How the Carnivorous Plant Price Index works
We collect every public live-plant listing at 3 US vendors once a day, classify each by genus/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 carnivorous plants — Venus flytraps (Dionaea), sundews (Drosera), trumpet pitchers (Sarracenia), tropical pitchers (Nepenthes), butterworts (Pinguicula), bladderworts (Utricularia), and the rarer genera (Cephalotus, Heliamphora, Darlingtonia, Byblis, Drosophyllum, Aldrovanda, Genlisea, Roridula, Brocchinia). Currently 56 recognized species/varieties and 1729 current price points. Vendors tracked: California Carnivores, Carnivorous Plant Nursery, Predatory Plants. Seeds, growing media, supplies, feeders and merchandise are collected in the raw feed but excluded from the index.
Form-factor normalization (the core rule)
Carnivorous plants are sold in fundamentally different forms: small tissue-culture cups, established potted plants, and bare-root divisions or rhizomes. A propagation cup and an established potted plant 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 plants ("3 plants", "pack of 5") are divided down to a per-plant 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 lots ("assorted collection", "mystery box") are excluded entirely — they aren't a single price point.
Why seeds are excluded
Many carnivorous-plant vendors sell seed packets. We deliberately exclude them: a seed packet is a different product from a live plant — germination plus years of grow-out, with its own risk — so its price is not comparable to a live-plant price. Keeping this a live-plant index avoids a misleading "$4 Sarracenia" that is really a seed packet. Live seedlings and seed-grown plants are tracked normally.
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 "Carnivorous Plant Price Index (carnivorousplantpriceindex.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.