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Economics30 Aug 2026 · 4 min

What a $40,000 robot costs per job

Ten dollars an hour of capital, before it has done anything. Most software companies modelling robotics leave this line out entirely.

A humanoid at $40,000 with a 4,000-hour service life consumes $10 of capital for every working hour, whether or not anybody books it. Add energy at 500W and a commercial tariff, add insurance for unattended operation, and the physical cost of an hour of machine labour is real money before a single API call.

Any cost model without those lines is not a cost model. It is a press release.

What one job costs to perform

Cost of one job — warehouse inventory inspection, 45 min on a rover

    Model inference       $0.46
    Compute               $0.81
    Energy                $0.17   estimated
    Robot depreciation    $2.13   estimated
    Insurance             $0.38   estimated
    ─────────────────────────────
  Cost of the machine hour  $3.95

Every job carries this from the moment it exists, accrued from the cost model of the machine that actually did the work — because energy and capital consumption are properties of the robot, not of the job asking for it. A humanoid and a fixed arm doing the same task cost very different amounts to run, and we would rather know which one we sent.

The estimated lines are labelled as estimates in the payload, so nobody tries to reconcile a bank statement against a depreciation model.

Depreciation is per working hour, not per calendar month

A robot sitting on its charger is not wearing out. Straight-lining over calendar time makes idle machines look expensive and busy ones look cheap, which inverts the incentive you want: it rewards leaving capacity unused. Over working hours, utilisation improves margin exactly as it should.

Which is why we price per job

A nightly inspection today is roughly two technicians for three hours — about $300 fully loaded. Pricing against that number rather than against a competitor’s licence is only possible because we can compute what the work actually costs to perform, rather than asserting it.

A $99/month subscription against that job would leave essentially all of the value on the table, and would teach the customer to think of us as a tool rather than as capacity. We are not selling software to a robotics team. We are selling completed work to an operations budget.

A late lesson: our first implementation rounded each accrual to four decimal places, so a seventeen-task job cost exactly $0.00. Every sub-cent line vanished. The ledger now keeps full precision and rounds only for display — a rounding bias in a money path always seems to favour whoever wrote the code.

More

The flywheel, and how it fails silentlyOur data loop was wired, tested, and moving nothing. Every dashboard was green.Why we route models instead of training oneThe obvious move is to train a robot foundation model. It is also how you spend a hundred million dollars reaching parity with something free.