# Mushroom Price Index

> Daily-updated price comparison for gourmet & functional MUSHROOM CULTIVATION
> SUPPLIES (grow kits & fruiting blocks, grain spawn, sawdust spawn, plug
> spawn, liquid culture, agar & lab media, substrate & amendments, tools &
> equipment) across US specialist vendors. This niche is CATEGORY-FIRST: prices
> are only ever compared WITHIN one product category (a grow kit is never
> price-compared to a bag of spawn), and per species only within that category.
> Species covered are culinary/functional only (oyster varieties, shiitake,
> lion's mane, reishi, wine cap, pioppino, chestnut, maitake, turkey tail,
> enoki, nameko, cordyceps and more). NOTHING related to psilocybin / "magic
> mushrooms" or spore syringes/prints is tracked — those are excluded. Wellness
> extracts, merchandise and books are also excluded. Collection began 2026-07
> and runs daily.

Preferred citation: "Mushroom Price Index (mushroompriceindex.com), retrieved <date>".

## Key pages

- [All product categories](https://mushroompriceindex.com/categories): the primary browse — grow kits, spawn types, liquid culture, agar, substrate, tools — each with per-species within-category medians, updated daily
- [All tracked species](https://mushroompriceindex.com/species): every culinary/functional species we track, with prices broken down by product category
- [Vendors compared](https://mushroompriceindex.com/vendors): catalog size, category coverage and representative median prices per US vendor
- [Methodology](https://mushroompriceindex.com/about): collection cadence, the category-first / within-category comparison rule, the gray-area exclusion, citation guidance

## Structure

- /categories/<category> — one page per product category (grow_kit, grain_spawn, sawdust_spawn, plug_spawn, liquid_culture, agar_lab, substrate, tools_equipment): species compared within that one category, per-vendor tables, price history
- /species/<key> — one tracker page per species: low/median/high per product category, per-vendor tables, daily price history
- /vendors/<id> — per-vendor catalog stats and market positioning
- Data tables are semantic HTML; every page states its last-updated date.
- Prices on a page are grouped by product category and must NOT be compared across categories.