What a Published Robot Price Is Actually Worth

We have spent a lot of this year on vendors who *hide* prices — why they do it, and who fills the vacuum with invented numbers. Today's question is narrower and, for a buyer with a live project, more useful: among the vendors and dealers who actually do publish a number, what is that number worth?

The honest answer, after a day spent pricing the same parts in three places, is that "published price" covers at least four different objects, and only one of them behaves the way buyers assume.

Test 1: 21 identical SKUs, two dealers

OnRobot does not publish prices; its distributors do. On 4 August 2026 we read the full OnRobot catalogue at Automation Distribution (a BigCommerce store, 120 SKUs, add-to-cart live) and at Thinkbot Solutions (Shopify, 57 SKUs, USD confirmed at the cart). Twenty-one SKUs appear at both.

If published dealer prices reflected each dealer's own cost, freight, volume and appetite, the ratio between them would scatter. It does not. It falls into two clusters so tight they are almost certainly arithmetic:

Fifteen products — a magnetic gripper, a sander, a screwdriver, a seventh-axis elevator, brackets, a distancer kit costing $95 — priced within a fifth of a percentage point of the same multiple. That does not happen by negotiation.

More telling is which products landed in cluster B: RG2, RG6, RG2-FT, VG10, and the single and dual Quick Changers. That is OnRobot's original, pre-merger product line. Everything in cluster A is newer. Our view: these are not two dealers pricing independently; they are two dealers applying different standard multipliers to the same invisible manufacturer list, and the list itself has a legacy tier and a current tier. The number you see is a formula output, not an offer — which is exactly why it will not survive contact with a purchase order for ten units.

Test 2: the cheapest dealer is often the stalest one

A third dealer, Southwestern PTS, lists 19 OnRobot SKUs and looks like the bargain of the three. Split its prices against Thinkbot's and the same two-population structure appears, but with a different meaning:

• Seven SKUs — again RG2, RG6, RG2-FT, VG10, VGC10, and both Quick Changers — sit at 0.9806-0.9816 of Thinkbot. A genuine, consistent ~1.9% lower list.
• Six others sit at 0.5956-0.7814: the 3FG15 at $4,360 against $6,030, the Screwdriver at $6,445 against $8,935, the Eyes vision system at $4,475 against $7,513.

A dealer does not discount one product line by 2% and another by 40% at random. Our view: the tight cluster is the dealer's real current list, and the loose cluster is a catalogue that stopped being updated. This is the same failure mode we documented in reverse when tracking service-robot dealer list prices over eight days — the number on the page has a date attached, and nobody writes the date on the page.

For a buyer, the practical consequence is unpleasant: the cheapest published price in a category is, disproportionately, the one least likely to still be honoured.

Test 3: $0.00, with a working Add to Cart button

At the same distributor, five SCHUNK tool-changer adapter kits are listed at $0.00 — each with a live Add to Cart control. In our pull of Vention's design library, three published designs also priced at $0.00, and two more came in under $60 for what are described as robot designs.

We have now catalogued five shapes of placeholder masquerading as a price: several different machines sharing one identical figure, $0.01, $0.00, a round number large enough to look deliberate, and — new today — $0.00 attached to a functioning checkout path. Each of these is a contact form wearing a price's clothes, and each gets scraped by aggregators and, increasingly, by answer engines. That is the pipeline we traced in AI-generated robot prices versus what the dealer page says.

The counter-example: publishing the basis, not just the number

One vendor in this week's research does something different. Vention prints a live price for every published work-cell design *and* the itemised bill of materials underneath it. You can add the parts up yourself.

That auditability immediately does something no marketing page would volunteer: it shows that Vention's modular designs list 3.7-5.3% above the sum of their own parts, while its turnkey designs list 37.0-58.2% above theirs, with a "Ready to Operate Support Bundle - Full Deployment" section attached to the turnkey pages and absent from the modular ones. The gap is disclosed, explicable, and checkable in about four minutes. We put the full table in our Vention cell price guide.

Our view: this is the distinction that matters. Publishing a price is a marketing decision; publishing the basis for it is an accountability one, and only the second kind of number can be verified by the person spending the money. Standard Bots, igus and Hilti publish figures we can read; when we checked Standard Bots in July its own homepage and product page disagreed by $2,500 on the same machine, and when we checked Trossen in August its marketing page and its own store disagreed by 29.4% on the same workstation. Published, in both cases. Auditable, in neither.

Four questions to ask of any published robot price

1. Is there a working cart? A price with a checkout path is a claim someone has to honour. A price next to "Request a quote" is an anchor.
2. Does the same seller show it twice? Body copy, meta description, catalogue tile and manufacturer page routinely disagree — we have found 29%, 36% and 72% gaps *within a single seller* this summer.
3. Does it move with its neighbours? Price two or three SKUs from the same brand at two dealers. If the ratios agree to a decimal place, you are reading a list, not an offer. If one line is 30% adrift, that line is stale.
4. Can you add it up? If a vendor shows the parts as well as the total, you can test the total. If it shows only the total, you are trusting it.

None of this argues against buying from vendors who publish. It argues for reading what they publish as evidence with a provenance, rather than as a quotation. The industry's problem is no longer only that prices are hidden — it is that the visible ones are treated as equivalent when they are not.

Sources

• OnRobot catalogue with checkout prices, Automation Distribution: https://www.automationdistribution.com/onrobot/
• SCHUNK catalogue, including the $0.00 tool-changer adapter kits: https://www.automationdistribution.com/schunk/
• OnRobot grippers, Thinkbot Solutions (Shopify, USD confirmed at cart): https://thinkbotsolutions.com/collections/onrobot-grippers
• OnRobot listings, Southwestern PTS: https://toolsandergonomics.com/collections/ergonomic-arms/onrobot
• OnRobot product range, no prices published by the manufacturer: https://onrobot.com/en/products
• Vention turnkey cobot palletizer, with bill of materials and "Ready to Operate Support Bundle": https://vention.com/designs/ur-medium-payload-fixed-cobot-single-palletizer-fenceless-with-infeed-turnkey-305018
• Vention modular machine tending cell, bill of materials, no support bundle section: https://vention.com/designs/universal-robots-machine-tending-collaborative-robot-cell-cart-274766
• Standard Bots pricing: https://standardbots.com/
• Our July analysis of why cobot prices are hidden: https://www.grabarobot.com/blog/why-cobot-prices-are-hidden-2026/