IRONHOLDMINI PCS FORGED FOR YOUR HOMELABThe Raspberry Pi 5 Now Costs More Than a Mini PC
The Raspberry Pi 5 8GB — the board that used to be the cheapest way into a home server — now lists at $175. That's up 119% from its $80 launch price, after three memory-driven hikes in four months. A kitted-out Pi 5 runs about $220 all-in. Meanwhile our top mini PC pick, the Beelink EQ12, costs $199 with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD in the box. The Pi's entire value proposition just inverted, so let's talk about what happened — and whether the Pi still earns its spot on our picks page.
Three hikes in four months
| Model | Launch (Oct 2023) | Dec 2025 | Feb 2026 | Apr 2026 | Total rise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pi 5 16GB | $120 | $145 | $205 | $305 | +154% |
| Pi 5 8GB | $80 | $95 | $125 | $175 | +119% |
| Pi 5 4GB | $60 | $70 | $85 | $110 | +83% |
Source: Liliputing's price-rise roundup; timeline corroborated by Tech-Insider. The 1GB and 2GB models barely moved — it's the bigger RAM configs that got crushed, which tells you exactly where the cost sits.
Why it happened
AI data centers are vacuuming up the world's DRAM supply, and everyone downstream pays for it. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton has been blunt about it: memory costs forced the rises, they're painful, and prices come back down when DRAM costs do. It's not profiteering — it's pass-through. But "temporary" has already meant ten months and counting.
The math that stings
A usable Pi 5 8GB isn't $175. Add the official 27W PSU (~$12), a case, and storage, and you're at $215–225 before you've installed an OS. Against that:
The Beelink EQ12 is ~$199 with 16GB of LPDDR5, a 512GB NVMe SSD, an Intel N100 that's meaningfully faster than the Pi's Broadcom chip, and standard x86 software compatibility — no ARM Docker image roulette. For general home-server duty (Docker, Plex, Pi-hole, file serving), the x86 box is now cheaper and more capable. For a decade the Pi's pitch was "good enough and cheap." The "cheap" half just left the building.
Where the Pi still wins
It's not dead — it's just no longer the default. The Pi 5 still earns its place when:
- You need GPIO. Hardware projects, sensors, HATs — x86 mini PCs can't touch this.
- Every watt counts. ~3W idle vs ~7W for an N100 box. That's roughly $6 a year in electricity — nice, but it doesn't close a purchase-price gap on its own.
- You already own the accessories. If the PSU, case, and storage are sitting in a drawer, the math is just the board.
- You want the ecosystem. The Pi community, docs, and software support remain unmatched.
The mood in Pi-land
Mike Thompson — the creator of Raspbian — put it bleakly: he helped bring low-cost computing to a generation of tinkerers, and now "despairs that a Raspberry Pi can cost upwards of $300 because AI shortages are making personal computing unaffordable." Meanwhile Raspberry Pi confirmed newer firmware locks boards to their original RAM size, so there's no cheap RAM-transplant workaround either.
The bottom line
If you're building a home server in late 2026, don't default to the Pi 5. At $175 for the board, the N100 mini PCs on our picks page are cheaper, faster, and easier to live with. Buy the Pi 5 for what it's still best at — tiny idle draw, GPIO projects, the ecosystem — not because it's the budget option. It isn't anymore.