Is it just me, or is $269 monstrously expensive for some injection moulded plastic, plastic geared servo motors, an arduino compatible board, a battery and some connectivity modules?
The bill of materials might not come close to that number, but materials are not the only cost when creating a hardware product. In your end price you need to factor in stuff like time spent on research, designing, testing, prototyping, writing & debugging software. Then there's manufacturing, packaging, storage, marketing and probably others. When you take all these into account plus the fact that this will not sell in millions of units, the price suddenly doesn't seem that high.
And from a consumer point of view - a very technical person could probably pull off something similar to this, but the amount of hours a project like this would take a single person is probably in the hundreds and you would not approach the quality of this unless you invested a lot of money into equipment (assuming you don't own high quality 3d printers and other things required to build this).
In addition to the points you raised, one of the big challenges is to manage the supply chain and the bill of materials. For example, during covid, we faced the challenges of chip shortage.
For any hobbyist project, people don't really need to worry about things at scale.
Your parent should really check out the BOM on his iPhone or MacBook before complaining about $270 being "monstrously expensive" hardware. And all those gadgets benefit from high volume discounts on parts, decades of sunk R&D costs and the volume economies of scale, assembled by sweatshop workers, not niche low volume production runs for enthusiasts like this one.
The price of Pizza at your local non-fast-food restaurant is also significantly higher than that of the bulk raw ingredients it's made of. Now also try adding the R&D costs of inventing the Pizza to that see where that gets you.
Kind of, compared to high-volume products most consumers are used to see. R&D gets expensive fast.
Just try designing these up to first partial prototype and try calculating cumulative man-hour spent x local minimum wages x highly optimistic sales^-1 = pure R&D cost per unit before any manufacturing or even design reviews. It's not going to make a lot of commercial sense.
3D printing people sometimes says dollar stores makes them feel defeated. I'm not yet at that level but it's true, a 10-pack ball point pens at $1 makes very little sense if you knew.
I presume the value is in the associated open source software. You could obviously build your own for less in hardware costs, but once you've put in the effort of doing so, you will have spent far more of your time on the project than the cost of the ready-made product. You're paying for the bundling and the convenience.
I wouldn't say it is monstrously expensive, but it is kind of underwhelming at that price point. It doesn't even have three degrees of freedom on its legs, which is what I would expect on a basic quadruped.
Bittle has a tiny body, but it has strong and fast servos for running and even backflipping(check this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRE-sp05ia8&list=TLGG0bKEfuY...). We custom-designed our own high-quality servos which are half of the prices of any comparable servos.
We already had a prototype with 3 degrees of freedom on the legs. But the structural complexity and price would have increased substantially. We are not releasing it at this moment.
A luxury product for early adopters that looks great and works out of the box does not seem roughly the same to me than a device you still ultimately have to calibrate, expand (the default model of this doesn't even have a camera iirc) and program loads to do anything.
I'm not sure that is a good comparison. My old car cost ~$500 and weighed about 1000kg. If anything that is a comment on consumerism and not the value of things.
The value of this platform comes from the R&D, scale, support, packaged software, etc, etc.
Assuming they sell 10000 units at an average ~$300. At that scale likely a $100 of each unit is in parts/tooling, then assembly/flashing/testing. That's approximately $20mn to be split by:
2. Investors probably threw in $4mn along the way and look to claw that back (couldn't find investment info on a quick search).
3. Tax appears to be ~20% in most places, so 20% of $30mn is $6mn.
Leaving approximately $6mn, everybody gets a bump and they are left with enough to expand and run the company for ~2-4 years without needing to raise additional investment. That's a lot of pressure to get a new product out there.
And from a consumer point of view - a very technical person could probably pull off something similar to this, but the amount of hours a project like this would take a single person is probably in the hundreds and you would not approach the quality of this unless you invested a lot of money into equipment (assuming you don't own high quality 3d printers and other things required to build this).