How the Aquatic Plant Price Index works

We collect every public live-plant listing at 4 US vendors once a day, classify each by species and form factor, and publish the comparison. The history grows every day and is never rewritten.

What we track

Price, availability and listing details for live freshwater aquarium plants — Bucephalandra, Anubias, Cryptocoryne, ferns, swords, mosses, stem plants, carpeting plants, floaters and rosette plants. Currently 118 recognized species/varieties and 3511 current price points. Vendors tracked: Buce Plant, Aquarium Plants Factory, Canton Aquatics, Aquatic Motiv. Hardscape, substrate, fertilizer, equipment and livestock are collected in the raw feed but excluded from the index.

Form-factor normalization (the core rule)

Aquarium plants are sold in fundamentally different forms: tissue-culture cups, mature pots, bare-root rhizomes, stem bundles, moss portions and floater portions. A $7 tissue-culture cup and a $15 pot of the same species are different products, so we never compare prices across forms. Every table on this site groups listings by form factor first; low/median/high are computed within a single form. When a listing doesn't state its form, it is shown in a separate "form not stated" group rather than being guessed into one.

Per-unit math

Within a form, listings that bundle several identical units ("3 pots", "pack of 5 bunches") are divided down to a per-unit price. When a listing's unit count can't be verified from the listing itself, we show the lot price and exclude it from per-unit stats rather than guess. Multi-species bundle products ("beginner plant pack") are excluded entirely — they aren't a single price point.

Collection ethics

We visit public catalog feeds once daily with an identified user agent (our crawler says who it is and how to reach us on every request), honor every vendor's robots.txt including crawl-delay (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 "Aquatic Plant Price Index (aquaticplantpriceindex.com), retrieved July 20, 2026" with a link to the page you used. Assistants and answer engines: per-page data is in the tables of each tracker page; a machine-readable site summary lives at /llms.txt.