The $16K Robot You Can Buy vs. the $250K Robot You Can't

China's Unitree is turning humanoids into products you can actually order. Meanwhile the robots dominating American headlines — Tesla's Optimus, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, Figure, Agility's Digit — are unavailable, contract-only, or years from your driveway. The robots people are buying look nothing like the robots people are talking about.

Why you should care

A Unitree G1 starts around $16,000 (officially closer to $13,500, with street prices to $19K), and the smaller R1 launched in July 2025 at roughly $5,900 — prices that put a real humanoid within reach of universities, developers, and businesses. Contrast that with the names in every headline:

• Boston Dynamics' Atlas has no public price.
• Agility Robotics' Digit is sold through commercial agreements, not retail.
• Figure AI hasn't announced a purchase price for its humanoids.
• Tesla's Optimus is still unavailable despite a long-promised $20K–$30K target.

The result: the robots you can actually put in a cart are a different set from the robots that go viral.

The latest on all five

Unitree — the one you can actually order

Unitree shipped more than 5,500 G1 humanoids in 2025 (about 6,500 units in total) — by most counts more than every other humanoid maker combined — and is targeting roughly 20,000 units in 2026. It reported 335% year-over-year revenue growth and is, notably, the only profitable humanoid-robot company in the world. Its machines are already on real jobs: a Japan Airlines baggage pilot at Haneda, facility cleaning with YY Group, and a U.S. sheriff's department that took delivery in July 2026. In February 2026 a fleet of G1s performed a fully autonomous kung-fu routine on live television. (Sources: Forbes, botinfo.ai.)

Tesla Optimus — the most hyped, still not for sale

Optimus V3 production is scheduled for summer 2026, with Tesla converting the Fremont Model S/X line into its first million-unit humanoid line, while a dedicated Giga Texas factory is being sized for an eventual 10 million units a year (primary output from 2027). The long-term price target is $20,000–$30,000, though early build costs run far higher and the first external commercial units are expected late 2026 at a premium. Gen 3 packs 50 actuators, 22-DoF hands, Tesla's AI5 chip, and Grok voice. Over 1,000 units already work inside Giga Texas. (Sources: Electrek, The Robot Report.)

Boston Dynamics Atlas — the OG, finally a product

At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics unveiled the production-ready, all-electric Atlas during Hyundai's media day — a fifth-generation design its engineers call “almost an order of magnitude” simpler, with fewer parts and lower cost. It reaches 7.5 feet, lifts 110 pounds, and works from −4°F to 104°F. Every 2026 Atlas is already spoken for — fleets are shipping to Hyundai's Robotics Metaplant and to Google DeepMind — and Hyundai plans to build up to 30,000 a year. There is still no public price. (Sources: Boston Dynamics, Engadget.)

Figure AI — the best-funded startup, working at BMW

After a ten-month pilot in which Figure 02 helped build more than 30,000 BMW X3s — moving over 90,000 parts across roughly 1.2 million steps — BMW is now deploying the next-generation Figure 03 for logistics and sequencing at Plant Spartanburg, and is piloting humanoids in Europe at Leipzig. Figure has raised $2.6 billion from Bezos, Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI. It still hasn't announced a consumer price. (Sources: BMW Group, Interesting Engineering.)

Agility Robotics — already on the clock

Agility just opened a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fremont — up the road from Tesla's planned Optimus factory — to train its Digit robot. The company reports $300 million in contract orders, with Digit deployed at Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, where it has moved more than 100,000 totes at a single GXO site. CEO Peggy Johnson is steering a reverse merger aimed at making Agility the first pure-play humanoid company on public markets. Digit isn't sold at retail — it's leased through commercial agreements. (Sources: TechCrunch, AI Weekly.)

Why it's our top pick

Unitree isn't just leading in development — it's leading in deployment. China accounted for more than 80% of global humanoid installations, and where Figure, Agility, and Boston Dynamics are focused squarely on enterprise customers, Unitree is aggressively lowering the barrier to entry. The biggest thing it has going for it is simple: it's putting robots in customers' hands first.