Costcodle Unlimited

You get the name and size of one item and a line that says where and when its price was recorded. Type what you think the price was, in dollars, and press Guess. Each guess lands on a price line with an arrow that says higher or lower and a word, close or far, that says how near you are. Get inside the winning range and you win; run out of guesses and the price is shown. Press Next puzzle for another item as often as you like.

Easy gives 6 guesses and wins within 10% of the price. Medium gives 6 guesses and wins within 5%. Hard gives 5 guesses and wins within 3%. A guess that is not a number, has more than two decimals, or repeats an earlier one is turned down with a note and does not use up a guess. Hint is free: it marks a band on the price line that holds the price, 3 times at most, and the band gets narrower each time (2 times as wide at the top as at the bottom, then 1.4 times as wide at the top as at the bottom, then 1.15 times as wide at the top as at the bottom).

The arrow points the way to go: up means the price is higher than your guess, down means it is lower. The word beside it says how near you are: hit means you are inside the winning range, close means you are within 25% of the price, and far means you are further off than that. Close is a solid label and far is a hatched outline, and the pins on the price line follow the same two looks, so you never need to tell colours apart.

Yes. Press Next puzzle for another item at the same level, with no sign-up and no daily limit. There are 300 items in the table and the ones you saw most recently are skipped. Switch to Daily if you would rather have the one item everybody gets today.

They are real prices that shoppers typed in, not an official Costco list. Each one comes from Open Prices, the open price database from Open Food Facts, where people record what they paid or saw on a shelf tag at a particular store on a particular day. The 300 items here were recorded at Costco warehouses in 22 US cities over the 12 months before the table was built, in dollars and not on sale. The data is published under the Open Database License; see the dataset page. We never copy anything from costco.com.

Because each price is one person’s record from one warehouse on one day, and the line on the item tag tells you which: the city, the state and the month. Prices differ between warehouses and change over time, and a shopper can mistype a figure, so treat the answer as what was recorded then, not what you will pay today.

No. The Dles is an independent site, and Costcodle Unlimited is an independent fan game we wrote ourselves, with our own look, our own levels and a new item every time you press Next. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Costco Wholesale Corporation, and it uses no Costco logo, colours or product photos.

According to the original’s own page and its public code on GitHub, it first appeared in September 2023. It is a different game from this one, which was written separately for this site with its own data.

No. Your streak, your best time on each level and the game you are in are saved in this browser, so there is nothing to sign up for. Clearing the site data in your browser, or switching to another browser or device, starts them again.