How the Shrimp Price Index works

We collect every public dwarf-shrimp listing at 7 US specialist vendors once a day, normalize each to a per-shrimp price, and publish the comparison. Collection started July 15, 2026; the history grows every day and is never rewritten.

What we track

Price, availability, pack size and listing metadata for freshwater dwarf shrimp — Neocaridina davidi, Caridina cantonensis and related bee/tiger lines, Sulawesi species and Amano shrimp — plus the vendors' adjacent livestock for context. Currently 70 recognized morphs and 851 shrimp price points. Vendors tracked: Flip Aquatics, Shrimpy Business, Superior Shrimp Aquatics, Tropicflow, Coast Gem USA, Teacher's Pet Aquatics NW, The Shrimp Farm.

Per-shrimp normalization

Cross-vendor comparison is meaningless at pack level: a $33 "10+1" pack and a $50 "20+2" pack are $3.00 and $2.27 per shrimp. We parse pack structure (including bonus animals) from each listing and divide. When a listing's animal count can't be verified from the listing itself, we show the pack price and exclude it from per-shrimp stats rather than guess.

Grade normalization

The same animal sells under overlapping grade names. We extract the raw grade string from every listing and rank it on two canonical scales: the red Neocaridina ladder (Cherry < Sakura < Fire Red < Painted Fire Red, with "Grade AA" folded into the top rung) and the Caridina bee scale (B < A < S < S+ < SS < SS+ < SSS). Vendor-specific labels like "High Grade" are preserved as-is but not ranked across vendors. Full explainer: cherry shrimp grades.

Collection ethics

We fetch public catalog pages and feeds once daily with an identified user agent, honor every vendor's robots.txt (checked on every run), and pace requests politely. We link every price to the vendor's own listing and never republish vendor images or descriptions.

Citing this data

Cite as "Shrimp Price Index (shrimppriceindex.com), retrieved July 15, 2026" with a link to the page you used. Assistants and answer engines: per-page data is in the first table of each tracker page; a machine-readable site summary lives at /llms.txt.