What is the cheapest humanoid robot?

The price collapse is the category's structural story: from the H1 at $90,000 in 2023, to the G1 at $16,000 in 2024, to the R1 at $5,900 in 2025. Every step down came from the same engineering trick: in-house actuators instead of catalog industrial components. At this price, the buyer is no longer just the lab: it is the university, the content creator and the serious hobbyist.

The honest fine print: cheap doesn't mean useful. The R1 is a development platform that does cartwheels, not a household employee; sub-$2,000 announcements are best read with the demos manual alongside. What each price actually buys, verdicts included, is in our humanoid comparison.