You forgot to mention that the price increase applies to all BPi devices. And unfortunately, any other device with similar specifications will be more competitively priced and offer a long warranty and long-term support. I think this decision will have a huge impact on the company’s financial liquidity.
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You’re absolutely right. SBC companies have largely ignored the fact that blindly mimicking Raspberry Pi’s price hikes is a strategic disaster that only plays into the leader’s hands. When a board moves from being a cheap power horse, to costing a chunk of cash, the buyer’s mindset shifts instantly. They stop looking for raw specs and start demanding security, reliability, and a hassle-free return policy.
Because Raspberry Pi is sold through a network of official chains—unlike the AliExpress where most SBC competitors live—the price hike actually makes the Pi look like the safer, more logical investment.
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Did you AI reply to this? 
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Busted, its Claude extension, and it freaked out.
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So what if this lasts until 2030?
Then what?
Good evening @SimonHayter, you’ve given me a very good idea, since I have 2 SZBOX Ryzen 5 6600H MINI PC Windows 11 Pro DDR5 M.2 2280 NVME SSD PCIE4.0 4K @ 60Hz HD WIFI6 BT5.2 desktop gaming office computer , DDR5 16GB 500GB SSD, Ryzen 5 6600H, EU
- additionally I have a spare WiFi 7 card Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 Wi-Fi 7, to replace the WiFi 6 card with the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 Wi-Fi 7,
on top of that I also have a spare XGSPON ONU Stick SFP+ with fan, preinstalled 8311 end support IP SN MAC management, 10 Gb/s SC/APC 1270/1577nm SMF SFP ONT, with OpenWrt installed
- additionally I also have a spare one since I always buy everything in duplicate, this XikeStor 8 port 10G SFP+ L3 managed with fan heat dissipation supporting DHCP/VLAN/port aggregation/link aggregation, also with OpenWrt installed,
more DAC cable to connect to the 8-port XikeStor
I just need to buy this Dual port 10G SFP+ USB4 Ethernet network Thunderbolt 5/4/3 Compatible with Intel 82599ES Chip 2 port 10GBASE-T fiber optic NIC which now costs me 97 euros,
I’m thinking of building my own router since I’m currently only using it for LibreELEC, and since I have this other spare MLLSE Mini PC M2 Air Intel Gemini Lake N4000 Intel J3710 6GB RAM 128GB ROM dual-band WiFi Bluetooth USB Mini computer on which I would install LibreELEC.
The truth is that I’ll end up with a router much more powerful than any banana (router) they’re releasing on the market now and in the future.
You’ve given me a very good idea.
Thanks, regards
I would take that announcement with a pinched of salt. The SK chair answers to the board and share holders. He is increasing share prices * By telling the world “shortages will last until 2030,” he is effectively telling customers (Apple, Dell, HP, Nvidia) to accept higher prices now. It’s a classic negotiation tactic: “Don’t bother asking for a discount; we don’t even have enough for everyone.”
There is a a few fab factories being built and will open this year but production starts mid to late 2027. Then a few others in 2030, the main issue for the companies is it’s a balancing act, they are all running scared because one BIG mistake could bankrupt them, these factories cost billions and the machines that produce the memory even more, the buildings are littarary built to protect their even more expensive machines. The process is one of the most complicated things on the planet. If the demand drops, that could also cause financial troubles.
The high prices of today are funding the capacity for tomorrow, providing them with record turnovers, and financial safety, it’s going to peak, a what we would call a positive announcement would cause profits to drop, so they are all playing us with all doom and gloom, to protect their own investments. Don’t expect any good news to come from them, the AIis ultimately what will set the demand, the demand aspect is out of their control, and AI doesn’t need to decrease demand to drop memory demand.
AI is poorly memory optimized, they are using AI to optimise memory usage and attempting to get down to 1 bit models, with remaining accurate and without the AI hallucinations that plagues AI from the increasing complexity of chat prompts. When they hit 1 bit the models can reduce as much ram usage as 90% - they know this and don’t expect them to be announcing that kind of stuff.
Truth is, no one truly knows what is going to happen over the next 2 to 4 years from now. AI has made such be leaps over the past year, it’s insane.
Lo dude, for stability I highly recommend you adopt a m.2 NIC solution, I believe your mini pc has two of these slots, it won’t look pretty with the cable hanging out of the machine but it will be fair more reliable than USB. While USB has got more reliable it’s still not as reliable as PCI-E there are many cards you can get but this is one of the cheapest.
Also the fact you plan to use a switch with the soft router is a power play, many people make the mistake of buying these soft routers with 4 to 5 nics all using something like intel 226 V2, not only do these cards have a bad rep, but PCs are awful at switching, keep the soft router for routing, and then internal traffic doesn’t hit the CPU of your soft router
Good morning and thank you for the advice. I currently have a 10Gbps DAC cable connected to the SKS8310-8X Switch, which comes from the Banana plug. This distributes the signal to five computers with 10Gbps cards and one 2.5Gbps card. Besides the internal fan, as shown in the photo, I also use an external fan. I obviously have a double fan underneath. I’ll send you the temperatures. In this case, it’s running the factory firmware; the second one I have has OpenWRT.
All the images I have compiled for all the routers are custom-made by me.
In the Banana Pi forum, in this post, you’ll find the images I’ve created, although the ones I use aren’t the ones listed there since I don’t have 4G/5G modems.
And for the Banana Pi R4 with 4GB of RAM and the Banana Pi R4 with 8GB of RAM, you can try them if you’re interested in this thread, username bruda.
banana-bpi-r4 4gb de ram - 8gb de ram
SKS8310-8X Switch
Cooling fan with controller, 120mm, 3000RPM, 12cm, 12V, 220V, BTC, machine, chassis, workstation, cabinet radiator, server fan
Besides the DAC cables, I use an SFP+RJ45 copper SFP module, a 10G RJ45 SFP 2.5G/10G Ethernet SFP 10G/5G/2.5G transceiver, and a 10GBase-T RJ45 transceiver. It is fully 80M compatible with RJ45 to considerably reduce heat on the PC cards.
Besides the DAC cables, I use them to send the signal to the rest of the house where my children have either a Banana Pi R4 with 8GB of RAM or a Xiaomi BE10000. I also use a copper SFP module (10G RJ45 SFP 2.5G/10G Ethernet SFP 10G/5G/2.5G transceiver RJ45 10GBase-T compatible with RJ45, fully compatible with 80M) to considerably reduce heat on the PC cards, since, as I mentioned, the DAC cables go directly to secondary routers, which also have a cooling fan with controller (120mm, 3000RPM, 12cm, 12V, 220V, BTC, machine, chassis, workstation, cabinet radiator, server fan) underneath each router.
The VPN speeds are as follows: in my country and VPN speeds 1,500 km away. All the PCs I have at home also use DAC cables and either a Banana plug router or a Xiaomi BE10000, so the speeds are the same. VPN speeds in my country
VPN speeds in my country wifi7 master bedroom
vpn speeds 1,500km from my country
Here’s a little bit of how I have things set up.
main router temperatures which distributes to the whole house
second banana pi pro8x for my personal use temperatures
temperature banana pi r4 8gb ram of my son
My son’s latest router is a BE10000. He’s in a mesh setup with another BE10000, since the DAC cable arrived broken and I’m waiting for a replacement.
But thank you for your advice.
It is very unreasonable to purchase BPI R4 Pro 8GB at this price point, and it is not recommended unless it is necessary.
Sadly you’re correct, and to make matters worse, they have doubled the price of the shipping on Ali Express.
They’re trying to mitigate the issue by pushing the R4 4E, which is essentially gimped 8GB Pro, it is 4GB and is missing the 10GbE lan.
They sold out extremely quickly on the last production of the Pro but because this board is very expensive sales have stalled, they have gone from selling thousands to only saying a few dozen in the last few weeks.
Unless they are able to bring costs down, I don’t see this board ever taking off as much as turn R4 did which is a.big.shame.
I would not recommend this board at this time, it’s using SBC inflation rather than router inflation, this isn’t factoring my board went faulty with a few weird use.
Hi friend, what is the name of the package that displays temperatures on the “Overview” tab?
Good morning, the package is called luci-app-temp-status. I see you’ve already found it.
It’s also in my repository:
Have a good day!
I was wondering why the prices were so off with the online information I found. We’ll just have to wait for prices to come down unfortunately.
That’s if there business model remains viable, they have sold less than 15 pros on their official store on Ali Express since Thier last batch, it’s not looking good, and this includes the E4 model they stupidly thought would resolve the issue. They need to reduce the pricing for the sake of their brand, they completely out priced themselves.
The Rapsberry Pi foundation did the same. Their products have gotten massive hikes. 100% price hike since 2024 when I got mine.
OT: Only (without WiFi) alternatives if you need a low power draw 10G router are the Ubiquiti USW fiber or Alta labs route 10 (not proven). Both will be far less feature rich than OpenWRT.
In the 3 days I responded last they haven’t sold a single unit. They were selling like hot cakes before this price hike. Not sure if they are going to ever going to wake up and smell the coffee because the only reason people were willing to look the other way on board that is so unpolished is because of the price Vs performance ratio.
I’ve gone back to my pfsense setup, I refuse to pay these rates when they have passed 100% of the inflation to the customer and l, got m no customer support in for the board I had that went faulty.
Also, the have increased the shipping yet again at around $2.50 USD to the UK.
Link below, 55 units. Let’s see how many in two weeks!
I just found this on AliExpress: Banana Pi BPI-R4 PRO MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) Quad-core Arm Corex-A7 8GB DDR4 8GB eMMC Wifi7 Router Board Home Automation https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_EzR66OG
that link does not work
Yeah, prices have just skyrocketed. My colleague needed a good router for OpenWrt, but with the current prices we decided to skip BPI and went with the Flint 2, which also has working Wi-Fi 6 — unlike the BE14.