Robotics deep dive: WHO BUYS A HUMANOID ROBOT? Every humanoid forecast is a supply curve. Units shipped, price per unit, cost per unit falling. The demand side gets left as an exercise for the reader. Start with price, because Unitree publishes one and almost nobody else does. The G1 in the headlines is $17,990 and it is an entertainment and development unit. The EDU research line starts at $43,900. Configurations with three-finger hands and tactile sensing run to $67,900. Now the hour you are buying back. US private industry, transportation and material moving occupations, March 2026: $35.81 per hour worked. $24.66 in wages, $11.15 in benefits. That is the BLS number, not a vendor's. Then the hours the machine can actually give you. A G1 runs about two hours standing and closer to one under manipulation load. Give it spare packs and a swap routine and call it four working hours inside an eight-hour shift. 1,000 robot-hours a year. Somebody has to be standing there when it stops. One operator, paid for the whole shift, spread across k robots. k = 1: supervision costs $71.62 per robot-hour against $35.81 of labour displaced. The machine is a net cost. There is no payback at any purchase price. k = 3: $11,890 saved a year. Payback 3.7 years. k = 10: $28,600 a year. Payback 1.5 years. Cutting the purchase price to $25,000 moves the k=3 case from 3.7 years to 2.1. Moving from one robot per operator to three moves it from never to 3.7. The supervision ratio swings the answer harder than the price does, and the supervision ratio is the intervention rate, which no vendor publishes. Roughly seven in ten of the humanoids Unitree shipped last year went to universities and research institutions. Those buyers are buying lab equipment, and lab equipment does not have a payback period.