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 details 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 77 recognized morphs and 42811 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 read 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 take each listing's grade exactly as the vendor writes it and rank it on two standard 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 visit public catalog pages and feeds once daily with an identified user agent (our crawler says who it is on every request), 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.
Independence
We are not owned by any vendor, and vendors cannot pay to alter their prices, rankings, or placement in the index. We do hold one disclosed affiliate relationship with a tracked vendor — The Shrimp Farm — and one with a supplies retailer that sells no live shrimp (Chewy). Both are disclosed on every page where their links appear and detailed on how we make money; the data pipeline has no knowledge of either relationship, and affiliate status never affects a single number, ranking, or which vendors appear.
Who runs this
Shrimp Price Index is independently owned and operated — a small, self-funded data project, not a media company or a vendor's marketing arm. It is part of a family of niche price indexes built on the same principle: collect the market's real listings every day, publish honest statistics, and let the data speak. The collection, classification, and analysis pipeline is heavily automated (including AI-assisted tooling), with the classification rules curated and corrected by hand — this page and the machine-readable site guide describe exactly what we do, because a price index is only worth publishing if you can check its work.
Editorial standards and corrections
Every figure on this site — morph pages and analysis articles alike — is computed from our own daily snapshots of vendor catalogs. We do not quote prices from other websites, estimate numbers we didn't collect, or accept payment for coverage. Where an analysis has limits (a short tracking window, a small sample, a gap in our own collection), the article says so in the text rather than a footnote.
If any number looks wrong, tell us: [email protected]. We check reports against the underlying immutable snapshots and correct published figures when they don't hold up — vendors are welcome to flag how their own listings appear.
Citing this data
Cite as "Shrimp Price Index (shrimppriceindex.com), retrieved September 2, 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.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or business inquiries: [email protected]. Vendors: if you'd like your store added to the index (or have concerns about how your listings appear), we'd love to hear from you.