About
Price per kg shows what things cost per kilogram, in South African rand. One unit for everything, so a phone, a truffle and a bag of cement sit on the same scale.
What R/kg means here
The shelf price of a pack, divided by the mass of what is in it. Nothing is adjusted for quality, grade or how much of the pack you would actually use. It is the arithmetic and no more:
price paid ÷ kilograms in the pack = R/kg
The figure is computed when the site is built, from the price and the pack size in the item's file. It is never typed in by hand, so it cannot drift away from the two numbers it comes from.
The two lanes
Most of this site is a daily index: a handful of sources that publish their own price lists, read once a day, one request each, and kept as one file per source per trading day. Nothing is re-read and nothing is rewritten, so every figure on an item's history page is the figure that source published that day.
Beside it is a smaller curated lane — items looked up by hand because they are odd, funny or extreme. Those are the ones that carry a caption, and they are the ones the source rule below applies to.
Where the index comes from
| Source | Items | Read | How R/kg is worked out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cape Town Market | 589 | daily | average price per container ÷ container mass |
| Joburg Market | 133 | daily | value sold ÷ kg sold, the day column only |
| RPO carcass prices | 8 | weekly | already R/kg by carcass grade |
| Makro food | 31 | weekly | shelf price ÷ pack mass parsed from the product title |
Each source is read once per run, with a browser-like user agent and a twenty-second ceiling. There are no retries and nothing is crawled beyond the single page listed above. A source that publishes a pack size we cannot read in kilograms — a six-pack of one-litre milk, say — is left out rather than converted at a guessed density.
The source rule
This is the rule for the curated lane. An item is only published if it passes one of two tests:
- at least one source is a named South African retailer's own page, or
- two or more sources each carry their own price and pack size, and the R/kg those imply agree within 10%.
An item that meets neither is dropped. The check runs as part of the build, so a price that cannot be backed up does not reach this site at all.
Every item carries its source link and the date the price was seen. Prices go stale — the date is there so you can judge how stale.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, the source link is the place to start. Send the corrected page and the date you saw it.
Advertising
There is one reserved ad slot in the layout and it is empty. It stays empty until there is enough traffic to be worth anyone's money. No trackers, no analytics, no third-party scripts on any page.
Advertisers: ads@priceperkg.co.za