Raspberry Pi price increases: Why this $260 kit is now the smartest buy

Raspberry Pi has announced another round of price increases as the rising cost of memory continues to impact its popular single-board computers. For IT professionals, developers, and enthusiasts planning new projects, higher prices make choosing the right hardware more complicated than ever.

The Raspberry Pi 5 8GB is currently listed for $199.95 on Amazon, but the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 5 Starter Kit Pro is just $60 more. It includes the same 8GB board, along with a case, cooling system, storage, power supply, and cables.

Raspberry Pi prices continue to rise

As memory costs have risen sharply over the past two years, the Raspberry Pi has been forced to increase prices to cover production costs. More recently, the price of the 2GB versions of the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 were increased to $67.50 and $77.50 respectively.

The price increases have led the company to encourage customers to think carefully about how much memory their projects actually require and to consider older hardware, including the Raspberry Pi 3B, 3A+ and 3B+, where the additional performance of newer models is not necessary.

The Raspberry 5 8GB features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, 8GB of LPDDR4X memory, and a VideoCore VII GPU. It includes dual micro-HDMI outputs capable of driving two 4K displays at 60 Hz, USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, wireless networking, and PCIe expansion support.

It sells for $199.95 on Amazon and although it sounds expensive, I found a better option. The Canakit Raspberry Pi 5 Starter Kit Pro costs $60 more and, in addition to the 8GB Raspberry Pi 5, includes a Turbine Black case, a low-noise cooling fan, a large aluminum heatsink, a USB-C power supply, two six-foot display cables, a microSD card reader, and a GPIO reference card. It also comes with a 128GB microSD card preloaded with the 64-bit Raspberry Pi operating system.

Is the CanaKit package a better value?

For just $60 more, the CanaKit bundle gives you everything you need to power, cool, protect, and start the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB computer, plus cables to connect displays.

The CanaKit package will not suit all projects. If you already have a compatible power supply, case, cooling and storage solution, purchasing the board separately will be the best and cheapest option. Additionally, if you plan to use NVMe storage, a specialized case, or a custom cooling system, purchasing those components individually will be the way to go.

That said, for enthusiasts and IT professionals who want to start a new Raspberry Pi 5 project without getting all the extras individually, the $259.99 CanaKit Starter Kit Pro is an easy recommendation.