What robots actually cost
The purchase price is the first number, not the cost. Certification, integration, spares, service, tariffs and payment terms land on top. This section deals with that second half — and with how a payback period should honestly be calculated.
Why price data is hard to write about
Robotics has no published pricing. Unlike forklifts or racking — mature categories with price books — you cannot look up an official rate, most tender outcomes stay private, and vendors have every reason to keep it that way.
So the price figures in circulation come from four places, and they are not equally useful:
| Source | Grade | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor-published (site, whitepaper, trade show) | C | Usually a "from" price or a superseded model, and it moves with project size |
| Trade press and secondary articles | C | Copied between outlets; the earliest source is often untraceable |
| Public tender and government procurement records | A | Checkable, includes configuration and quantity — rare, but the only hard source |
| Listed-company disclosure (average selling price, gross margin) | A | Supports a price band, but coarse and mixed across product lines |
We prioritise the bottom two. We would rather publish fewer numbers than hand you one you cannot check — because you are going to put it in a budget, or use it to negotiate.
What this section will contain
- Price bands by category — whole machine, white-label chassis, and per-pick pricing, each with its range, its scale of application, and its source on the same line
- All-in cost structure — what lands on top of a quote every time: certification, integration and commissioning, spares, downtime risk, software subscription
- How to compute a payback period — including whose wage you compare against, whether overtime and turnover count, and whether throughput differences are modelled
- Purchase versus per-pick — cash-flow difference between the two routes for the same requirement, and which scale suits each
Any page offering that single figure has already decided your configuration, scale, port and delivery route on your behalf. Change any one of the four and the answer moves by a factor of three. A breakdown showing which blocks the money goes into, and what each block depends on is more useful than a number that pretends those variables don't exist.
Available now
This section is being built. Publication follows verifiability, not a calendar.