25 ms·

Show HN: RAM Prices

I was inspired by this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 about diskprices.com last month, and decided to go ahead and make a site for RAM. It's my first time building anything like this! Any tips / suggestions / calls for complete overhaul are welcome :)

soyelmango 3y ago
I was just thinking today, "I wish there was diskprices.com but for RAM". THANK YOU! Please could you add other locations? (In particular amazon.co.uk)
- generalizations 3y ago
  Glad you like it :D Alternate locations are on the list, though it'll require reworking a decent amount of code - I don't currently track the geographical location and it'll add to the scraping overhead unfortunately - but it'll happen! At the moment, I'm mostly focused on getting Amazon Associates to approve me. Ha.
hakfoo 3y ago
What would be neat would be a way to consume a motherboard's validation list and cross-filter with that.
farseer 3y ago
Hi great effort. What tech stack did you use to accomplish this?
- generalizations 3y ago
  Thanks :) Bash scripts, with a bit of python and TCL thrown in for good measure. The webpage is just a big index.html with some inline javascript and css, pasted together with bash. It's amazing what the OG tools can accomplish lol.
cbracketdash 3y ago
Is it me or is the website no longer loading?
cranberryturkey 3y ago
i made https://gpuprices.lol https://gpuprices.lol
- ronyfadel 3y ago
  It’s not loading for me
  - hyperific 3y ago
    You have to go to the prices link at the top. Threw me off too.
- generalizations 3y ago
  I guess you went the route of creating blog posts to play nice with the amazon affiliates program? I'm curious if that's working for you. Have been wondering if I need to do something similar. What's your experience been like so far?
  - cranberryturkey 3y ago
    naah, this ai blog garbage doesn't rank
    - lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
      I mean it's really obvious. If it's really obvious to me, it's probably also really obvious to google.
mg 3y ago
It looks like making things easier to search through is a typical Hacker News project. I had a similar idea some years ago for flashdrives: https://www.productchart.com/flashdrives/ https://www.productchart.com/flashdrives/ Except I decided to implement a two-way sort, so the result is a chart, with axis "price" and "size". Or whichever parameter you chose. (At least on Desktop. On mobile, I show a list.) Then I added ssd drives: https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/ https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/ And more product types like monitors, phones etc, which you can access from the menu. Maybe we should make a group to discuss the way forward and how to make the whole world easier to search through.
ojbyrne 3y ago
Feature request: either an “uncheck all” or a “Select only” to select only one option in a list. Otherwise it’s a lot of clicking to find the 1 specific type of RAM you might be looking for.
- calrain 3y ago
  how about 'right click' on a checkbox removes all other selections in that options section
  - jeffhuys 3y ago
    Hiding stuff like that is never good. Not for discoverability, not for mobile.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Good point. I’ll add that in next iteration. Was conflicted if it was a button worth including.
nubinetwork 3y ago
If you think that is bad, mouser quoted me over $300 for a 28c256... sure, they're new old stock, but who do they think are going to buy them at that price?
hi_hi 3y ago
There's a whole host of these, which is great, thats been listed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314 This one's mine https://listofdisks.com/ https://listofdisks.com/ :-) The faceted search approach can be applied to so many things, and it's pretty easy to code up.
- woutr_be 3y ago
  I’m sure these are trade secrets, but how do these sites get all the data? Is it just scraping?
  - taspeotis 3y ago
    https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overview-of-product-advertising-api https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overvie...
  - hi_hi 3y ago
    No trade secret here, it is indeed simple web scraping. Although as noted, Amazon does provide a product API, if you qualify with 3 sales, which I did, and was then promptly ejected from the affiliates program by Amazon. I'm honestly not sure I'd want to build my product on top of their API as they then have you by the short and curlies. I'd be interested to see how all these other "copy cat" sites fare with the Amazon policies?
    - generalizations 3y ago
      I guess we’ll see. I took the scraping route, for both reasons - didn’t have the 3 sales to qualify, and I don’t like the idea of coming cap-in-hand to Amazon for access to their API. Easier to just scrape what I need. BUT we’ll see what happens when/if I try to get a few bucks back from the affiliate links ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - generalizations 3y ago
      Wait. So you weren't ejected until you tried to use the API? Were you earning anything from your affiliate links prior to getting access to the API?
lofties 3y ago
Add sorting on the columns. First thing I tried was seeing which one was cheapest per GB.
adrian_b 3y ago
This would be very nice, but it is still very incomplete. The table needs an additional attribute, ECC vs. non-ECC. Searching the list for a 2 x 48 GB DDR5 SODIMM kit finds none, while an Internet search finds candidates immediately (e.g. Crucial DDR5-5600 @ $298.99).
- generalizations 3y ago
  There’s still some new product entries being discovered and added…not sure if what you found was on Amazon, but theoretically, eventually, candidates like that will land in the table.
mjevans 3y ago
Missing an 'ECC' vs 'Non-ECC' filter... and I honestly would like all the marketing people that feel a need to specify 'Non-ECC' to just be fired for search pollution.
- steelbrain 3y ago
  Someone correct me if I am wrong but isn't DDR5 ECC by default? I know this from an anecdote that I used to enable XMP all the time in my builds and run RAM stability tests, none ever caught anything but on my DDR5 builds, if I turned on XMP and played a game for an extended period, I'd get a BSOD after 4-5 hours, which I figured is the ECC built into DDR5 flagging something unexpected.
  - hugryhoop 3y ago
    The default DDR5 ECC is not exposed to the outside, not reported to the OS. You only caught errors on DDR5 because it's stability is very brittle. Market forces push it to the limit - everybody cares about the MT/s and runs XMP unlike previous generations.
    - jtriangle 3y ago
      DDR5 seems to have optimistic XMP settings, whereas DDR3/4 were more conservative. I have, however, had very good luck so far just buying faster DDR5 and then running it a little slower at the same timings, which is how I arrived at the idea that DDR5 XMP is usually too fast to be actually stable.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        I think it's just the memory controllers not being as mature yet. For some point of comparison: Intel 12~14th gen operate DDR5 at 4GHz with 2DPC (DIMMS per channel), AMD Ryzen 7xxx at 3.6GHz with 2DPC. With 1DPC the numbers are slightly better, with Intel 12th at 4.8GHZ and 13th/14th at 5.6GHz and AMD Ryzen 7xxx at 5.2GHz. All a far cry from the ridiculous overclocks at 6GHz and above.
jasonjmcghee 3y ago
Wow we're under $1/GB of RAM (in certain cases). Hard to comprehend. I remember getting a 1GB hard drive and how crazy that was, and then much later when a mechanical drive was $1/GB. Seeing RAM hit that is something else!
- daemonologist 3y ago
  Someone tell Nvidia (I know, I know, this isn't the fancy GDDR or HBM stuff.)
  - why_only_15 3y ago
    HBM is often, as I recall, $30/GB for comparison
- wraptile 3y ago
  Yet Apple dares to ship a laptop with 8gb ram that is not upgradable. RAM is dirt cheap but somehow the market abusers make it look like it's some expensive rare resource. Even Thinkpads now solder ram to sell you a +16GB upgrade for 100usd (6usd per gb, double the market price).
  - yellow_lead 3y ago
    The funniest thing about this is apple's engineer claiming 8gb on apple is equivalent to 16 on other systems.
    - wraptile 3y ago
      They're basically openly calling their userbase idiots to increase the profit margin by 20usd on a 1,500++ usd device. Incredible how we got to this state where the RAM market quality in consumer devices is quickly degrading because of corporate greed not because of any market or technical challenge.
      - ponector 3y ago
hyperific 3y ago
So now we have: - diskprices.com - cpuscout.com - ramstickprices.com - gpuprices.lol/prices Now we just need MOBO, power supply, fans and case price trackers! *Edit: goryramsy's list below is more complete than this one. Thanks!
- goryramsy 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314
- nolongerthere 3y ago
  What’s the benefit of these sites over pcpartpicker.com?
  - parameters69 3y ago
    Nothing as far as I can tell..
- snvzz 3y ago
  >Now we just need MOBO, power supply, fans and case price trackers! Recreating pcpartpicker[0] one piece at a time. 0. https://pcpartpicker.com/ https://pcpartpicker.com/
- listenallyall 3y ago
  Back in the day, a wonderful solution to your dilemma existed. It was cheap, it was up-to-date, it covered virtually every vendor and every product in existence, the only downside was it was heavier than a phone book: Computer Shopper magazine
KyleSanderson 3y ago
RDIMM please (filtering specifically for ECC versus not). Voltage would also be appreciated.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Voltage is on the todo list! RDIMM should be on there now.
fossdd 3y ago
For Germany (and i guess Europe) there always is: https://geizhals.de/ https://geizhals.de/
- universa1 3y ago
  yes, i am always suprised that such a tool does not exist everywhere (at least the modern western world...). not every shop is in there and rarely I buy from elsewhere... but even just checking specs of any kind of "hardware" (geizhals has also home appliances, ...), or seeing what is available with certain specs, geizhals is a godsend. and it mostly still has that "old-web"-style :-)
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  originally geizhals.at, geizhals.eu for a wider market. skinflint.co.uk and cenowarka.pl exist as well
- orlp 3y ago
  In the Netherlands we typically use https://tweakers.net/ https://tweakers.net/.
skywal_l 3y ago
In a spirit of cooperation, you could add a link to other similar websites for other types of equipments (https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/, https://gpuprices.us/ https://gpuprices.us/, etc).
- Ilasky 3y ago
  Just spun up gpupricecompare[0] for GPU prices from eBay as well. Still need to add more filters, of course, but figured I’d throw it out there as well while it’s in progress and topical for the discussion. [0] https://gpupricecompare.com https://gpupricecompare.com
  - bufferoverflow 3y ago
    This one is close to useless, no filtering.
    - Ilasky 3y ago
      I’m well aware, as I said in my comment, I need to add filters and am working on it!
- bArray 3y ago
  The price of 2.5" drives is not good in the UK currently: https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacity=2-&disk_types=external_hdd25,internal_hdd25,external_ssd,internal_ssd,m2_ssd,m2_nvme,u2 https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacit... I needed to buy a significant amount of 2TB(+) 2.5" drives (for a personal server project) and managed to (just about) get them under £15 a TB. Note to self, next time get a server that accepts 3.5" drives: https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacity=2-&disk_types=external_hdd,external_hdd25,internal_hdd,internal_hdd25,external_ssd,internal_ssd,m2_ssd,m2_nvme,u2 https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacit...
- generalizations 3y ago
  That’s a good idea. I didn’t even know gpuprices.com existed! But yeah, I tried to give diskprices a lot of credit here. Edit: there's a new entry in the sidebar.
jldugger 3y ago
Wonder if you can rescue this data from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114232515/https://jcmit.com/mem2010.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20170114232515/https://jcmit.com... update: guess i just need to update my bookmark, it moved to https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sho 3y ago
Adding to the list of feature suggestions, it would be nice for a manufacturer tier filter. I'm not interested in "A-Tech" RAM, which, rumour has it, is sourced from Kingston's chip binning rejects. So of course it's going to be cheaper, that doesn't mean you want it. It would be nice to be able to filter by only the proper trusted brands and first-party manufacturers.
bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
Also hdd-prices.com
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cies 3y ago
I'd expect a "Show HN" post to at least explain a bit how they built it (or even better link to some browsable source repo if it's open source). Apart from the nit-pick: nice work! I had a look at the source, proper minimalism right there (and a stray html tag), just loads the page containing all data/JS/CSS and a favicon.
- generalizations 3y ago
  I mean, that's fair. A decent chunk of the backend effort was figuring out how to scrape amazon without setting off their bot detection; I'd rather not tell them how I did that. The rest is an unholy collection of bash, python and TCL scripts assembling raw html - not surprised there's a stray html tag. Ha. I forget who said it first, but the Linux OS really is the ideal environment for async operations. I just have some shell scripts running in their own while loops, downloading, parsing, building and uploading. Thanks! :D
TomK32 3y ago
Especially for the Speed selection it needs an invert toggle. Why not use numbers to click for the Capacity? Lastly, something like a sane default or a choice of the three most common search queries would make using it much faster.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Good suggestions, thanks! I was on the fence about the capacity filter. Wasn’t sure if discrete numbers would get in the way or be easier to use. The invert/uncheck all button is definitely on the list. Hadn’t thought of making it an invert button - I’d put off adding it because I didn’t like the idea of check/uncheck all. Thanks. I don’t track anything on the site (static hosting from my registrar lol) so I can’t track common queries- but sane defaults makes sense. I can at least uncheck the ancient stuff by default.
r1ch 3y ago
Does it only show prices for which you have an affiliate link? I noticed the majority of links are to Amazon which generally isn't great for PC hardware (lots of returned products, fakes, etc).
- generalizations 3y ago
  …yes. This is exclusively scraping Amazon. Keeps it simple. Also it seemed like a lot of the reason why Amazon is suboptimal for PC hardware is because it’s hard to find stuff - so maybe this helps make Amazon a better option.
atmanactive 3y ago
Just in case you didn't know, there is https://geizhals.eu https://geizhals.eu which is the same as https://skinflint.co.uk https://skinflint.co.uk which has very, very detailed filtering and sorting capabilities. Plus an android app (maybe iOS too). My personal go-to app/site when searching for computer hardware. Check it out.
- 3abiton 3y ago
  Absolutely this. Information is money!
- xela79 3y ago
  awesome site that geizhals, even if you don't need to buy from there, the amount of filters is just impressive. Take hard drives for example, you can filter on CMR HDDs so you don't get a HDD that is rubbish in your NAS
  - FinnKuhn 3y ago
    you can't buy from Geizhals, it just links to a large amount of different European (mostly German) online retailers :D
- rozab 3y ago
  I think geizhals.eu is the first time I've ever seen my Do Not Track header respected, or at least acknowledged. That's nice.
  - ilikepi 3y ago
    There were a few high profile sites that honored it early on. Hulu was the example I remember, but I'm having trouble getting the Wayback Machine to load an archived copy of their policy, so this article will have to do: https://martech.org/hulu-joined-list-major-platforms-ignore-not-track-requests/ https://martech.org/hulu-joined-list-major-platforms-ignore-...
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  This looks great and is new-to-me. Key feature in this context, you can filter memory by CAS timings. Is there a version for the US market? I couldn't find one. More info on the site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geizhals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geizhals
haunter 3y ago
Usually I just use PCPartPicker https://pcpartpicker.com/ https://pcpartpicker.com/
eqvinox 3y ago
This seems to be Amazon-only, without stating so anywhere. If this is the case, it really needs to say it, and prominently.
danpalmer 3y ago
The first entry is mis-labelled as 512GB when it's actually an ancient 512MB stick. Only 1 of the top 5 is actually available to buy. I'd recommend cleaning up the data, and filtering by availability as it's very easy to have an amazing product and price that no one can buy, which isn't useful to have in the data.
- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  The Amazon page has it wrong, so OP’s chart is also.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    Yeah that's a good catch. That entry probably showed up overnight - I'm still working on the rarer edgecases. I actually assumed everything would be denominated in GB! My bad. Edit: odd, they all show as available to me (in the US?).
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      Ah you're right. Some show as on sale in the US, shippable to the UK, some show as on sale in the US but not shippable to the UK, and some show as not on sale at all regardless of country (but when switching country to the US are on sale). Strange!
      - generalizations 3y ago
        Stretch goal is to split up the site by geography the way diskprices does. That would probably fix what you’re seeing. But that would double the resource requirements on the backend and I’d have to rewrite/abstract a bunch of stuff…so for now I’m just going to make the pages open in new tabs, and figure we just keep looking until we find what’s available locally. Pretty sure I’m pulling worldwide, so there’s likely stuff not available in the US too.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Well it's correct once in the title, incorrect another time in the title, and the data may be incorrect. I suspect that was a malicious attempt by the seller to be borderline on correctness, get unsuspecting sales, and then claim correct listing based on the title. Unfortunately on Amazon/AliExpress/etc this is fairly common and something that needs to be accounted for in usage of the data like this.
AndroTux 3y ago
Not that anyone would care about DDR1 anymore, but the DDR(1) filter doesn't work.
- generalizations 3y ago
  I think I messed up the JavaScript filtering code. I have a guess why it doesn’t work, but it’ll have to wait until after work hours.
aqfamnzc 3y ago
Thanks for being very clear about the presence of affiliate links.
CyberDildonics 3y ago
This seems like a run of the mill affiliate link site with the same interface as a lot of online stores.
amelius 3y ago
It's kind of crazy that Google doesn't offer this type of searching capability, considering all their expertise in search and AI.
- guenthert 3y ago
  If you can explain how that would increase their revenue, I'd think Google has a job for ye.
paulnpace 3y ago
Is this trend demonstrating how lame interfaces make more money? I'm talking about Amazon, et al, who could just as easily make this site.
carterschonwald 3y ago
Super cool! I think there might be some nice tools to make it possible to sort by any given column or give it a spread sheet like experience, which could help exploring it
rmdashrfv 3y ago
That's weird. According to these prices, Apple has been overcharging me for RAM?
- downrightmike 3y ago
  And now: Mild shock 'o'
- reddit_clone 3y ago
  Lol. $400 added for 18 extra GBs of RAM !
2StepsOutOfLine 3y ago
Also missing a CAS Latency filter. It's the only reason I find myself going to newegg over Amazon so I can filter by it.
- generalizations 3y ago
  I looked into adding that (briefly, as a stretch goal) - I may be wrong, but that info doesn’t seem to show up in the product info very often. I could try including it when available, though. I’ll take another crack at it.
leros 3y ago
Did you have a hard time getting into the Amazon affiliate program? Last time I saw a post like this it seemed the consensus was that a price comparison site didn't have enough content for Amazon to let you use the affiliate program.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Signing up wasn't that hard - they just want minimum sales per 90 days. I still don't have API access though; figured it was worth just trying this and seeing what happened. It's super unclear what leverage Amazon tries to exert; it might be that they just refuse API access? Guess I'll find out when/if I try to withdraw my winnings.
  - leros 3y ago
    Good to know. Thanks for the info. I'm thinking about building my own price comparison site in another niche. How are you scraping the data right now?
    - generalizations 3y ago
      An unholy combination of bash, python and TCL scripts running in async loops on an old computer under my desk :D TCL is actually a great scripting language - it handles text strings as well as bash (and this is all just text), it does file I/O really easily, and it has nested arrays that bash doesn't do. For my purposes, it's a lot cleaner to work with than python. For the scraping itself - I tried wget with useragent strings, and quickly hit 503 blocked errors. After that I gave it the whole nine yards, and threw every trick I could come up with at the problem (considering my last project involved netbooting xen, this was completely outside my field). I honestly would rather not say how I did it though. If anyone from Amazon's bot detection is here, I don't want to give them hints. Edit: I'm collecting similar projects in the sidebar of my site, it'd be fun to add yours when you publish it.
- hi_hi 3y ago
  Getting in is the easy part :-) This happened to me recently. The crazy thing (to me) is I received the required 3 sales, which I assumed would be the objective validation required. I'm also interested if anyone managed to talk to reasonable human at Amazon. I was only met with automated emails.
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
A couple observations: 1. All outgoing Amazon links appear to be intentionally augmented with a "?tag" querystring parameter "probablecausality-20". This appears to be an Amazon-specific affiliate link tracker [0], which means the author is indirectly profiting from every purchase originated from this site, which feels scummy or disingenuous at best. 2. If the author is accepting sponsorship/advertisement revenue from brands for promoting their products, this should be extremely clearly disclosed. Notably, many major brands (like G.SKILL) are conspicuously absent from the rankings, despite having some of the most competitive capacity/dollar ratios. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49919290/what-are-all-those-parameters-in-an-amazon-affiliate-associate-link https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49919290/what-are-all-th...
- hajimuz 3y ago
  why affiliate is disgenuous?
  - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
    1. Publishing a tracker for RAM prices out of passion for open source and/or computer hardware is noble. Exploiting this for personal monetary gain, however, is not. 2. From my read of how the affiliate program works, the author is basically pocketing some change for every sale made from an outbound click from this website. I can see this being valid for content like an in-depth review or benchmark of a particular model. But here, 100s of links are plastered with no context--extracting affiliate revenue from this feels scummy, cheap, and low-effort. Unlike a review, for example, there is no additional value being contributed that one can't already find directly on the product page.
    - speff 3y ago
      If there's supposedly no value from this project that you can't find on the product page, then don't use it. An affiliate link is appropriate here - you're using their work to find a specific product. One that you may not have found without this site. If the site helps amazon make a sale, then the dev can feel free to take their cut in making that sale happen.
Gud 3y ago
Thanks! I love it.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Neat! I miss pricewatch.com. Also miss tier-1 vendor deets on prices for registered ECC 128/256/512 GiB modules.
johnklos 3y ago
This is nice. I like this, and I like how responsive it is. It does illustrate a common issue with doing anything at all with Amazon: search manipulation. You can't search on Amazon for, say, 32 gigs while specifying either one 32 gig DIMM or two 16 gig (or, I suppose, four 8 gig) DIMMs. For example, the listing this site offers is, "DDR5 32GB 6000MHz Ram (16GB×2 PC5-48000)", yet it has "32 GB", quantity 1. Although I just bought memory and won't need more for a while, this site shows that I got an excellent price (two 32 gig DDR5-6000 for $178 USD).

Show HN: RAM Prices

soyelmango 3y ago

I was just thinking today, "I wish there was diskprices.com but for RAM". THANK YOU! Please could you add other locations? (In particular amazon.co.uk)

generalizations 3y ago
Glad you like it :D Alternate locations are on the list, though it'll require reworking a decent amount of code - I don't currently track the geographical location and it'll add to the scraping overhead unfortunately - but it'll happen! At the moment, I'm mostly focused on getting Amazon Associates to approve me. Ha.

hakfoo 3y ago

What would be neat would be a way to consume a motherboard's validation list and cross-filter with that.

farseer 3y ago

Hi great effort. What tech stack did you use to accomplish this?

generalizations 3y ago
Thanks :) Bash scripts, with a bit of python and TCL thrown in for good measure. The webpage is just a big index.html with some inline javascript and css, pasted together with bash. It's amazing what the OG tools can accomplish lol.

cbracketdash 3y ago

Is it me or is the website no longer loading?

cranberryturkey 3y ago

i made https://gpuprices.lol https://gpuprices.lol

ronyfadel 3y ago
It’s not loading for me
- hyperific 3y ago
  You have to go to the prices link at the top. Threw me off too.
generalizations 3y ago
I guess you went the route of creating blog posts to play nice with the amazon affiliates program? I'm curious if that's working for you. Have been wondering if I need to do something similar. What's your experience been like so far?
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
  naah, this ai blog garbage doesn't rank
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
    I mean it's really obvious. If it's really obvious to me, it's probably also really obvious to google.

mg 3y ago

It looks like making things easier to search through is a typical Hacker News project. I had a similar idea some years ago for flashdrives: https://www.productchart.com/flashdrives/ https://www.productchart.com/flashdrives/ Except I decided to implement a two-way sort, so the result is a chart, with axis "price" and "size". Or whichever parameter you chose. (At least on Desktop. On mobile, I show a list.) Then I added ssd drives: https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/ https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/ And more product types like monitors, phones etc, which you can access from the menu. Maybe we should make a group to discuss the way forward and how to make the whole world easier to search through.

ojbyrne 3y ago

Feature request: either an “uncheck all” or a “Select only” to select only one option in a list. Otherwise it’s a lot of clicking to find the 1 specific type of RAM you might be looking for.

calrain 3y ago
how about 'right click' on a checkbox removes all other selections in that options section
- jeffhuys 3y ago
  Hiding stuff like that is never good. Not for discoverability, not for mobile.
generalizations 3y ago
Good point. I’ll add that in next iteration. Was conflicted if it was a button worth including.

nubinetwork 3y ago

If you think that is bad, mouser quoted me over $300 for a 28c256... sure, they're new old stock, but who do they think are going to buy them at that price?

hi_hi 3y ago

There's a whole host of these, which is great, thats been listed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314 This one's mine https://listofdisks.com/ https://listofdisks.com/ :-) The faceted search approach can be applied to so many things, and it's pretty easy to code up.

woutr_be 3y ago
I’m sure these are trade secrets, but how do these sites get all the data? Is it just scraping?
- taspeotis 3y ago
  https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overview-of-product-advertising-api https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overvie...
- hi_hi 3y ago
  No trade secret here, it is indeed simple web scraping. Although as noted, Amazon does provide a product API, if you qualify with 3 sales, which I did, and was then promptly ejected from the affiliates program by Amazon. I'm honestly not sure I'd want to build my product on top of their API as they then have you by the short and curlies. I'd be interested to see how all these other "copy cat" sites fare with the Amazon policies?
  - generalizations 3y ago
    I guess we’ll see. I took the scraping route, for both reasons - didn’t have the 3 sales to qualify, and I don’t like the idea of coming cap-in-hand to Amazon for access to their API. Easier to just scrape what I need. BUT we’ll see what happens when/if I try to get a few bucks back from the affiliate links ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - generalizations 3y ago
    Wait. So you weren't ejected until you tried to use the API? Were you earning anything from your affiliate links prior to getting access to the API?

lofties 3y ago

Add sorting on the columns. First thing I tried was seeing which one was cheapest per GB.

adrian_b 3y ago

This would be very nice, but it is still very incomplete. The table needs an additional attribute, ECC vs. non-ECC. Searching the list for a 2 x 48 GB DDR5 SODIMM kit finds none, while an Internet search finds candidates immediately (e.g. Crucial DDR5-5600 @ $298.99).

generalizations 3y ago
There’s still some new product entries being discovered and added…not sure if what you found was on Amazon, but theoretically, eventually, candidates like that will land in the table.

mjevans 3y ago

Missing an 'ECC' vs 'Non-ECC' filter... and I honestly would like all the marketing people that feel a need to specify 'Non-ECC' to just be fired for search pollution.

steelbrain 3y ago
Someone correct me if I am wrong but isn't DDR5 ECC by default? I know this from an anecdote that I used to enable XMP all the time in my builds and run RAM stability tests, none ever caught anything but on my DDR5 builds, if I turned on XMP and played a game for an extended period, I'd get a BSOD after 4-5 hours, which I figured is the ECC built into DDR5 flagging something unexpected.
- hugryhoop 3y ago
  The default DDR5 ECC is not exposed to the outside, not reported to the OS. You only caught errors on DDR5 because it's stability is very brittle. Market forces push it to the limit - everybody cares about the MT/s and runs XMP unlike previous generations.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    DDR5 seems to have optimistic XMP settings, whereas DDR3/4 were more conservative. I have, however, had very good luck so far just buying faster DDR5 and then running it a little slower at the same timings, which is how I arrived at the idea that DDR5 XMP is usually too fast to be actually stable.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I think it's just the memory controllers not being as mature yet. For some point of comparison: Intel 12~14th gen operate DDR5 at 4GHz with 2DPC (DIMMS per channel), AMD Ryzen 7xxx at 3.6GHz with 2DPC. With 1DPC the numbers are slightly better, with Intel 12th at 4.8GHZ and 13th/14th at 5.6GHz and AMD Ryzen 7xxx at 5.2GHz. All a far cry from the ridiculous overclocks at 6GHz and above.

jasonjmcghee 3y ago

Wow we're under $1/GB of RAM (in certain cases). Hard to comprehend. I remember getting a 1GB hard drive and how crazy that was, and then much later when a mechanical drive was $1/GB. Seeing RAM hit that is something else!

daemonologist 3y ago
Someone tell Nvidia (I know, I know, this isn't the fancy GDDR or HBM stuff.)
- why_only_15 3y ago
  HBM is often, as I recall, $30/GB for comparison
wraptile 3y ago
Yet Apple dares to ship a laptop with 8gb ram that is not upgradable. RAM is dirt cheap but somehow the market abusers make it look like it's some expensive rare resource. Even Thinkpads now solder ram to sell you a +16GB upgrade for 100usd (6usd per gb, double the market price).
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  The funniest thing about this is apple's engineer claiming 8gb on apple is equivalent to 16 on other systems.
  - wraptile 3y ago
    They're basically openly calling their userbase idiots to increase the profit margin by 20usd on a 1,500++ usd device. Incredible how we got to this state where the RAM market quality in consumer devices is quickly degrading because of corporate greed not because of any market or technical challenge.
    - ponector 3y ago

hyperific 3y ago

So now we have: - diskprices.com - cpuscout.com - ramstickprices.com - gpuprices.lol/prices Now we just need MOBO, power supply, fans and case price trackers! *Edit: goryramsy's list below is more complete than this one. Thanks!

goryramsy 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314
nolongerthere 3y ago
What’s the benefit of these sites over pcpartpicker.com?
- parameters69 3y ago
  Nothing as far as I can tell..
snvzz 3y ago
>Now we just need MOBO, power supply, fans and case price trackers! Recreating pcpartpicker[0] one piece at a time. 0. https://pcpartpicker.com/ https://pcpartpicker.com/
listenallyall 3y ago
Back in the day, a wonderful solution to your dilemma existed. It was cheap, it was up-to-date, it covered virtually every vendor and every product in existence, the only downside was it was heavier than a phone book: Computer Shopper magazine

KyleSanderson 3y ago

RDIMM please (filtering specifically for ECC versus not). Voltage would also be appreciated.

generalizations 3y ago
Voltage is on the todo list! RDIMM should be on there now.

fossdd 3y ago

For Germany (and i guess Europe) there always is: https://geizhals.de/ https://geizhals.de/

universa1 3y ago
yes, i am always suprised that such a tool does not exist everywhere (at least the modern western world...). not every shop is in there and rarely I buy from elsewhere... but even just checking specs of any kind of "hardware" (geizhals has also home appliances, ...), or seeing what is available with certain specs, geizhals is a godsend. and it mostly still has that "old-web"-style :-)
taskforcegemini 3y ago
originally geizhals.at, geizhals.eu for a wider market. skinflint.co.uk and cenowarka.pl exist as well
orlp 3y ago
In the Netherlands we typically use https://tweakers.net/ https://tweakers.net/.

skywal_l 3y ago

In a spirit of cooperation, you could add a link to other similar websites for other types of equipments (https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/, https://gpuprices.us/ https://gpuprices.us/, etc).

Ilasky 3y ago
Just spun up gpupricecompare[0] for GPU prices from eBay as well. Still need to add more filters, of course, but figured I’d throw it out there as well while it’s in progress and topical for the discussion. [0] https://gpupricecompare.com https://gpupricecompare.com
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  This one is close to useless, no filtering.
  - Ilasky 3y ago
    I’m well aware, as I said in my comment, I need to add filters and am working on it!
bArray 3y ago
The price of 2.5" drives is not good in the UK currently: https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacity=2-&disk_types=external_hdd25,internal_hdd25,external_ssd,internal_ssd,m2_ssd,m2_nvme,u2 https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacit... I needed to buy a significant amount of 2TB(+) 2.5" drives (for a personal server project) and managed to (just about) get them under £15 a TB. Note to self, next time get a server that accepts 3.5" drives: https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacity=2-&disk_types=external_hdd,external_hdd25,internal_hdd,internal_hdd25,external_ssd,internal_ssd,m2_ssd,m2_nvme,u2 https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk&condition=new,used&capacit...
generalizations 3y ago
That’s a good idea. I didn’t even know gpuprices.com existed! But yeah, I tried to give diskprices a lot of credit here. Edit: there's a new entry in the sidebar.

jldugger 3y ago

Wonder if you can rescue this data from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114232515/https://jcmit.com/mem2010.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20170114232515/https://jcmit.com... update: guess i just need to update my bookmark, it moved to https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

deleted 3y ago

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sho 3y ago

Adding to the list of feature suggestions, it would be nice for a manufacturer tier filter. I'm not interested in "A-Tech" RAM, which, rumour has it, is sourced from Kingston's chip binning rejects. So of course it's going to be cheaper, that doesn't mean you want it. It would be nice to be able to filter by only the proper trusted brands and first-party manufacturers.

bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago

Also hdd-prices.com

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cies 3y ago

I'd expect a "Show HN" post to at least explain a bit how they built it (or even better link to some browsable source repo if it's open source). Apart from the nit-pick: nice work! I had a look at the source, proper minimalism right there (and a stray html tag), just loads the page containing all data/JS/CSS and a favicon.

generalizations 3y ago
I mean, that's fair. A decent chunk of the backend effort was figuring out how to scrape amazon without setting off their bot detection; I'd rather not tell them how I did that. The rest is an unholy collection of bash, python and TCL scripts assembling raw html - not surprised there's a stray html tag. Ha. I forget who said it first, but the Linux OS really is the ideal environment for async operations. I just have some shell scripts running in their own while loops, downloading, parsing, building and uploading. Thanks! :D

TomK32 3y ago

Especially for the Speed selection it needs an invert toggle. Why not use numbers to click for the Capacity? Lastly, something like a sane default or a choice of the three most common search queries would make using it much faster.

generalizations 3y ago
Good suggestions, thanks! I was on the fence about the capacity filter. Wasn’t sure if discrete numbers would get in the way or be easier to use. The invert/uncheck all button is definitely on the list. Hadn’t thought of making it an invert button - I’d put off adding it because I didn’t like the idea of check/uncheck all. Thanks. I don’t track anything on the site (static hosting from my registrar lol) so I can’t track common queries- but sane defaults makes sense. I can at least uncheck the ancient stuff by default.

r1ch 3y ago

Does it only show prices for which you have an affiliate link? I noticed the majority of links are to Amazon which generally isn't great for PC hardware (lots of returned products, fakes, etc).

generalizations 3y ago
…yes. This is exclusively scraping Amazon. Keeps it simple. Also it seemed like a lot of the reason why Amazon is suboptimal for PC hardware is because it’s hard to find stuff - so maybe this helps make Amazon a better option.

atmanactive 3y ago

Just in case you didn't know, there is https://geizhals.eu https://geizhals.eu which is the same as https://skinflint.co.uk https://skinflint.co.uk which has very, very detailed filtering and sorting capabilities. Plus an android app (maybe iOS too). My personal go-to app/site when searching for computer hardware. Check it out.

3abiton 3y ago
Absolutely this. Information is money!
xela79 3y ago
awesome site that geizhals, even if you don't need to buy from there, the amount of filters is just impressive. Take hard drives for example, you can filter on CMR HDDs so you don't get a HDD that is rubbish in your NAS
- FinnKuhn 3y ago
  you can't buy from Geizhals, it just links to a large amount of different European (mostly German) online retailers :D
rozab 3y ago
I think geizhals.eu is the first time I've ever seen my Do Not Track header respected, or at least acknowledged. That's nice.
- ilikepi 3y ago
  There were a few high profile sites that honored it early on. Hulu was the example I remember, but I'm having trouble getting the Wayback Machine to load an archived copy of their policy, so this article will have to do: https://martech.org/hulu-joined-list-major-platforms-ignore-not-track-requests/ https://martech.org/hulu-joined-list-major-platforms-ignore-...
NelsonMinar 3y ago
This looks great and is new-to-me. Key feature in this context, you can filter memory by CAS timings. Is there a version for the US market? I couldn't find one. More info on the site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geizhals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geizhals

haunter 3y ago

Usually I just use PCPartPicker https://pcpartpicker.com/ https://pcpartpicker.com/

eqvinox 3y ago

This seems to be Amazon-only, without stating so anywhere. If this is the case, it really needs to say it, and prominently.

danpalmer 3y ago

The first entry is mis-labelled as 512GB when it's actually an ancient 512MB stick. Only 1 of the top 5 is actually available to buy. I'd recommend cleaning up the data, and filtering by availability as it's very easy to have an amazing product and price that no one can buy, which isn't useful to have in the data.

jagged-chisel 3y ago
The Amazon page has it wrong, so OP’s chart is also.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Yeah that's a good catch. That entry probably showed up overnight - I'm still working on the rarer edgecases. I actually assumed everything would be denominated in GB! My bad. Edit: odd, they all show as available to me (in the US?).
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Ah you're right. Some show as on sale in the US, shippable to the UK, some show as on sale in the US but not shippable to the UK, and some show as not on sale at all regardless of country (but when switching country to the US are on sale). Strange!
    - generalizations 3y ago
      Stretch goal is to split up the site by geography the way diskprices does. That would probably fix what you’re seeing. But that would double the resource requirements on the backend and I’d have to rewrite/abstract a bunch of stuff…so for now I’m just going to make the pages open in new tabs, and figure we just keep looking until we find what’s available locally. Pretty sure I’m pulling worldwide, so there’s likely stuff not available in the US too.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Well it's correct once in the title, incorrect another time in the title, and the data may be incorrect. I suspect that was a malicious attempt by the seller to be borderline on correctness, get unsuspecting sales, and then claim correct listing based on the title. Unfortunately on Amazon/AliExpress/etc this is fairly common and something that needs to be accounted for in usage of the data like this.

AndroTux 3y ago

Not that anyone would care about DDR1 anymore, but the DDR(1) filter doesn't work.

generalizations 3y ago
I think I messed up the JavaScript filtering code. I have a guess why it doesn’t work, but it’ll have to wait until after work hours.

aqfamnzc 3y ago

Thanks for being very clear about the presence of affiliate links.

CyberDildonics 3y ago

This seems like a run of the mill affiliate link site with the same interface as a lot of online stores.

amelius 3y ago

It's kind of crazy that Google doesn't offer this type of searching capability, considering all their expertise in search and AI.

guenthert 3y ago
If you can explain how that would increase their revenue, I'd think Google has a job for ye.

paulnpace 3y ago

Is this trend demonstrating how lame interfaces make more money? I'm talking about Amazon, et al, who could just as easily make this site.

carterschonwald 3y ago

Super cool! I think there might be some nice tools to make it possible to sort by any given column or give it a spread sheet like experience, which could help exploring it

rmdashrfv 3y ago

That's weird. According to these prices, Apple has been overcharging me for RAM?

downrightmike 3y ago
And now: Mild shock 'o'
reddit_clone 3y ago
Lol. $400 added for 18 extra GBs of RAM !

2StepsOutOfLine 3y ago

Also missing a CAS Latency filter. It's the only reason I find myself going to newegg over Amazon so I can filter by it.

generalizations 3y ago
I looked into adding that (briefly, as a stretch goal) - I may be wrong, but that info doesn’t seem to show up in the product info very often. I could try including it when available, though. I’ll take another crack at it.

leros 3y ago

Did you have a hard time getting into the Amazon affiliate program? Last time I saw a post like this it seemed the consensus was that a price comparison site didn't have enough content for Amazon to let you use the affiliate program.

generalizations 3y ago
Signing up wasn't that hard - they just want minimum sales per 90 days. I still don't have API access though; figured it was worth just trying this and seeing what happened. It's super unclear what leverage Amazon tries to exert; it might be that they just refuse API access? Guess I'll find out when/if I try to withdraw my winnings.
- leros 3y ago
  Good to know. Thanks for the info. I'm thinking about building my own price comparison site in another niche. How are you scraping the data right now?
  - generalizations 3y ago
    An unholy combination of bash, python and TCL scripts running in async loops on an old computer under my desk :D TCL is actually a great scripting language - it handles text strings as well as bash (and this is all just text), it does file I/O really easily, and it has nested arrays that bash doesn't do. For my purposes, it's a lot cleaner to work with than python. For the scraping itself - I tried wget with useragent strings, and quickly hit 503 blocked errors. After that I gave it the whole nine yards, and threw every trick I could come up with at the problem (considering my last project involved netbooting xen, this was completely outside my field). I honestly would rather not say how I did it though. If anyone from Amazon's bot detection is here, I don't want to give them hints. Edit: I'm collecting similar projects in the sidebar of my site, it'd be fun to add yours when you publish it.
hi_hi 3y ago
Getting in is the easy part :-) This happened to me recently. The crazy thing (to me) is I received the required 3 sales, which I assumed would be the objective validation required. I'm also interested if anyone managed to talk to reasonable human at Amazon. I was only met with automated emails.

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

A couple observations: 1. All outgoing Amazon links appear to be intentionally augmented with a "?tag" querystring parameter "probablecausality-20". This appears to be an Amazon-specific affiliate link tracker [0], which means the author is indirectly profiting from every purchase originated from this site, which feels scummy or disingenuous at best. 2. If the author is accepting sponsorship/advertisement revenue from brands for promoting their products, this should be extremely clearly disclosed. Notably, many major brands (like G.SKILL) are conspicuously absent from the rankings, despite having some of the most competitive capacity/dollar ratios. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49919290/what-are-all-those-parameters-in-an-amazon-affiliate-associate-link https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49919290/what-are-all-th...

hajimuz 3y ago
why affiliate is disgenuous?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  1. Publishing a tracker for RAM prices out of passion for open source and/or computer hardware is noble. Exploiting this for personal monetary gain, however, is not. 2. From my read of how the affiliate program works, the author is basically pocketing some change for every sale made from an outbound click from this website. I can see this being valid for content like an in-depth review or benchmark of a particular model. But here, 100s of links are plastered with no context--extracting affiliate revenue from this feels scummy, cheap, and low-effort. Unlike a review, for example, there is no additional value being contributed that one can't already find directly on the product page.
  - speff 3y ago
    If there's supposedly no value from this project that you can't find on the product page, then don't use it. An affiliate link is appropriate here - you're using their work to find a specific product. One that you may not have found without this site. If the site helps amazon make a sale, then the dev can feel free to take their cut in making that sale happen.

Gud 3y ago

Thanks! I love it.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Neat! I miss pricewatch.com. Also miss tier-1 vendor deets on prices for registered ECC 128/256/512 GiB modules.

johnklos 3y ago

This is nice. I like this, and I like how responsive it is. It does illustrate a common issue with doing anything at all with Amazon: search manipulation. You can't search on Amazon for, say, 32 gigs while specifying either one 32 gig DIMM or two 16 gig (or, I suppose, four 8 gig) DIMMs. For example, the listing this site offers is, "DDR5 32GB 6000MHz Ram (16GB×2 PC5-48000)", yet it has "32 GB", quantity 1. Although I just bought memory and won't need more for a while, this site shows that I got an excellent price (two 32 gig DDR5-6000 for $178 USD).