Deposits, lead times and warranties: reading a humanoid order sheet

We keep a buy record for 42 humanoids, each checked on 4 September 2026. Every record has the same twelve fields: price, price range, price basis, channel, seller, configurations, lead time, shipping regions, shipping cost, deposit, monthly subscription and warranty. Most of them are empty. Two records give a deposit. Four give a monthly rate. One gives a warranty term. One gives a shipping cost. None gives a lead time in days or weeks.

This article is about the fields, not the prices. The price bands are in How much does a humanoid robot cost, and why only 44 of 182 machines can be ordered at all is in 44 you can order, 138 you cannot.

Checkout, quote form, or nothing at all

Twenty-nine of the 42 records point at a page where you can buy: 17 in the maker’s own store, 7 at an authorised distributor, 5 on a marketplace. Eight are a sales contact, which means a form and a conversation. One, the Unitree H2, is a waitlist with a $29,900 list price and no buy button; our note calls it a signal of intent, not an offer. Four have no order path at all: Atlas, Optimus V3, Figure 03 and Apollo.

The channel decides how much the sheet tells you. Of the 29 with a checkout, 5 list named configurations, 9 give a price range, and 8 carry a price the maker itself published. Both deposits, the one warranty and the one shipping cost in the whole record sit in the maker’s-own-store column. The 13 quote-side records list zero configurations, zero shipping costs and zero warranties. Seven of them still carry a number, every one reported or estimated, from the H2 at $29,900 to the $250,000 estimate for Digit. A quote channel with a price attached is a price someone else paid, or said they did.

Two deposits, four monthly rates

The two deposits are $200 at 1X and $250 at Weave Robotics, both refundable according to the sellers: 1.0 percent and 3.1 percent of the purchase price. The four monthly rates run from $449 to $8,500. Divide the purchase price by the monthly rate and you get the month at which renting has cost as much as buying: 17.8 months for Isaac 1, 40.1 months for NEO, 13.6 to 24.0 months for the Walker S2 depending on which end of the reported range you believe, and 29.4 months for Digit against an estimate Agility Robotics has never confirmed. None of the four sheets says what happens to the machine, the software or the data at the end of that month.

What the monthly rate buys also differs. NEO’s record says teleoperation yes: 1X staff can drive it with the owner’s permission for tasks it cannot do alone. Isaac 1 is partial: Weave says remote operators step in when the robot cannot finish. Walker S2 and Digit are both partial in our record. On a subscription you pay every month for a machine and, some of the time, for the person behind it; The $20,000 body goes through the NEO sheet line by line.

No one publishes a lead time in weeks

The lead-time field is filled on all 42 records, and not one entry contains a number of days, weeks or months. This is what the field holds instead.

“In stock” is the most common entry, on 10 records, and it is a claim about a shelf, not about your door. The Unitree G1 is “backordered, ships when restocked” on Unitree’s own store, with no restock date. The three records with a date give a year. NEO says US deliveries start in 2026. Isaac 1 says California in autumn 2026 and the wider United States through 2027. Boston Dynamics says select early adopters get Atlas in 2027, and has no order page. A year is a promise about the calendar. A lead time is a promise about your order. The record holds three of the first and none of the second.

One warranty, one shipping cost, twelve configurations

The warranty field is filled once in 42 records: NEO, three years on the Early Access purchase. Forty-one records, including every machine above $20,000 and every distributor and marketplace listing, say nothing. The shipping-cost field is also filled once. Unitree lists $300 to $1,200 for the G1, which is 2.2 to 8.9 percent on top of the $13,500 base price, the only record where the landed cost can be worked out from the seller’s page. The EngineAI PM01 note is the other side of that: bought mostly through Chinese marketplaces, which means import duty and no local support.

Configurations are the field that moves the price most and appears least. Five records list named configurations, 12 in total: three each for the Unitree R1 and the G1, two each for the Booster T1, Reachy 2 and Reachy Mini. The spread from the bottom configuration to the top is 1.38 times on the R1, 1.50 on the Reachy Mini, 1.71 on the T1, 1.97 on the Reachy 2 and 5.47 on the G1, whose ladder we took apart in Unitree G1 at $13,500. Thirteen records give a range without naming what sits at either end. The other 29 give one number and no configuration, so you do not know what the number is for.

Where it ships from, and whether it ships to you

The shipping-regions field mentions a route outside the home market on 27 records. Nineteen say “Global” with no qualifier. Eight hang a condition on it, and the condition is the part that costs money. Four say China, then “Global via freight”: the PM01, AgiBot Lingxi X2, Noetix N2 and Dobot Atom. You arrange the freight. Three say China, then “Global via sales”: Fourier GR-2, Fourier GR-3 and the Walker S2; the Fourier note says institutional sales only, with no North American retail channel. The Kondo KHR-3HV ships from Japan through hobby dealers.

Seven records ship inside China only, among them the EngineAI T800 and the Chery Mornine, both on JD.com. Four ship to the United States only: the two home robots, Digit, and the $999 Z-Bot. Four ship nowhere.

Who you are actually paying

Every official price in the record comes from a maker’s own store, and even there it is a minority. Nine of the 17 store entries carry a price we could only confirm in trade press or a reseller listing, the Unitree R1, both AgiBot store machines and the Noetix N2 among them. Outside the maker’s store, none of the 18 prices is official.

Twelve records, 7 distributor and 5 marketplace, are sold by someone other than the maker. The names that recur: Robotopian on 3 records, the Fourier N1, the Robotera Q5 and the PNDbotics Adam; JD.com on 3, the R1 note, the T800 and the Mornine. Then RBTX for the Q5, RobotShop and Amazon for the ROBOTIS MINI, AliExpress for the R1, and K-Robotics, Generation Robots and Robots International for the Booster T1. The T1 note says the price varies by reseller. The Booster K1 note says reported prices differ by a factor of two depending on seller and configuration, and Booster Robotics publishes neither. The T800 note has one trade listing at $25,000 and another at $40,500 to $80,800. A distributor price is a real price from a real shelf. It is not the same shelf as the next distributor’s.

What to get in writing before the deposit

In order of how often the field is blank in our record, most blank first.

1. Warranty term and what it covers, blank on 41 of 42. Months, parts, labour, and who pays freight on a repair.
2. Shipping cost to your address and who clears customs, blank on 41 of 42. “Global via freight” means you do.
3. Deposit terms, blank on 40 of 42. Refundable or not, until when, and against which configuration.
4. Subscription end terms, blank on 38 of 42. What happens to the machine, the software and the data when you stop paying, and how much of the work a remote operator does.
5. The named configuration, blank on 37 of 42. The price is for a version; get the version’s name and what it leaves out.
6. A delivery month, blank on 42 of 42. A year is not a lead time.

If the seller answers all six, $200 or $250 is a cheap way to hold a place. If the seller answers none, the sheet is still blank, and the deposit should stay in your account until it is filled in.