭😭😭 Raspberry pi needs to make their own ram at this point.
W. H. Heydt
A fab for making DRAM chips costs multiple BILLIONS of dollars. Then you have to add the packaging facility.
RPT is much too small a frog to play in that pond. (Many MAJOR electronics companies are “fabless”, starting with AMD.)
There is one bright spot–besides the hope that AI is a bubble and will burst. There are a lot of new fabs that will be coming on-line in the next 2 to 4 years. What drives down DRAM prices is when the there is an oversupply in the market. New fabs means more supply…
HankB
> … the hope that AI is a bubble and will burst.
I’m a little circumspect about that. Aside from the aspect that LLMs are likely to be useful for a wide range of tasks, a “burst” may result in impact to many other parts of our economy. I much prefer that the bubble deflate gently and not otherwise wreak havoc.
Russell1872
For new projects that will require a new SBC, it’s a good time to learn the command line. You can do a lot with a Pi Zero (or 3B/3B+) if you can live without the GUI. Too bad modern computing is so dependent on the bloated web and other memory hogs.
Chris Audley
Any chance of 1GB CM5s please? Some of us still know how to roll minimal (and atomic) distros and we have hundreds of these units out there using only a few hundred megs of RAM – 2GB has always seemed a bit overkill, but the CM4 has too much of a performance deficit to fallback to that!
Archisman Panigrahi
A few years ago (at least until 2019), the 1GB RAM models worked quite well with Raspberry Pi OS, but nowadays, they lag considerably when a browser is opened, and also for other functions. Could you tweak Raspberry Pi OS so that even those models with less RAM perform reasonably well? Then we would not need so much memory, at least, not for basic tasks.
Steven Blackburn
Ditto. We had to stop using rpi3b a couple of years ago for a code club as scratch via the browser was painful to use… Often would lock up when a couple of people selected a sprite at the same time.
Perhaps the memory squeeze will encourage a focus on lower memory usage… Linux used to run in a few megabytes! Or perhaps expanded uses of micro controllers!
Anders
There are still Linux distributions and kernels which are setup for minimal hardware.
James Hughes
The OS does use a bit more RAM nowadays, but its not a huge increase, and the desktop is pretty well optimised. This is really down to browsers, they are massive memory hogs, and we don’t have much influence on the providers, but just maybe they will realise that getting memory requriements down might be a good thing to do.
Steven
Indeed. The browser is the likely elephant in the room. I did consider trying the native desktop scratch application, although there is chance it is just a browser in disguise… and might have found out for myself if only it offered cloud saves (due to seats changing each time, and supporting out-of-club progress).
Russell
The web browser may be the worst offender, by a considerable distance, but last year I found that the 3B/3B+ models were too painfully slow running 64-bit GUI desktop (RPi OS) even without the browser. Had I not sold the Pi on, I felt my main choices were to run RPi OS Lite (no GUI) or RISC OS Open – and focus browser internet usage on the “small web” – Gopher, Gemini (protocol), and lean websites (text-based, or no javascript). Many common websites are just too bloated these days.
Harry Hardjono
Maybe 1GB PiZeroW is the answer. With LXDE running Epiphany browser.
Nic
Chip labs in [country of your choice] don’t want you to know this clever secret…
A recent study of a data center with six servers concluded that if everyone in the world stopped using AI for ONE DAY, prices of memory would drop by nearly $0.50. Imagine that, for everyday that we stop using AI, memory gets half a dollar cheaper. After a couple of weeks, memory would really really affordable and YOU can do your bit to make the change happen.
Even more stunning is that if everyone stopped using AI for one day, it would save an estimate 1 billion GWh of electrical energy. That is enough power to supply all the homes in Sydney for two weeks. Or to charge your Tesla 1,000 million times. That is a lot of electricity.
* This study was done using estimates based on a disused bitcoin mining facility from 2016 and no calculations were involved.
Olydnad_SWE
I want people to quit AI ;). I myself have only tried a few times. Nothing for me!
However, I’m lucky I bought up about ten Raspberry Pi 5s, and around five CM5s before the worst happened. Prices are absolutely crazy now :/.
rclark
Ouch. Sorry to hear of the price raising… Wish the AI stuff would just go away. Going to hurt sales… Don’t know why tech is ‘pushing’ so hard…
Glad I have several extra SBCs around now. Looks like about 4 RPI-5s in the wings waiting for a project. I just put new retro keys on my RPI-500+ for fun and have an older RPI-500 and RPI-400 also waiting to be used. So I am ‘saturated’ for the time being. And plenty of RP2350 and RP2040 boards around too….
Pierre
Well I was trying to buy a Pi 5 4GB on Sunday from West of Canada, and it was not available at Digikey for $101. After an order for Pi4, 25(!) Pi5 were available on Monday. Today, elastic price jumped to $122, but there are none at Digikey, Lees Electronics, BC robotics, Robotshop. Only stock is at pishop.
Good luck.
crumble
There shall be now Pi 4 boards with 2 RAM chips.
Will we get Pi 5 with dual channel? And 32GB as soon as memory prices drop?
If you still ask why? LLMs :)
The 16GB models seems to work best with the CPU and memory speed of a Pi 5. But free mem for additional tasks will be nice.
C-C-Hsu
Running OS with zram/zswap can effectively extend available RAM on memory-limited models.
Maybe this can help all of us to live a little better in this RAM shortage time.