The Costco price game, measured

A Costco price game — a price guesser, a guessing game, call it what you like — shows you a warehouse product and asks what it costs. Costcodle is the one this archive documents: a free browser page, six guesses, and a guess within 5 percent of the stored price wins. What no other page about it can tell you is what the prices actually look like, because that needs the whole official list rather than one day's puzzle. This archive has every published row, so here is the measurement.

Everything below is computed from the 1142 puzzles the daily game has published, game-2 through the latest row, read straight out of games.json in the developer's repository. Nothing on this page is an estimate.

The price spread, in one table

Costcodle items are groceries far more often than they are furniture, and the distribution is sharply bunched. Half the puzzles sit under ten dollars.

650 of the 1142 items (56.9 percent) come in under ten dollars, and 1083 of them (94.8 percent) sit at or below twenty-five dollars. The mean price is dragged far above the median by a handful of big-ticket rows — a patio dining set, a piece of furniture — which is why the mean is the wrong number to aim at.

The pattern nobody mentions: the last two digits

Costco shelf prices are not evenly spread across the cents. In this archive 1136 of 1142 published prices end in .99 or .49, and only 6 end in anything else at all.

That single fact is worth more than any guessing strategy built on vibes. A blind guess spread evenly across the cents has roughly a two-in-a-hundred chance of landing on the right ending; anchoring on .99 or .49 is right essentially always. It also means that when the arrows tell you the price is lower, the next sensible number is usually the nearest .99 below you, not an arbitrary round figure.

The prices that come up most often

Repeat prices are common, because Costco's own price endings cluster on a few familiar points.

This is why an opening guess around nine or ten dollars is not lazy, it is informed: the median sits at ten, and the single most repeated price in the archive is eight ninety-nine.

How the game scores a guess

The official script measures how far your number is from the stored price as a percentage, not as a dollar amount. Within 5 percent is a win. Within 25 percent is the yellow band, which the game marks as close. Anything further away is red. Each guess also comes back with an arrow: an up arrow means the real price is higher than your guess, a down arrow means it is lower, and a tick means you are inside the winning band.

Because the test is a percentage, the same dollar gap means different things at different price points. Being a dollar out on a four-dollar item is 25 percent away and yellow; being a dollar out on a forty-dollar item is 2.5 percent away and a win. The practical consequence is that cheap items are surprisingly hard and expensive items are surprisingly forgiving.

Opening moves that follow from the data

• Open near the median, not near the extremes. Half the archive is below $9.99 and nine in ten items are below $18.49.
• End every guess in .99 or .49 until the arrows force you off it.
• Use size and brand before you use intuition. A two-pack or a 4 lb bag is not priced like its single-unit cousin.
• Once you are yellow, halve the remaining distance each time instead of jumping across the band.
• Treat an item that looks like furniture or a seasonal special as the exception it is: those rows are why the mean is so far above the median.
• The full method is on the tips page, and the exact colour rules are on how to play.

Other Costco and price games

Costcodle is not the only game in this corner. Scrandle compares food items, Pricedle is a name you will see in searches with no playable host this archive could confirm, and the wider daily-puzzle world runs on the same habits. The games like Costcodle page covers what is actually playable and where each one lives, without pretending an unverified domain is official.

Keep playing against these numbers

Reading the distribution is one thing; recalling it under six guesses is another. Costcodle Unlimited is this archive's own practice game: it deals items from the same published rows as a run of five, in an endless session, or as a replay of any single day, and it keeps a separate practice record so your daily streak is untouched. If you would rather look up one specific day, the archive index has every month back to 2023.