Methodology

1. What a price on DJI Index means

Every price on DJI Index is the price that DJI’s official online store for that country showed for one product variant when we checked it. Each price is labelled with the date it was checked. Where the store showed a sale price, the original price it showed is listed next to it.

A price on DJI Index is not a quote. Prices change without notice, and the price in the store’s checkout is the one that applies, so check it on the store before you buy.

Stock is checked only where a store is ranked cheapest. The daily price data has no stock information, and DJI’s stores list prices for variants that are out of stock. So once a day, after the prices are collected, DJI Index opens the store page of the store ranked cheapest for each product variant and records whether that page shows the variant on sale, out of stock or on pre-order. If it is out of stock, the next cheapest store is checked too, up to six stores per variant.

• A store whose page showed the variant out of stock is still listed at its price, labelled “Out of stock” with the date of the check, but it is never called the cheapest and never used for a saving; the next store is.
• A store checked within the last 36 hours carries that result and its date. After 36 hours the result is no longer used, on the page or in your browser.
• Everywhere else, stock is not checked, and the price says so. A store shown as the cheapest without a stock label may be for a variant that store cannot sell you today, so check the store before buying.

2. How prices are collected

Once a day, an automated job run on GitHub Actions reads the public price of each known product variant on DJI’s online store for every country it covers, and about once a week it refreshes the list of variants each store sells. The job:

• identifies itself as “DJIIndexBot/1.0” with a link to our about page;
• sends one request at a time, at least a second apart, and retries only a few times;
• waits when the store asks it to slow down, and stops the run if the store refuses a request, shows a check page or returns something unexpected;
• does not log in, add to cart, place orders, use a browser or get around any block.

If a country’s store cannot be checked, that country is marked as not checked and its earlier prices keep their original check date; they are never relabelled as new.

3. Same variant only

Prices are matched by the barcode number (EAN) of each product variant. Prices sit side by side only when they are for the same variant, so a Fly More Combo is never compared with a base kit, and a bundle with a different controller is a different variant.

4. Currency conversion

Prices are converted with exchange rates from the Frankfurter API, a free public source of daily reference rates. The rates are updated with each daily collection and saved with the site, together with the date of each rate, and every converted amount says which date’s rate it uses. Prices are converted into one currency before they are ranked, so a ranking never compares amounts in different currencies. A price is always labelled with the currency of the store it came from, and a foreign price is never shown as a local one. If a rate is missing, that price is not converted or ranked. Conversions exclude bank and card fees.

5. Freshness

The site is rebuilt after each daily collection, and freshness is worked out when it is built. A price checked more than 72 hours before that is left out of rankings, “cheapest” labels and savings figures, and is shown, if at all, with the date it was checked. Prices are checked once a day and are not updated in between.

6. What a price does not include

• Shipping or delivery charges
• Import duties, customs charges, import VAT or brokerage fees when you bring a product into another country
• Sales tax where the store shows prices before tax (for example in the United States)
• Bank conversion or foreign-transaction fees
• Warranty, return, radio, registration or flight-rule differences
• Coupons, membership prices or trade-in offers
• Stock, except at the store ranked cheapest for each variant (checked once a day): elsewhere DJI Index does not check whether a store has the variant

A lower price in one country is not a claim about total landed cost, legality, warranty coverage or the right purchase for every buyer. Some stores only deliver within their own country.

7. Images

Where a page shows a DJI press photo, it comes from the DJI Europe newsroom on Mynewsdesk, where DJI publishes it under a media-use licence; we record the source page and credit DJI. Where no press photo is available, a page may show a generic picture of the product type, made with an AI image generator and labelled “Illustration (AI-generated)”. It is not a photo of any specific product.

8. Corrections

If a price, variant, conversion or date looks wrong, email [email protected] with the page URL and evidence. See the contact page for details.