How Strainline measures cannabis prices

The headline figure for any market, category, or strain is the median price, the middle value once every observed price is sorted. Cannabis prices have a long upper tail (a few boutique products cost many times the typical price), which pulls a simple average upward and misrepresents what most shoppers actually pay. The median is the price a typical buyer sees.

Alongside the median we publish the typical range (25th to 75th percentile), the band that the middle half of prices fall within, plus the lowest and highest observed prices. The band is what keeps the median honest: it shows how tightly or widely prices are spread, so a single number is never mistaken for the only price.

To compare prices fairly across products of different sizes, we normalize to a common basis: per gram for flower, pre-rolls, and concentrates, and per mg of THC for edibles. Ranking and trend math always run on the normalized basis, so a bulk ounce and a single gram are compared on equal terms.

Where it helps a shopper, we also show the price in the unit people actually buy, such as the median price of an eighth (3.5g) of flower. We never compare an eighth in one place to an ounce in another on raw package price.

Trends compare rolling 30-day and 90-day windows of observed prices, grouped by day. We describe only what already happened (for example, prices down 4% over the past 30 days) and never predict future prices.

A statistic is only as trustworthy as the sample behind it, and a median built from a handful of listings is not the same object as one built from hundreds.

Price-index tables carry the counts behind each figure: the number of listings and the number of distinct dispensaries the median and the percentile band were computed from. Read the count alongside the number: we publish both rather than deciding for you which samples are large enough.

Menus are scraped on a rolling schedule per dispensary, so how recently any given price was checked varies from one shop to the next. That is why we do not quote a single refresh interval. Instead every price-index page carries an “updated” date derived from the data itself, never the moment the page happened to render. Read that date as the claim: it is the age of what you are looking at.

These push our figures in known directions. We would rather name them than let a reader discover them.

• A price index can only reach shops that publish prices. A dispensary with no online menu cannot appear here at all, however real it is.
• Menus are not inventory. A product listed in stock can be sold out by the time you arrive. We report what the menu said and when it said it.

Rankings are computed only from price per unit, package weight, and cultivation method. No dispensary or brand can pay to rank higher or to change a displayed price. Any sponsored placement, if ever shown, is labeled and kept entirely separate from the cheapest-first results.