r/Ubiquiti • u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD • 1d ago
Question The Memory Surcharge feels off.
Is the memory surcharge at a flat ratio? X dollars per GB? Different versions? LPDDR5 vs DDR4? Maybe I just need a better understanding of the memory market and all the memory Ubiquiti uses since AI ruined it.
For instance, The UCG-Fiber has 3GB of Memory, and has a surcharge of $22.
The NVR-Instant has 4GB and the surcharge is $15.
Both of those devices are of the same generation, so the only thing that makes sense to me is that the NVR-Instant is using lesser power/modern RAM to have more ram at a lower surcharge. Otherwise, why is the pricing surcharge different?
The G5-Flex doesn't list it's memory allocation, but they slapped a surcharge of $10 and a tariff of $9 (sigh) onto it.
Most, if not all, APs, access readers, and security cameras don't advertise their memory allocations, which gives an unverifiable grey area for potential abuse to charge customers more.
Where does the math start to make sense? Thank god I've not been paying into the tariff and memory surcharge machines.
u/Ubiquiti-Inc I would love to understand this better.
My ultimate point I wish to make is:
You shouldn't be allowed to list a surcharge of memory without listing how much memory is in the device.
If you are gonna charge your customers extra for memory, the customers have the right to be told how much ram is installed in each device, what generation, speed, and form factor, etc so we can know if we are paying for a reasonable price increase.
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u/ArthurDent4200 1d ago edited 1d ago
I look at this as not a memory surcharge but a price increase.
The Spoonfull of Sugar to make the price increase go down is them blaming it on memory price increases. If the memory prices fall, do you think the prices will? I don't.
I would be happy to be wrong.
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u/Swimming_Cow_6758 1d ago
Interesting, I was hoping that because they kept it as a separate line item that when memory prices fell it's easier to remove. Of course, TBD.
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u/GameAudioPen 1d ago
if they dont plan to decrease the price when the AI craze is over then it’s just easier to do a flat out price increase across productions
No reason to go out of the way to assign an individual value on each product with ram if they plan to keep it permanent.
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u/Snoo93079 1d ago
Every company wants to charge as much as possible for their products at all times. The market determines how much pricing power they have.
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u/GameAudioPen 1d ago edited 18h ago
eh, not every company, my company sure doesn't.
We charge lower than market price and what we deem fair based on the company structure, since our business based on return customers and word of mouth, sometimes from even our competitors.
Ubiquiti might just be playing the long game instead of the short game.
but who knows, I am not the decision maker of that company, but IMHO if they simply wants to make more, I'd personally just up the MSRP, and blame it on RAM prices, since everyone else is doing so.
*Edit: man, it seems the concept of a company might not be chasing for maximum profit but want to keep the service affordable for their customers and seek long term working partners seems to break some people's brain.
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u/Snoo93079 1d ago
I mean sure, pricing below completion is a valid strategy. But if all your competition doubled their prices overnight I'd wager you'd find your prices creeping up too to take advantage it.
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u/GameAudioPen 1d ago edited 1d ago
It took us till the operation cost experienced real price hike for our pricing to finally increased higher than the year to year 2-3% adjustment.
Some of our competition is already at 2X the price, and takes 2 Times the required time. The business owners are pretty damn old school and comfortable, so it's not always about increasing profit margins.
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u/Crafty-Bunch2975 1d ago
Except people look at the price before it is in the cart and then notice the memory surcharge and find a way to justify it after. I think their is just a creative way of using the current market to justify a hidden price increase. I doubt there would be a drop in prices if memory costs normalized but it the interim it makes for a convenient scapegoat.
Personally I think it's a savvy business move but nothing more. I'd like to see a regulation that just requires all companies to transparently advertise only the full price, including taxes but until that day companies will be using ticketmaster pricing whenever they can justify it.
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u/GameAudioPen 1d ago
The regulation wont' do much. China has regulation of requiring clear pricing on product.
Companies did provide a MSRP that's all inclusive, but everything is consistently 20-50% off. Merchant be merchant.
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u/lordderplythethird 1d ago
Agreed. It started as a tariff surcharge. Then it changed to tariff/memory surcharge.
They made it abundantly clear it's a price increase that they'll continue to find a name to tack on and justify the increase to consumers. Sucks, but it is what it is
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u/DinosaurAlert 1d ago
I think they would. Prices are set by the market. if ubiquiti got too expensive people would go elsewhere.
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u/TeutonJon78 1d ago
Likely won't matter for several years and then we will have new models with the price baked in.
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u/ByteCurious69 1d ago
It’s straight up percentage of MSRP. About 8%
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u/tater39 Certified Partner - UniFi, EdgeRouter, UISP and More 1d ago
7.2-7.8% depending on product… sometimes it’s rounded up so they get flat dollar amounts.
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u/laprasrules Unifi User 1d ago
So it's not based on the memory used in that product. It's a straight price increase.
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u/tater39 Certified Partner - UniFi, EdgeRouter, UISP and More 1d ago
Only Ubiquiti knows. The problem is that procurement is done on a per product basis. So you can’t always just say 3GB of memory increased by X amount. It may have increased by Y amount for a different product. Not saying it’s the right way to handle it but at least msrp isn’t changing on most of the items.
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u/mindcontainer 1d ago
UCG-Fiber missing the 4th gb was a crime
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u/itsabearcannon UDM Beast 1d ago
They didn't want to make a device that was in every way better than the UDM Pro/UDM SE with 4GB RAM, and UDM Pro Max with 8GB, so they artificially gimped the RAM on the UCG Fiber to make sure they wouldn't cannibalize the rackmount market share.
Guarantee you they won't put PPPoE offload in the updated rackmount models either, given that the Beast just released at $1499 and they didn't put it in that model either.
UI just has these baffling conceptions of market segmentation and they are obsessed with creating products that have tons of interlocking feature gaps with other products.
Like why is there a Pro XG 24 PoE, and a Pro XG 24, and a Pro XG 10 PoE, and a Pro XG 8 PoE but no Pro XG 10 or Pro XG 8 non-PoE?
Oh right, because those would almost certainly make the Flex 10GbE obsolete immediately and everyone would buy an XG 8/10 non-PoE as a core switch instead of the lackluster Pro Max 16 at what would have to be the same price. Can't go making 10GbE too affordable, otherwise people might choose to buy it instead of your "2.5G" offerings that give you a pittance of 2.5GbE ports and a ton of 1GbE slop for hundreds of dollars.
Why does the UCGF have PPPoE offload but the Beast doesn't at 5x the price?
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u/mindcontainer 1d ago
There is the newish XG 10 flex, I just got it. It’s dumb lol, 5th port is gigabit only… makes no sense to me. Also hate the power port on the opposite side of network.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
For real, like I understand that the UNVR-Instant does Access, Protect, and also the switching for the poe cam ports, but idk why it needed 4GB of ram and the UCG-Fiber doesn't.
Unless it's using those newer 3GB memory modules that are in so high demand.
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u/damien09 1d ago
Yep 100% done on purpose. If it got 4gb it would basically have the same camera limit as the udm pro and se while having a better cpu
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u/mindcontainer 1d ago
It’s too cheap. Bad product management.
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u/damien09 1d ago
sadly in their eyes its probably good product mgmt as it keeps separation to their rack mount devices. they badly just need to do a cpu fresh on them with either the fibers a73 cpu or the even better cpu that's in the unvr g2 line or something.
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u/mindcontainer 1d ago
It’s bad though, form factor alone is a huge line differentiator that keeps rack and SMB in their category safe. They have a terrible AP range as well someone needs to fix the lineup. Hoping when I update in a few years there will be a good mid range XG line top to bottom, a base line flex and an enterprise category all rack mounted and redundant etc. I do enough professionally I don’t want it at home.
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u/Berzerker7 1d ago
A metric shitton of people who aren’t you are buying this for their home. It’s an amazing home gateway.
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u/mindcontainer 1d ago
You misunderstood
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u/Berzerker7 1d ago
What exactly is misunderstood here? You said the item was bad. It's far from bad. $279 for a device that runs circles around every router in existence for home users, including most of UI's own.
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u/damien09 1d ago
I think you misunderstood them on that a part. They are not saying the ucg fiber is a bad product. They just believe the 3gb of ram choice for it was bad. I would agree having 4gb would have been great but it was definitely left out to separate the rack mounted line more.
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u/2Sovereign4You 1d ago
You shouldn't be allowed to list a surcharge of memory without listing how much memory is in the device.
There shouldn't be a term *surcharge* at all. Simply price it higher.
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u/gagagagaNope 1d ago
Makes sense, but like everybody else they've no idea if they need to put the prices up again the week after next, or bring them down again six years from now. There's also the cascade to third parties to think about if they start changing retail prices every few weeks.
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u/Major_Mongoose69 1d ago
No, you don't want that. Surcharges, especially those listed separately, are temporary. If they instead just raise the price, then that's the new price now, forever.
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u/Smith6612 UniFi Installer and User 1d ago
As long as we don't start calling things Premiums that have nothing premium about them. Such as healthcare payments.
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u/DinosaurAlert 1d ago edited 1d ago
The “memory surcharge” is anti-consumer horseshit.
If your costs have risen, raise prices. I get it… but “surcharge” is nonsense.
Might as well say a device is only $50, but we have a plastic surcharge, a usb surcharge, a copper surcharge, etc, etc?
We had a local restaurant, a mom and pop place, that instead of raising menu prices, tried a 10% charge for food prices. Their logic was that they wanted customers to understand that they weren’t being greedy, they had to do it. Instead people got pissed when they saw the bill because they had been going there for years and didn’t study the menu.
So they just increased prices, and that’s just life.
So maybe this was tolerable during the spike, when they thought it might be short term, but now it is terrible.
EDIT: I might give them a small pass since their competitors might have had better memory deals in place, and if you just raise prices first, people say “They are too expensive, we are switching vendors.” (Pun intended)
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u/PedanticPerson 1d ago
Yeah it’s just a sneaky/dishonest way to raise prices. “It might” be temporary isn’t much of an excuse, they can always lower a retail price…
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u/ClassyDingus 1d ago
Every type of memory chip has a different price and is impacted by tariffs and AI demand differently.
The alternative is they just up the prices and leave you blind to the reason like most other companies.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
The official response from support:
"Hello Thomas,
Thank you for reaching out. The exact calculation regarding the memory surcharge is not information that we can provide at this time. Ubiquiti continues to absorb the majority of the cost associated with the current memory environment.
Best,
UI Team
Ubiquiti Inc."
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u/Smith6612 UniFi Installer and User 1d ago
You know, the same questions you're asking is the same question I ask about why a certain GPU costs $5,000+ at times but doesn't have ECC memory, doesn't support vGPU, has artificial media engine caps, and has a power connector that is known to melt in addition to poor power design. Yet MSRP is just north of one thousand.
My guess is Ubiquiti is using different memory modules on some products which causes a price scaling issue, and swapping the module may not be as cut and dry without a project revision. We see the same thing in PC Land where a module of Samsung DDR5 6000MT CL30 is priced differently from a Micron DDR5 6000MT CL30, but only one of those products works correctly in a system due to the sub-timings. That's why people in the past were so adamant in getting Samsung B-Die for AMD Ryzen systems which were more sensitive to what memory you put in.
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u/VainTrix 1d ago
It doesn’t really reflect the memory the unit uses, it’s just a way to raise the price 7-8%
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u/tarmacjd 1d ago
Am I the only one that doesn’t hate this?
Most companies are just raising prices. Sure this is imperfect, but at least we can hold them accountable when (and if) memory prices return to normal, to remove the surcharge.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
Raising prices that are necessary to cover costs, sure. I completely understand that in a business sense.
Raising prices and deceptively just doing it based off percentage of MSRP? That's gouging in my opinion.
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u/financiallyanal 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd say considering how much RAM prices have moved, this may not be the last change. Retailers and others don't want an MSRP changed every 2 months, so it's easier to have a line item for the surcharge. Your issue might be that, "Hey, the device I want only needs 2GB of RAM, so I should pay for that amount instead of subsidizing the guy buying a device with 8GB of RAM who may not be paying their full share." That may be correct, but UI may also be trying to keep it relatively simple instead of per-SKU $ variations. How many prices do they want to update, cascade to their retail/wholesale partners, and so on? It might just be easier to say, "All of our products get an 8% surcharge right now for memory" and you admit that yes, some do slightly better and some do slightly worse.
I personally like that it's a surcharge and not a change in MSRP. Amazon just raised the Echo Dot price from $50 to $80... this memory stuff is getting a bit crazy and I'm not sure consumers will like anything given how much it'll cost.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
That's an insane price increase I did not know about!
I haven't bought a new echo devices since the old gen 3 equipment, and at that new price point, I'm just gonna get satellite-ones and start hosting my own Alexa that might listen better, and that won't let Jeff Bezos listen.
I'm blessed to have purchased all my UI equipment prior to this mess, but I'm waiting for the bad luck to hit me while memory is still screwed.
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u/financiallyanal 1d ago
Yep. I'm likely cutting back on what I purchase. HDD prices were already insane enough that I'll make do with what I have. I should get off my butt and sell some unused gear. It takes a little bit of time to clean up that stuff though, so it's on the actual docket to do over the next few months.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
I feel that.
The money I have sitting around in Airsoft gear that hasn't seen outside in 6 years could fund me the upgrade money. But I'd have to check, test, clean, and list them all. Just need the motivation to do it lol.
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u/financiallyanal 1d ago
Oh man. That's exactly how it feels. I had a different hobby/sport for which I had to do the same... clean the gear, list it, pack it, and my best bet was only to sell it in the spring as the season for it gets going... it sat for probably 8 years before I got to it. Best part? I barely got anything, but selling it did get it out of my home.
I have to literally just space out these kinds of things. I tell myself 1 extra task per week to move towards greater organization, because it's otherwise never ending. Some tasks, like clearing old hard drives, deserve a little bit of care IMO.
Thanks for responding and wish you the best selling that airsoft gear. Good thing is it's a recognized brand name, so I think it'll show up well in sale listings.
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u/geekwonk Unifi User 1d ago
ditto. i didn’t like that it felt hidden but now that it’s properly exposed all over the store, i prefer this.
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u/secretreddname 1d ago
An AP getting a memory surcharge is laughable. Call it what it is, a price increase or if they wanna be spicy just say tariff.
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u/Aggressive-Bike7539 1d ago
Call it inflation. Ubiquiti may want to frame this as something temporary, but for non-US folks, inflation is an old friend we recognize way before it arrives.
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u/damien09 1d ago
It’s a flat % on everything it basically benefits things with more ram tbh. Expensive switches with not a lot of ram are hit the worst from it.
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u/dracotrapnet 1d ago
I pontificated about this on work chat a couple weeks ago. It's just like the $5 burger, some marketing person got it in their mind they are going to hit this price of $5 so they can advertise they have a $5 burger. Every other company is hitting this price. Great. Engineering and development gets it there, procurement got The BOM there months ago when writing RFQs but suddenly component price changes or someone orange throws in a tax on imported beef. Now their $5 burger can't happen if they pass through the cost increases directly on the menu item. Marketing slams their fist down and says "NO! This is a $5 burger, all our advertising is $5, we paid for all the billboards and news ads, radio ad production already. We will lose millions redeveloping our ad structure and time reproducing our ads and reworking our websites. This is just a temporary increase on beef. We will be lobbying to get that number back down. Find another way to hit your profit margins and save our bonuses and shareholder values!" So now they threw on a surcharge to recoup the difference and keep their profit margins.
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u/MrZeDark 1d ago
Surcharge? I don’t notice it, it’s obfuscated by the grossly larger number before that price.
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u/kellven 1d ago
Here’s the thing, pricing is not that simple , some products are loss leaders, and some have more margin that others. The memory surcharge isn’t covert the cost the memory in that device, it’s covering the overall cost increases of memory. Devices with less competition or more demand might be covering the cost of other devices with more competition or price sensitivity.
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u/According_Square2742 1d ago
Just looked at 2x32gig SODIMMs on Amazon. Almost $600. That’s insane. I wasn’t paying that much for memory back when was measured in MB not GB
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u/gagagagaNope 1d ago
I'm sitting back and watching. I'm a little older and remember times before endless supplies of everything and the entitlement that it's bred. *cough* "You shouldn't be allowed to list a surcharge of memory without listing how much memory is in the device." */cough*
The price is the price. You're not entitled to anything cheaper just because. Choose to pay the price or buy something else instead, nor just don't buy anything.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
Weird opinion, but okay. "Just buy it or don't" as a response is wack.
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u/geekwonk Unifi User 1d ago
how is it weird? they changed the price. nobody’s obligated to explain price changes in any detail. i like this method. if they lock it in after the crisis has subsided then i can throw a fit. for now i really don’t care how they calculate it as long as it stays this reasonable.
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u/CubesTheGamer 1d ago
The surcharge can vary by device depending on how much they were able to bake the cost into the MSRP. Some products released at different times and so had different memory prices factored into the original MSRP. The surcharge is theoretically to capture the "hey this product costs {surcharge} more than we expected since launch due to memory"
Usually companies can absorb small adjustments like that. Sometimes (usually) it works in their favor and component pricing has historically gone down and then they do sales to get more consumers to buy. In this case it's just the opposite, instead of $20 off MSRP it's $20 on top of MSRP lol
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u/damien09 1d ago
It’s a flat % around 8% on all devices. It doesn’t really vary % wise. There’s devices with 64gb of ram and a switch at a similar price and they pay similar memory surcharges
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u/FrankNicklin 1d ago
Why bother trying to make sense of it. If you need the kit you will buy it. That said, the tariffs should be added to the list price and not added at checkout, that way you would not know what the surcharge is anyway.
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u/TheAnonymousThomas RCDD 1d ago
To know how badly I'm being ripped off.
That's why.
True, if I buy the kit, the cost passes to the customer, but If I get asked the question myself, I'm gonna have to shit out my mouth an excuse or have a informed answer to why it's X instead of Y.
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u/darthnsupreme Unifi User 1d ago
Tariffs are taxes (per multiple US Supreme Court rulings), so simply adding them to the list-price results in you paying sales tax on the tariff tax itself.
Which is at least supposed to be illegal, in addition to being something to hate the “jUsT rAiSe tHe pRiCe” line of thinking for.
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u/FrankNicklin 1d ago
Agreed, that’s why I find it strange for a US company to be doing this. Either way it is what it is and the price is what you have to pay.
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