[qurren]

If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%.

Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.

[nsvd2]

Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.

[underlipton]

But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.

[jfaat]

Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...

[yorwba]

The difference is that some of those businesses might buy a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently have employees doing robot work for a human salary.

[aantix]

Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than 20K.

I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.

[drusepth]

I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.

[rendang]

A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr

[brailsafe]

> A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time

Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.

[jader201]

Vehicles, when first invented, were 100% a luxury, not a necessity.

They only became a “necessity” once they went mainstream and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a part of everyday life.

I can certainly see the same thing happening with residential robotics.

[nancyminusone]

Only way I can see that happening is if you somehow get fired for not folding your laundry, in the same way people are fired when their car breaks and they can't make it to work.

[jader201]

At some point, household robots — once they become mainstream — can do things around the home that you depend on, and if/when they break down, prevent you from being able to work/get to work.

Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too much, and interferes with your ability to work and do other things you once had the time to do.

[stef25]

So many people talking like cleaning services don't exist

[si1entstill]

> I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component.

I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.

[aantix]

I'd want cleaning to happen every day during the week/

Probably $80/day for someone to do everything I want done. 20 days a month.

$1,600/month.

It'd take two years, and the robot has paid for itself.

[ACCount37]

People in the US buy cars.

Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.

[cj]

How does it compare to hiring a human?

I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.

That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.

[scotty79]

You'd have to pay me this much to let a human inside my house to do that.

[cj]

Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members.

My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner.

If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients.

That makes it easier for me to trust her.

(It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold)

I would never use random online cleaning services.

[MostlyStable]

My understanding from parents and friends who have a cleaning service...it pretty much depends on a certain baseline level of cleanliness. Most cleaning services don't (and likely wouldn't be able to provide) basic "pick up around the house". They will come into a house that is mostly picked up and sweep, dust, mop, vacuum, etc. but they won't come into a toddler house and put everything away.

I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about. Robots may not be able to do that level of task at all right now, but they will get there.

And of course, that's not even thinking about all the cleaning tasks that would be avoided in between the every-other-week visits.

Having my surfaces be somewhat cleaner every two weeks is worth ~nothing to me. It's by far the easiest and least unpleasant part of cleaning a house. Having a robot that will pick up the detritus of everyday life and put it away, pick up and clean dishes, etc. and do so every single day would be worth an enormous amount of money.

I have no idea how long it will take for robots to get to that point, but whichever company cracks that level first is going to make a lot of money.

[slfnflctd]

This is the part of the thread I was looking for.

Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner compares to a human.

As you point out, the potential for robots far outperforms humans in multiple categories (although clearly not all by any stretch).

I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen discussed much is the competitive advantage this can provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's more time for other things.

[stef25]

> I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about

Costs me 160 / month for 4hrs / week.

[sciencejerk]

Toddlers should learn to pick up their own toys...? Unless we're grooming them for a life of pampered self-absorbed entitlement?

[stevep98]

Totally agree with you on ‘putting stuff away’. Much of the mental effort is trying to organize stuff so it takes space efficiently, and be easy to find it when I need it. If a robot put it away, I don’t really care where. I can just ask it where it is.

[qsera]

>but they will get there.

May be they will. But do you think this because of the LLMs? I don't think LLMs will help. Because it can only generate text.

[qurren]

Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food, unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot is not.

[jryle70]

The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by?

Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.

[scotty79]

People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them doesn't really need to.

[nancyminusone]

You don't even "need" to clean your house (yes, yes, I know). You do need to drive to work.

[NichoPaolucci]

As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc...

I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI.

Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.

[DrScientist]

To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ).

Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.

[si1entstill]

The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k.

People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper.

Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.