Pixel 9 Pro US carrier pricing leak is just what you didn’t want to hear

With less than a week to go until August 13’s Made by Google event, we’re just days away from getting the full picture on the Pixel 9 family. While leaks and rumors have been very generous over the past few months, giving us a quite solid sense of what to expect from this new hardware, some key questions have persisted — and one of the biggest there concerns pricing. Last year, we got a price hike with the Pixel 8, and it’s felt like the Pixel 9 would repeat that pattern. And while we checked out some leaked European pricing that seemed to confirm that idea, we’ve still been interested in getting some precise figures about what US sales might look like. Today we receive what might be our best sense of that yet, upon the publication of what appears to be T-Mobile Pixel 9 pricing.

This data comes to us from Reddit, where user 5XDylanBISHF shares what looks like Google Shopping search results pulling from T-Mobile (via Android Police). We’re not sure how that might have happened — maybe someone made a database visible a little too early — but it ultimately displays a few price figures for some of the Pixel 9 models we’re expecting:

According to this, sales of the Pixel 9 Pro will start at roughly $1,000 and the new 9 Pro XL will go for at least $1,200. We wouldn’t get too distracted by the presence of both 256GB and 512GB storage options here, as that’s likely the consequence of a free storage upgrade promo.

While that $1,000 pricing matches what we had with the Pixel 8 Pro, remember that this year’s models don’t line up exactly with that old dichotomy, and it’s really the 9 Pro XL that feels like the direct successor to the 8 Pro:

In that light, this would represent a $200 price bump from last year. And although this source stops short of sharing any data on the regular Pixel 9, if Google follows the same approach there, we might expect to see the phone sell for $900 — or $200 more than the $700 the base model Pixel 8 went for.

None of this is what any of us wanted to hear, but at this point, it’s also far from unexpected. As Google’s smartphone hardware ambitions grow, the company’s clearly been positioning Pixel as a more premium brand than shoppers might have seen it just a few years back. At least the Pixel 9 Pro Fold may arrive without any significant change in pricing compared to last year’s inaugural model, with the latest source we’ve heard from indicating it’s likely to sell in the US for the same $1,800.