What does a humanoid robot preorder deposit buy in 2026?
1X takes a refundable $200 deposit on NEO, a home humanoid whose first year of production sold out in five days. Unitree takes full payment, and Figure names no price.
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A $200 deposit, marked “Fully Refundable,” is what 1X’s order page asks from anyone who wants NEO, a 5-foot-6 humanoid the company sells as a home robot. The money comes back on request, and it goes toward one of two plans: buying the robot or paying for it by the month.
Orders opened on October 28, 2025. Six months later, opening its plant in Hayward, California, 1X said it had “sold out its entire first-year production capacity (over 10,000 units) in just five days.” First customer shipments, it said, were “planned for 2026.”
For anyone ordering today, the sell-out is the number that matters. The Hayward plant is built for 10,000 NEOs a year, so a new order sits behind roughly a year of its output. Yet 1X still promises “US Deliveries start 2026.” So what does your $200 hold, and what arrives when your turn comes?
What the $200 holds
Choose how to pay and you also choose your place in line. Buying NEO for $20,000 brings priority delivery, along with a three-year warranty and premium support. The $499 monthly subscription brings standard delivery, which puts subscribers behind buyers in the queue.
Against either plan the deposit is small: 1 percent of the purchase price, or about 40 percent of one month’s subscription. Since it comes back on request, holding a place costs you little. What it costs is the wait. A report on 1X’s plans put the first deliveries to private customers at the end of 2026.
What NEO does when it arrives
NEO “arrives with basic autonomy for early owners” and learns more over time through Redwood, 1X’s AI model. On the first day, that means “opening doors for guests, fetching items, and turning off the lights at night.”
Other chores go to a 1X Expert: a person in a VR headset who operates NEO remotely, at times the owner schedules. The order page doesn’t say how many Expert sessions either plan includes, or whether they cost extra.
How much does NEO do by itself? Bernt Børnich, 1X’s chief executive, gave rough figures in a podcast interview: “Everything I talk about here now happens through a mixture of autonomy and teleoperation.” He put NEO’s autonomous success rate at “90 something percent” for opening doors and “maybe… 80%” for fetching objects.
In the same recording the robot could not pick up a pair of tongs from the floor, and it went off balance when it tried to squat. A 1X representative blamed Wi-Fi issues and calibration at the office where the demonstration took place.
So picture your first week with one. NEO is meant to open doors, fetch things and turn off the lights on its own, and by Børnich’s estimate about one fetch in five still doesn’t succeed that way. Anything past those three chores means booking an Expert.
It is going to be a while until there is absolutely no human in the loop ever
The humanoids with no deposit to pay
Unitree skips the deposit and asks for the whole price up front. Its shop sells the G1 for $13,500, plus $300 to $1,200 for shipping. Customs duties and import clearance are left to you, the buyer.
The G1 in the shop comes with a limit, in Unitree’s own words: “This product does not support secondary development. For customization needs, please select the EDU edition.” The EDU edition, the version a lab can program, shows “Contact sales” where a price would be.
The smaller R1 is listed from $4,900, and there too only the EDU version is marked for secondary development. At either price, what you get is the robot as Unitree ships it, without the freedom to program it yourself.
Figure 03 has no price at all, and Figure AI’s October 9, 2025 announcement gives no date for home buyers either. It says the robot “is designed for Helix, the home, and the world at scale” and that its first manufacturing line “will initially be capable of producing up to 12,000 humanoid robots per year,” close to Hayward’s 10,000.
Apptronik lists no price for Apollo. It pitches the robot at logistics, manufacturing and retail work, such as kitting, packout and machine tending: jobs in a warehouse or a factory, far from anyone’s living room.
How four humanoid makers take money in 2026
| Robot | How the maker takes money | Listed price | Delivery the maker states |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1X NEO | $200 refundable deposit | $20,000, or $499 a month | US deliveries start 2026 |
| Unitree G1 | Full payment in Unitree’s shop | $13,500 plus $300 to $1,200 shipping | Details on request |
| Figure 03 | Not in the launch announcement | None published | None published |
| Apptronik Apollo | Pitched to businesses | None published | None published |
Add it up and the $200 buys a place in 1X’s queue that you can take back. The machine at the end of it opens doors, fetches things and turns off the lights on its own, and hands other chores to a person in a VR headset. No other maker here asks for a deposit at all.
The queue may shorten. 1X plans capacity for more than 100,000 robots a year by the end of 2027, against Hayward’s 10,000 today. Until that line exists, a deposit placed this fall waits behind the 10,000-plus robots claimed in the first five days, and the refund is the part you control.
