Roku Raises Streaming Device Prices by Up to 60% Amid Component Shortages

Roku is raising the prices for its streaming sticks and boxes by up to 60 percent. Roku has updated its website with the new prices. Currently, it is still selling its streaming players at their old MSRPs but lists those prices as sale prices. The new prices are: Roku Streaming Stick: $40 (formerly $30) Roku Streaming Stick Plus: $60 (formerly $40) Roku Streaming Stick 4K: $80 (formerly $50) Roku Ultra: $150 (formerly $100) Roku Streambar SE: $150 (formerly $100) Roku is even upping the price for a bundle that includes a Streaming Stick Plus and a one-month subscription to Fox One. As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price. When I tried buying the devices at their “sale prices,” Roku’s store limited me to three units per model. Other retailers will continue to sell the devices at the lower prices until supply runs out, The Desk reported today. Roku is raising prices in response to the shortage of memory, as well as “other components, caused by the artificial intelligence rush,” The Desk reported, citing a “Roku executive.” This is an about-face from May, when Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood said that the memory shortage is “great” for Roku. During a call with investors, Wood said that the Roku TV operating system “requires significantly less memory and storage” than rivals because Roku has focused on keeping its bill of materials low. “Although there is issues around memory that we have to manage, [the RAM shortage] is generally great for our business because of our bill of materials cost advantage, which allows us to just have a lower cost than … all the competing products. That gap is just widening right now by a pretty wide margin,” Wood said, per a transcript of the call. The executive also noted that the low costs associated with running Roku OS have helped the company win over TV OEMs and retailers. Many tech companies have hiked prices recently due to the memory shortage. On the streaming hardware side, for example, Apple last month raised prices for Apple TV boxes from $129 to $199 for the 64GB version and from $149 to $249 for 128GB. Apple has a reputation for selling high-end devices at a premium, though. Roku, on the other hand, has built a name for itself through affordability. The company may have a harder time getting people to accept higher prices for what have traditionally been viewed as budget products. A Roku representative told The Desk that the company still thinks its devices are competitively priced. “We are doing our best to have great deals like what we have going on right now,” the executive told the publication. Roku’s price hikes come weeks after Fox announced it is buying Roku for an enterprise value of $22 billion. The deal remains subject to regulatory and shareholder approval and is expected to close in 2027.