RAM Price Index

We track the same basket of desktop RAM kits month over month and measure how much its price actually changed — a new kit entering or leaving the catalog doesn't move the index, only a price change on a kit we can see in two consecutive months does. Each period is set relative to Sep 2025, which we fixed at 100.

The index comes in three flavors, all shown above, and they don't all measure the same thing. The median price and lowest listed price (a proxy for the best deal available, not the typical one) are both matched-model: same basket, month over month, as described above. The median $/GB is different by design — it's the median cost per gigabyte across every kit priced that month, not just the ones we can match to the prior month. That makes it sensitive to the catalog's capacity mix in a way the other two deliberately aren't: it answers "what does a gigabyte typically cost right now," not "how much did prices on a fixed basket move."

For $/GB, lower is better for a buyer. For the two dollar-price series, lower is also better — a rising index means RAM got more expensive over that period, full stop.

Every listing we can't reliably price for a given month, or that doesn't appear in both the current and prior month, is left out of that month's calculation rather than guessed at. The full math — winsorization, minimum-listing and minimum-basket thresholds, and why — is on the methodology page.