There was a time when telling someone the price of a Raspberry Pi was a punchline about how cheap computing had become. That time is over. The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 now sells for $305, and no, that’s not a typo, and it’s not a kit with a keyboard and monitor bundled in. That’s the price of the bare board.

A machine that was supposed to democratize computing has quietly turned into something you have to think twice about buying, and honestly, that should bother anyone who cares about accessible hardware.

Four price hikes in fifteen months, same silicon

$120 to $305, and nothing on the board actually changed

The 16GB Pi 5 launched in January 2025 at $120, which already raised a few eyebrows because it was $40 more than the 8GB model for nothing but extra memory. Then the increases started coming, and they came fast.

By December 2025 it was $145. A February 2026 hike pushed it to $205, and then an April 2026 round added another $100 to land at roughly $305. That’s more than double the launch price in about 15 months, on a board where not a single component or capability has changed. You’re paying two and a half times as much for the same piece of silicon.

What makes this sting is how transparent Raspberry Pi has been about the reason. This isn’t corporate greed or a redesigned premium product. CEO Eben Upton has repeatedly said the company is simply passing along memory costs it can’t absorb, and he’s called the whole thing painful for an organization that prides itself on being cost-effective. When even the manufacturer sounds a little embarrassed by its own price tag, you know something structural is broken.

AI data centers are eating the memory supply meant for you

DRAM got seven to ten times more expensive in about a year

The culprit, as you’d expect, is the global DRAM shortage, and the reason behind that is artificial intelligence. Upton has said the LPDDR4 memory used in the Pi 4 and Pi 5 now costs roughly seven times what it did a year ago, and in a CNBC interview he put it even more bluntly, saying Raspberry Pi is paying 10 times more for DRAM than it was 18 months ago.

The reason is that hyperscalers and cloud providers are ordering staggering amounts of memory to feed AI data centers, and that demand is swallowing fab capacity that would otherwise make the cheap commodity chips the rest of us rely on. The scale too is genuinely hard to wrap your head around. Conventional DRAM contract prices jumped 90 to 95 percent in a single quarter in early 2026, and a 32GB DDR5 kit that cost around $80 in mid-2025 is now going for roughly $400.

Even the consumer electronics category is getting squeezed, from phones to laptops to game consoles. The Raspberry Pi just happens to be one of the most visible victims, because its entire identity was built on being cheap. When memory is your board’s biggest cost line, a memory crisis hits you harder than anyone.

A bare board now costs more than a finished computer

An N100 mini PC beats it on price, case, and power supply included

To put things in context, a 16GB Pi 5 now costs more than a complete, fully built mini PC. You can buy an Intel N100 mini PC with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, in an actual case with a power supply, for somewhere between $150 and $270. The Pi gives you a bare board, and you still have to add storage, a case, a power supply, and cooling before it does anything. Once you tally a Pi 5 16GB with an NVMe drive and the basics, you’re at $290 to $305 and squarely in x86 mini PC territory.

That comparison would have been unthinkable a year ago, and it inverts the entire value proposition of the platform. The Pi was never the fastest option; it won on price, ecosystem, and the sheer joy of tinkering. Strip away the price advantage and a lot of people are going to start asking why they’re paying more for less machine.

The $35 mission survives, just not at the top of the lineup

The Pi Zero and Pi 400 are still exactly as cheap as before

The original Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 at $35 with a straightforward mission—give students affordable computers they could understand, modify, and program. That $35 board is the reason a generation of makers, tinkerers, and self-hosters, including myself, exist at all. A kid with pocket money or a hobbyist repurposing old gear could get into real computing without a real budget.

A $305 board serves a different world. To be fair, Raspberry Pi has protected its truly cheap options, holding the 1GB Pi 5 at $45 and the Pi 400 at $60. The older LPDDR2 boards like the Pi Zero and Pi 3 are also unaffected because the company has years of that older memory in stock.

The mission isn’t dead. But the flagship, the board most people actually want for serious projects, has drifted out of impulse-buy range and into the realm of a considered purchase.

Analysts keep pushing the recovery date further out

2027 optimistic, 2028 realistic, 2030 if SK hynix is right

The most depressing part is the timeline. Upton has framed the increases as temporary and says he looks forward to unwinding them, but he’s offered no date, and the analysts are grim. TrendForce, IDC, Counterpoint, and others broadly converge on late 2027 as the earliest realistic relief, and plenty of voices push it to 2028 and beyond. Intel’s CEO flatly said there’s no relief until 2028, and the SK hynix chairman has floated 2030. New fab capacity is years out, so the crunch is structural, not a passing blip.

That’s what makes the $305 Pi 5 feel like a symptom rather than a fluke. A humble hobbyist board got caught in the crossfire of a trillion-dollar AI arms race, and the cost landed on exactly the people the platform was built to serve. The Pi didn’t get worse. The world around it did, and the price tag is just the receipt.