Almost nobody publishes what a finished robot work cell costs. Arm vendors quote arms; integrators quote projects. Vention, a Montreal company that sells modular aluminum-extrusion automation with an online CAD configurator, is the exception: every published design carries a live price, and — unusually — the itemised bill of materials behind it.
We pulled 478 robot-related designs from Vention's public design library on 4 August 2026. Every one returned priceCurrency: USD, and on the twelve designs we opened individually the headline price matched the page's own US regional total exactly. Prices below are those readings, not quotes.
What a Vention cell costs, by application
| Application | Designs | Low | Median | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine tending | 87 | $872.17 | $9,935.31 | $116,828.49 |
| Palletizing | 46 | $3,029.44 | $17,386.79 | $291,917.55 |
| Bases, pedestals, carts | 106 | $371.45 | $2,375.66 | $138,001.76 |
| Conveyor-fed cells | 16 | $1,081.80 | $18,816.56 | $116,635.28 |
| 7th-axis rails / range extenders | 8 | $9,157.58 | $10,863.78 | $164,728.78 |
The first thing to internalise is that "machine tending cell" spans 134x on the same vendor's own price list. The $872.17 entry is a mobile stand for a UR3 — furniture. The $116,828.49 entry is a full application mock-up. A price you find quoted for "a machine tending cell" is meaningless without knowing which end of that range it sits at.
The arm is most of the cell
Because Vention publishes the BOM with per-line prices, you can decompose the cell. Here are twelve designs read on the same day, listed price against the sum of their own parts list:
| Design | Listed | Sum of BOM | Uplift | Robot arm | Arm % of BOM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ABB GoFa mobile MT cell | $7,988.32 | $7,630.82 | +4.7% | none included | 0% |
| Machine tending robot station | $14,340.72 | $13,824.38 | +3.7% | none included | 0% |
| UR5e inspection cell w/ conveyor | $43,919.90 | $42,173.90 | +4.1% | UR5e $34,527.00 | 81.9% |
| UR10e MT workstation, flat tray | $60,652.67 | $58,384.43 | +3.9% | UR10e $44,636.00 | 76.5% |
| Mobile UR MT cobot cell | $61,237.83 | $58,139.02 | +5.3% | UR10e $44,636.00 | 76.8% |
| FANUC CRX MT workstation | $73,811.29 | $70,945.11 | +4.0% | CRX-10iA/L $56,931.82 | 80.2% |
| UR20 sanding / finishing cell | $76,896.88 | $73,459.00 | +4.7% | UR20 $62,990.00 | 85.7% |
| Doosan H-series MT workstation | $79,575.95 | $76,123.74 | +4.5% | H2017 $55,500.00 | 72.9% |
| UR cobot palletizer, fenceless (turnkey) | $135,984.72 | $99,256.92 | **+37.0%** | UR10e $44,636.00 | 45.0% |
| FANUC cobot palletizer, fenced (turnkey) | $181,418.80 | $128,633.64 | **+41.0%** | CRX-30iA $67,988.64 | 52.9% |
| FANUC M-710iC/45M palletizer (turnkey) | $271,151.40 | $171,345.60 | **+58.2%** | M-710iC/45M $80,750.00 | 47.1% |
| FANUC M-20iD/35 palletizer (turnkey) | $291,917.55 | $189,247.46 | **+54.3%** | M-20iD/35 $86,245.00 | 45.6% |
Two findings fall out of that table.
On a modular cell, the mechanical hardware is small change. Strip the arm out of the UR10e flat-tray workstation and everything else — pedestal, extrusions, gussets, casters, tooling plates, tool changer, gripper — is 23.5% of the parts cost. On the UR20 sanding cell it is 14.3%. If you are budgeting from an arm quote, the frame is not what breaks the budget.
The 20-40% "integration tax" is a turnkey-tier phenomenon, not a universal one. Vention's modular designs list 3.7-5.3% above the sum of their own parts. Its turnkey designs list 37.0-58.2% above — and those pages carry an explicitly named section, "Ready to Operate Support Bundle … Full Deployment," that the modular pages do not have. Same vendor, same day, same currency: the surcharge tracks whether someone else is commissioning the cell, and at the top end it exceeds the rule of thumb we have used in our own five-year TCO model.
Software is a visible line, too. Both cobot palletizers carry MachineApp - Palletizer at $17,476.37; the two industrial FANUC palletizers carry $25,684.37 of software (the palletizer app plus MachineMotion AI at $7,476.00 and a FANUC add-on bundle at $8,208.00). That is more than most grippers cost.
Arm prices, published
A side effect of the open BOM: Vention prints a price for each partner arm it resells.
| Arm | Price in BOM |
|---|---|
| Universal Robots UR5e | $34,527.00 |
| Universal Robots UR10e | $44,636.00 |
| Universal Robots UR20 | $62,990.00 |
| Doosan H2017 | $55,500.00 |
| FANUC CRX-10iA/L | $56,931.82 |
| FANUC CRX-30iA | $67,988.64 |
| FANUC M-710iC/45M | $80,750.00 |
| FANUC M-20iD/35 | $86,245.00 |
These are worth holding against other sellers. The UR5e here is $34,527.00; the US distributor catalogue we priced on 28 July listed UR5e configurations at $39,083.16-$43,544.43, so Vention's line is 11.7-20.7% below it. The same cross-check works on tooling: a UR cell in this set carries an OnRobot RG6 at $6,920.00, which sits between the $6,683.00 and $7,594.43 that two other US dealers were asking for the same gripper the same day (see our OnRobot price guide).
How to read these prices before you budget
- Check whether a robot is in the box. Two of the twelve designs above are called cells or stations and contain no arm at all. The $14,340.72 "machine tending robot station" is mostly a $7,585.00 telescopic lift column.
- Check who authored the design. The library mixes Vention-official, organisation and community designs. A community design's price is the sum of whatever that user dropped into the CAD — not a curated configuration.
- Three designs in our pull priced at $0.00. Treat those as placeholders, not free cells; we cover the pattern in our piece on what a published robot price is worth.
- Listed prices exclude tax, freight and duty, and the modular tier excludes deployment. The turnkey tier is where commissioning is priced in.
For buyers comparing this route against a bare arm plus an integrator, the useful takeaway is that the hardware around a cobot is cheap and the labour around it is not — which is exactly the shape the turnkey column shows. Browse collaborative robots and palletizing robots for sourcing options.
*Prices read from vention.com on 4 August 2026, USD as returned by the site. Figures are list readings for published designs and are not quotations.*
