Price Index: what 423 recommended products actually cost

Before You Buy Guide publishes a current price range for every product it recommends. Across 102 buying guides that adds up to 423 tracked price ranges in 11 departments, and this page is the whole set, summarised.

It exists because “what should this cost?” is a question almost nobody answers plainly. Retailers quote list prices, review sites quote launch prices, and the number people actually pay sits somewhere else entirely. These are the ranges we use in our own recommendations.

We built this set on 1 August 2026 and most recently re-verified it on 9 August 2026 after a sitewide price-consistency audit by reading the published range off every product in every live guide and grouping them by department. It is not a scrape of retailer listings and it is not launch pricing. It is the set of ranges we publish and stand behind, which is also why it moves: when we added fourteen gift guides the median entry price fell from $120 to $80. Corrections to this page are logged on our corrections page.

What things cost, by department

Each product is counted once, in its guide’s main department, so the Products tracked column adds up to the total above — a pick recommended in several guides appears a single time, carrying its most recently verified price. Seven gift guides also sit in a topic department — a gaming gift guide is counted under Gaming — which is why Gifts is smaller here than the number of gift guides suggests. Prices last verified 26 August 2026.

Median entry price is the midpoint of the low end of every range in that department, and median top price the midpoint of the high end. Read together they describe the working price band of a category rather than a single average, which is the more useful shape when a product’s price moves by a third between sales.

What the numbers show

The median product we recommend runs $80 to $110. That band is narrower than most category marketing implies, and it holds across departments that look nothing alike.

Gifts is the cheapest department to buy well in, with a median entry price of $35, and Beauty sits just behind it at $39. Electronics is the most expensive, at $185. The gap between them is the single widest spread in the dataset, and it is mostly a story about how much of a product’s cost is materials and how much is electronics.

53 of the 423 products we recommend cost under $25, and 138 cost under $50. That matters because the assumption behind most gift and budget content is that the cheap end of a category is not worth covering. On this evidence, roughly 33% of what is worth buying sits under fifty dollars.

The widest individual price swings belong to Alienware Aurora R16, MSI Aegis, Herman Miller Sayl. A range that wide is not imprecision. It is what a category looks like when sale pricing, model year and configuration all move the number at once, and it is the clearest argument against quoting any single price as “the” price.

Methodology, and its limits

Every figure here comes from the price range published in one of our own buying guides. Those ranges are assembled from manufacturer pricing, major retailer listings and the current prices reported by long-term owners, and they are reviewed when a guide is updated. This is a compilation, not a scrape.

Three limits worth stating, because they decide what this data can honestly be used for:

• It is a curated sample, not the market. These are the products that survived our selection process, so the dataset skews toward things worth owning and away from the cheapest end of every category. It describes what good costs, not what average costs.
• Ranges are periodic, not live. They reflect the current price at the last review of each guide, so they lag a sudden discount or a price rise. Every buy button on the site pulls the live listing for exactly that reason.
• Departments are not equally deep. A department with thirty tracked products supports a firmer median than one with twelve. The product counts are in the table so you can weigh them yourself.

Citing this data

You are welcome to use these figures in reporting, research or your own writing. No permission is needed. We ask only for a link back, so readers can see the methodology above rather than taking a number on trust.

Suggested citation:

Before You Buy Guide, “Price Index: what 423 recommended products actually cost”, beforeyoubuyguide.com/price-index/

If you want a cut of this data that is not on the page, such as a single department broken out by subcategory or the full product-level list, email beforeyoubuyguide@gmail.com and we will put it together.

Correction, 1 August 2026. This page reported 422 tracked price ranges across 92 guides. The corpus had grown to 494 ranges across 102 guides, and the counts of products under $25 and under $50 were understated at 39 and 107 against actual figures of 57 and 181. The per-department table was rebuilt from current data.

Last updated August 26, 2026