Most Nigerian phone price pages don’t tell you where the number came from, when it was last checked, or what condition it applies to. That’s the problem Cost.ng exists to fix. This page explains exactly how we arrive at every figure we publish, and what each one does and does not mean.
What a Cost.ng price actually is
Every price we publish is a range, not a single number. For each device, storage size and condition, we show three figures:
- Low: the cheapest genuine offer we could verify, from a seller we would actually send a reader to.
- Typical: the middle of the verified market. This is the number to plan your budget around.
- High: the upper end of mainstream retail. Paying above this means you’re paying for convenience, location or warranty, not for the phone.
We publish a range because Nigeria does not have one price. The same handset can differ by hundreds of thousands of naira depending on how it entered the country, what condition it’s in, which city you’re buying in, and what the exchange rate did that month. A single number would be tidier. It would also be wrong most of the time.
The conditions we price separately
Most price sites quote only new, sealed retail. In practice, a large share of phones bought in Nigeria are not new. We price each condition as its own market, because that’s how they behave.
| Condition | What it means | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| New (sealed) | Factory sealed, never opened, with warranty | Highest price. Warranty terms vary widely by seller, confirm before paying |
| Open box | Opened but unused, display units, cancelled orders, returns | Typically a modest discount to sealed for a functionally new device |
| UK-used (Tokunbo) | Previously owned abroad, usually UK, US or EU, then imported | The widest spread of any condition. Grade matters far more than age |
| Nigerian-used | Previously owned and used within Nigeria | Usually below UK-used of the same grade. Local warranty is rare |
| Refurbished | Professionally repaired and restored; may contain replacement parts | Ask which parts were replaced. A refurbished unit with an original screen is a different product from one without |
How we grade used phones
“UK-used” on its own tells you almost nothing. Two phones sold under that label can be four years apart in real condition. Where a seller provides enough detail to grade a device, we sort it into one of three grades and price each grade separately.
| Grade | Battery health | Cosmetic condition | Parts |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 90% or above | No visible scratches; frame and screen clean | All original |
| B | 85 to 89% | Light scuffs on the frame or edges; screen unmarked | All original |
| C | Below 85%, or not reported | Visible scratches, dents or marks on the screen | May include a replaced screen or battery |
One honest limitation: iPhones report battery health natively, so we can usually grade them properly. Most Android handsets do not, and sellers rarely measure it. Where battery health is genuinely unknown, we say so on the page instead of guessing a grade.
Where our prices come from
We draw from three source categories, and we weight them differently:
- Published retailer pricing: Nigerian online and offline retailers that display prices publicly. The most reliable source for new and sealed stock.
- Active marketplace listings: live classified and marketplace listings, filtered as described below. The primary source for used and Tokunbo pricing, because that market barely exists in formal retail.
- Direct dealer quotes: prices quoted to us by named dealers in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. The only reliable source for street-level pricing.
We exclude expired listings, out-of-stock items, listings that don’t state a condition, bundles priced as a single unit, and listings whose price sits so far from the rest of the market that it is almost certainly a data-entry error or a bait listing.
City pricing
Where we have enough verified offers, we publish price variance across three markets:
- Lagos: Computer Village and Ikeja. Usually the cheapest market, because it’s where most stock enters the country.
- Abuja: Wuse and Banex. Typically carries a premium over Lagos.
- Port Harcourt: typically the highest of the three.
Where we don’t have enough verified offers in a city to publish a figure responsibly, we leave it blank and say why. We would rather show a gap than an estimate dressed up as data.
How often prices are updated
Every price on this site carries the date it was last verified. Not the date the article was published, the date that specific number was last checked.
| Device category | Re-verification cycle |
|---|---|
| Current flagships and high-demand models | First on every sweep |
| Mid-range and budget models | On the next full sweep |
| Older and discontinued models | We do not publish a fixed re-verification interval we cannot guarantee. Every page carries the date it was last checked, so you can always see how fresh a figure is before you act on it. |
When a price passes its re-verification window, we mark it as stale on the page rather than leaving it sitting there looking current. A number you can’t trust the age of is worse than no number at all.
Why Nigerian phone prices move
- The exchange rate. Almost every phone sold in Nigeria is imported and priced against the dollar. When the naira moves, retail prices follow, usually within weeks.
- Import duties and clearing costs. Changes at the ports feed through to shelf prices.
- Supply. A new flagship launch pushes down the price of the model it replaces, often sharply, and often before the new one is widely available here.
- Seasonal demand. Prices firm up around December and ease in the first quarter.
What we will not price
iCloud-locked and carrier-locked devices. We do not publish prices for handsets with an active activation lock or network lock. There is a real market for them in Nigeria. We’re not going to help set a reference price for it. These devices are disproportionately stolen, and the buyer frequently cannot use the phone fully, or at all, after purchase.
We also don’t price counterfeit or clone handsets, or units sold explicitly as faulty or “as-is”.
What we don’t do
- We don’t accept payment to list a price, raise one, or lower one.
- We don’t let sellers write their own entry. Prices are recorded by us, from observed offers.
- We don’t publish invented reviews or testimonials. Where we show buyer sentiment, it’s aggregated from real sources and labelled as such.
- Where we earn from advertising or affiliate links, we disclose it. See our Editorial and Price Accuracy Policy.
Found a price that’s wrong?
Tell us and we’ll check it. The more of this you can include, the faster we can fix it: the device and storage size, the condition, the city, the price you saw, and where you saw it.