About

What This Is

lanthanides.io is an independent, open-access pricing and intelligence platform for rare earth elements and strategic metals, built and maintained by an independent researcher. It tracks real-world prices with full source provenance — every price is tied to a specific seller, date, quantity, and verification status.

The site covers 31 elements across four categories: light rare earths, heavy rare earths, strategic metals, and semiconductor metals. Price data is sourced from retail distributors, industrial wholesalers, and commodity benchmarks, then normalised to USD per kilogram.

Motivation

Rare earth pricing is fragmented, paywalled, and disconnected across market tiers. Commodity benchmarks from major reporting agencies sit behind expensive subscriptions. Retail prices vary by orders of magnitude depending on form, purity, and quantity. Chinese regulatory developments — which fundamentally determine supply availability for heavy rare earths — are poorly tracked in English-language sources.

This project exists because procurement analysts, researchers, and supply chain professionals need a single reference point that is transparent about what it shows, where it comes from, and what it doesn't know.

Principles

No fabricated data
Every price in the database has a source. Empty fields mean "not yet collected," never "estimated."
Two-tier pricing
Retail reference prices and bulk commodity benchmarks are tracked separately. They represent structurally different markets and are never averaged together.
Source provenance
Each price record includes the seller, country, date, form, purity, quantity, confidence score, and verification status. The full data is visible on every element page.
Open access
No subscriptions, no paywalls. Content is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Code is MIT.

Data Coverage

31 Elements tracked
238 Price records
5 Data sources
11 Policy events

Community Contributions

lanthanides.io is open to contributions from researchers, analysts, procurement professionals, and anyone with sourced pricing data or market intelligence for rare earths and strategic metals.

You can contribute by:

All contributions must be factual, sourced, and verifiable. See the full contribution guide for data formats, source requirements, and local setup instructions.

Contact

For data corrections, source submissions, or questions: mironovb@berea.edu

To contribute price data, see the contribution guide or the Sources page for the current registry. To understand how data is processed, see Methodology.