Ask what a collaborative robot costs and you will get one of three answers. A small number of vendors will tell you. A larger number will send you a contact form. And a third group — sites that do not sell robots at all — will give you a confident, specific, and frequently fabricated number.
We have spent the last two weeks price-checking robot brands one at a time for this site's price guides, and the distribution is stark enough to be worth reporting on its own.
What we actually found
Across the brands we attempted to cost out, the majority were quote-only at every channel we could reach:
- ROKAE (xMate cobot line). The largest independent cobot spec database, Qviro, lists the xMate's specifications and then states outright that it does not provide pricing, directing buyers to the manufacturer or a local supplier.
- Hai Robotics (HaiPick ACR). No published price on the company's product pages or through the integrators that resell it.
- Carbon Robotics (LaserWeeder G2). The official G2 product page describes five machine sizes and a claimed "1–3 year full payback period," then ends at "talk to our team." No number anywhere in the funnel.
- Hanwha (HCR series) and Flexiv (Rizon). We failed to find a single verifiable dollar figure through authorised channels for either.
- Estun and Geek+. Both quote-only for new equipment; the only checkable numbers for Geek+ were second-hand auction prices.
Against that, the brands where a real number exists cluster into a narrow set of channels:
- European e-commerce distributors. Unchained Robotics in Germany publishes ex-VAT prices with add-to-cart on cobots from AUBO, Elite Robots and NEURA — for NEURA, that means a full LARA line from €16,500 to €26,900 and MAiRA M at €39,500, as we detail in our NEURA price guide.
- Direct-to-consumer brands. Anything sold to a homeowner has a price, because it has to. Yarbo lists a $3,999 Core and modules from $299, per our Yarbo price guide.
- A handful of vendors who chose transparency as positioning. Standard Bots publishes "starting at $37,000" for its RO1 on its own site — and then publishes price *ranges* for its competitors, which those competitors do not publish themselves.
Our view: the split is not technical, it is commercial. The same arm that is quote-only in North America is add-to-cart in Germany. Nothing about the hardware changed at the border.
Why vendors hold the number back
Four reasons come up repeatedly, and only two of them are about the buyer.
1. Configuration genuinely varies. A robot arm price is not a solution price. End-effector, fixturing, vision, safety assessment and integration labour routinely dwarf the arm — we modelled that gap line-by-line in our five-year TCO analysis. A vendor that publishes $37,000 will field calls from buyers who budgeted $37,000 for a $120,000 project.
2. Channel margin protection. Where a manufacturer sells through integrators, a public list price caps what the integrator can charge and exposes regional price differences. Silence protects the channel, not the customer.
3. Price as a lead-generation gate. "Request a quote" is a contact capture mechanism first and a pricing mechanism second. This is the reason that is entirely about the seller.
4. Competitive concealment. In a market where Chinese cobots undercut Western list prices substantially — a gap we broke down in why Chinese cobots undercut Western brands — a published Western price is a published disadvantage.
Reasons 1 is legitimate. Reason 2 and 4 are rational. Reason 3 is a tax on the buyer's time.
Who fills the vacuum
Here is the part that should concern vendors. A buyer searching "[brand] robot price" does not stop searching because the manufacturer declined to answer. They click the first result that *does* answer.
In practice, the top of those search results is frequently occupied by content sites that publish price pages for machines they have never quoted, sourced, or touched. The tells are consistent: a precise-looking figure with no named distributor, no quote date, no configuration; identical numbers appearing across several unrelated domains; and "ROI calculators" built on those numbers. We maintain an internal exclusion list of such domains for exactly this reason, and it has grown every week we have run this exercise.
We have also hit a second, newer failure mode: AI-generated search summaries inventing prices that the underlying page does not contain. Two concrete cases from our own research. In one, a summary reported a specific cleaning-robot model at $42,000 with a matching monthly RaaS figure; opening the source page showed a different price entirely. In another, a summary presented the price of a 1998 CNC lathe as the price of a robot. Neither error was visible without opening the original page.
Our view: if you cannot open the page the number came from, you do not have a number. That rule has cost us several planned articles — we abandoned price guides for Estun, Hanwha, Flexiv, Geek+ and Carbon Robotics rather than publish figures we could not stand behind. We would rather have a gap than a fabrication.
How to get a real number anyway
For buyers stuck in this market, four tactics work:
- Use European distributor listings as an anchor. Even if you are buying in the US, an ex-VAT euro price from a distributor with a working checkout tells you the manufacturer's approximate position in the market. It is a floor, not a quote — but it is real.
- Demand a line-item quote, not a bundle. Insist on separate lines for arm, controller, end-effector, safety, and integration hours. Vendors who resist this are usually hiding integration margin, not protecting you from confusion.
- Ask for ex-works and delivered separately. Freight, duty and installation are where quotes quietly diverge from the number you were told on the phone.
- Treat undated prices as expired. Robot pricing has moved materially in the last 18 months, particularly at the low end. A price page with no "as of" date is not a source.
The brands publishing numbers are not doing it out of generosity. They are doing it because the buyer who can budget a project without a sales call is the buyer who starts the project. In a market this opaque, that is a competitive weapon — and most of the industry is choosing not to pick it up.
Sources
- Qviro — ROKAE xMate product page (states no pricing provided)
- Carbon Robotics — LaserWeeder G2 product page
- Unchained Robotics — NEURA LARA 8 listing
- Unchained Robotics — NEURA MAiRA listing
- Standard Bots — collaborative robot price guide
- Yarbo — official store module pricing
- Hai Robotics — HaiPick product pages
