Raspberry Pi price hike: the 16GB Pi 5 now costs $385

Remember when the whole pitch of the Raspberry Pi was “a real computer for the price of a textbook”? Yeah. About that. The latest Raspberry Pi price hike just landed, and the 16GB Pi 5 now sells for $385. Not a typo. Three hundred and eighty-five dollars for a board that launched at $120 in January 2025.

Eben Upton announced the bump on the official blog, and the explanation is the one you’ve heard everywhere this year: memory. “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,” he wrote. The 16GB Compute Module 5 takes a $40 hit too, up to $425. The Pi 500+ keyboard computer is spared this round, which is easy when it already costs $485.

Raspberry Pi price hike, round five

What gets me isn’t one increase, it’s the rhythm. The Register did the maths: $25 added in December, $60 in February, $100 in April, and now $80. That’s $265 piled onto the 16GB board in under two years, a 221 percent increase. And this comes barely a month after the 2GB Pi 4 and Pi 5 each went up by $12.50, to $67.50 and $77.50.

Put those two numbers side by side. The gap between the 2GB and 16GB Pi 5 is now more than $300. Same SoC, same board, same tiny box. The only thing that changed is 14 gigabytes of DRAM, and that’s apparently worth more than a decent mini PC.

Which is exactly the problem. For $385 you can buy an N100 or N150 mini PC with 16GB of RAM, an NVMe slot and a case, with change left over. You lose the GPIO pins and the cute form factor, sure. But if you were planning to run Home Assistant, a Pi-hole, a little media server or a Kubernetes toy cluster, the Pi stopped being the obvious answer a while ago. The 16GB model was always the niche one, I’ll give them that, but $385 moves it from “niche” to “why does this exist”.

Record profits, higher prices

Here’s the bit that makes the “we’re all suffering together” tone a little harder to swallow. In September, Raspberry Pi reported a record first half: revenue up 90 percent to $256.9 million, gross profit up 79 percent, and gross profit per board up 53 percent to $12.20. Part of that came from memory bought before prices exploded, and that stockpile is now gone, so I won’t pretend the squeeze isn’t real. It is. Micron has already warned that the shortage could drag into 2028 or later.

Upton insists the increases are “ultimately temporary” and promises to roll them back when memory costs fall. I’d love to believe that. I’ve just never seen a tech price go down as fast as it went up, and “when memory costs fall” could easily mean the Pi 6 is out by then and nobody cares about the Pi 5 anymore.

He also warned about “bad actors” selling Pis at inflated prices or shipping boards that aren’t what they claim to be. When the official price is $385, the line between a scalper and an approved reseller gets philosophically thin, but fine: buy from the official list or don’t buy at all.

What I’d actually do

Raspberry Pi’s own advice is honest, if unglamorous: buy less RAM, use an older Pi, or make your software fit. For most homelab stuff, a 4GB or 8GB Pi 5 is still plenty, and a used Pi 4 off a classifieds site will run a surprising amount of things. For sensors and small automation, the Pico and the ESP32 crowd are eating the low end for a reason, they cost a coffee. And if you want 16GB and a real desktop feel, a mini PC is simply the better deal right now, no matter how much it hurts the maker in me to say it.

The Pi was born as a protest against expensive computing. At $385, it’s starting to look like the thing it was protesting.