Raspberry Pi has put another $80 on its 16GB Raspberry Pi 5, which now sells for $385, more than three times what it cost at launch.
The increase, announced by the company's chief executive Eben Upton and reported by The Register, also adds $40 to the 16GB Compute Module 5 variants. The Raspberry Pi 500+, which carries the same amount of memory, escaped this particular round.
"Unfortunately, a lack of alternative supply for 16GB DRAM, compounded by other ongoing component shortages, means we now need to make further price increases on some of our highest-density products," Upton wrote.
The 16GB Pi 5 cost $120 when it launched in January 2025. Raspberry Pi added $25 in December, $60 in February and $100 in April. With this week's $80, buyers are being asked for $265 more than they were less than two years ago, an increase of 221 per cent.
It is barely a month since the company raised prices on its 2GB Pi 4 and Pi 5 boards by $12.50 each, taking them to $67.50 and $77.50 respectively.
The increases come despite record first-half results reported in September, when revenue jumped 90 per cent to $256.9 million and gross profit rose 79 per cent to $59.4 million. Gross profit per board climbed 53 per cent to $12.20, helped in part by memory bought before prices rose. That stockpile advantage has since largely disappeared.
Raspberry Pi says the increases are temporary. "As we've said from the beginning, the current memory landscape is difficult but ultimately temporary, and we look forward to rolling back our price increases when memory costs fall once again," Upton wrote. Micron has previously warned that memory shortages could drag on into 2028 or beyond.
For customers unwilling to pay nearly $400 for a single-board computer, Upton's advice is to buy something with less RAM, use an older Pi, or optimise applications to make do with less memory.
That advice is the most useful specification the company has published this year. Of the $385 now being asked, $265 is the amount by which the board has become more expensive while remaining the same board. The remaining $120 is the computer.
This newspaper has followed the guidance to its conclusion. If the way to avoid paying for memory is to need less of it, then the price of a Raspberry Pi is no longer a property of the hardware. It is a measure of how much memory the buyer has declined to require.
The product line reads accordingly. The 2GB Pi 5 costs $77.50 and asks for very little. The 16GB Pi 5 costs $385 and asks for a great deal. Between them runs a smooth scale of renunciation, priced per gigabyte unwanted.
Buying an older Pi works on the same principle in reverse. The board has not improved; the memory market has deteriorated around it, which has the effect of an upgrade on the invoice and none whatever on the specification.
The Department of Unnecessary Research endorses the optimisation route without reservation, and notes that a sufficiently well-optimised application requires no memory at all. At that point the recommended Raspberry Pi is the one the customer did not buy, available now at a saving of $385.