Robot rental prices plunge over 70% within a year—has robot rental lost its spark?

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Event Search Project Recommendations I Want to Join City Cooperation Robot Rental Prices Plunge Over 70% in a Year—Is Robot Leasing Fizzling Out? Jiang Han Perspective · October 21, 2026 19:20 Robot rental prices have fallen over 70%, and the industry has entered a new stage of pragmatic development.

Since last year, if you were to ask what has been among the hottest acts at all kinds of commercial performances, robot performances would definitely be in the top three. Ever since they appeared on the Spring Festival Gala, commercial events have felt embarrassed to claim any innovative flair without hiring a robot. Yet recently, robot rental prices have plunged over 70% in a year—is robot leasing fizzling out?

1. Robot rental prices plunge over 70% in a year?

According to a report by Red Star News, the threshold for ordinary people to rent a robot dog has now dropped substantially. Red Star Capital Bureau noted that on e-commerce platforms, the bare-metal daily rental price for robot dogs has fallen to under 100 yuan at the lowest. In the JD Leasing self-operated flagship store, the price for bare-metal rental of a quadruped robot dog is about 160 yuan per day; if the rental period is as long as 30 days, the per-day converted rent is less than 100 yuan.

The bare-metal daily rental price for bipedal humanoid robots is in the thousand-yuan range, with daily rental prices varying between 1,400 yuan and 1,700 yuan. Taking the Unitree U1 robot, which often appears in offline performance scenarios, as an example, on the JD Leasing platform the bare-metal daily rental price is as low as less than 1,600 yuan.

On the second-hand trading platform Xianyu, some merchants have marked robot rental starting prices as low as 200 to 300 yuan, but the merchants admitted to reporters that this is only a traffic-attraction tactic; the actual price will fluctuate depending on the model, functions, and whether operation and maintenance personnel are included.

Taking robot dogs as an example, the all-inclusive daily rental price including on-site guidance by technical personnel is about 500 yuan, and long-term rental prices can be even more favorable; the all-inclusive rental price for the Unitree U2 can reach 2,000 yuan per day.

Back in early 2025, a year ago, the all-inclusive daily rental price for humanoid robots was generally as high as 10,000 to 30,000 yuan, and the all-inclusive daily rental price for quadruped robot dogs was also generally 1,500 to 3,000 yuan. Now the all-inclusive daily rental price for mainstream humanoid robots has dropped to the 3,000-yuan range, and for some basic models the all-inclusive daily rental price has even fallen below 2,000 yuan, a drop of more than 70% from before. The all-inclusive daily rental price for quadruped robot dogs has fallen by about two-thirds.

But behind some cheap prices there are hidden catches. For example, on JD Leasing, prices are divided into bare-metal rental and rental including an on-site engineer. If technical personnel are provided to accompany the rental, the minimum rental for a robot dog is about 500 yuan per day.

2. What has happened to robot leasing?

Why did robot rental prices suddenly collapse? Last year you couldn't rent one for tens of thousands of yuan a day; this year you can take one home for a few hundred yuan. Is the industry cooling down, or is there another explanation?

First, explosive expansion on the supply side has driven market prices down. In recent years, the growth rate of the robotics industry has, frankly speaking, somewhat exceeded ordinary people's imagination. Capacity ramp-ups at leading manufacturers such as Unitree and AgiBot have come one after another, hardware costs have been whittled down layer by layer through economies of scale, and shipment volumes have gone from hundreds of units to thousands and tens of thousands. At the same time, various rental platforms have also rushed in en masse, all hoping to get a share of this wave of robot enthusiasm.

Supply is desperately surging upward, while demand remains at the same existing stock—prices would have to fall. From the most basic principle of economics, as long as supply growth in any industry continues to outpace demand growth, price declines are the inevitable result, and it has little to do with whether manufacturers work hard or whether products are easy to use. Therefore, I have always believed that the sharp decline in robot rental prices is essentially the market mechanism at work, not some fatal problem in the industry. It marks that robot leasing has slid from a high-profit niche market into a fully competitive regular market. A regular market has its own way of playing: the competition is over efficiency, channels, and scenario operation capabilities, not over who is loudest or whose concept is newest.

Second, demand-side scenarios are quietly shifting gears. Many people's impression of robot leasing is still stuck in the annual meetings, commercial performances, and cultural tourism pop-ups of the past two years. Clients renting robots were not asking them to do work at all; they just wanted them to stand there as "traffic props," take a photo and post it on Moments, and then have them hauled away when the event ended. The whole process did not require the robot to deliver any actual value. This kind of demand is itself extremely unstable: in peak season everyone is scrambling for one, in off-season nobody asks, and the entire industry's business follows holidays entirely, with no long-term stability to speak of.

Now it is different. More and more clients are no longer paying for "novelty" but are beginning to pay for "actual output." Many offline stores rent robots not to have them dance and be done with it, but to have them stand in the store for the long term to guide customer flow, explain products, and even help with simple product delivery. Calculated out, their daily cost is lower than hiring a part-time shopping guide, and they can run around the clock. Many industrial parks and factories rent robots to take on repetitive work such as daily inspections and material handling, so they no longer need to specially assign workers to do those boring and dangerous manual labor tasks. Many brands even directly rent robots as long-term "store employees," signing contracts for several months at a time, not at all like the one- or two-day short orders of the past.

The impact of this change is extremely far-reaching. In the past, a rental company could take a hundred one-off orders and they still would not be worth as much as one long-term, stable scenario order. Before, everyone competed over who had more machines and who quoted lower prices; now they are competing over who can deliver scenario-appropriate solutions to customers, and who can tie the robot's functions to the customer's actual business needs.

Third, the market is showing a clear K-shaped divergence. The first to buckle will certainly be the small and medium players who rushed in last year after seeing "payback in half a year." They usually have only a few machines, no technical team of their own, take orders through Xianyu or introductions from acquaintances, and at delivery time temporarily find someone who knows a bit about operation to go to the site. When daily rent was in the tens of thousands, this model was cost-effective no matter how you calculated it: a machine rented out five or six days a month could cover its cost. But now that daily rent has fallen to the thousand-yuan range, after deducting transport, setup, and on-site technician wages, the remaining gross margin is as thin as paper.

What is more troublesome is that customer demands are still rising. In the past, renting a robot to stand there and wave was enough; now they casually want three or five machines to form a formation, or require the robot to have an interactive segment with the audience. This kind of work simply cannot be taken on by a ragtag operation without standardized processes and dedicated technicians. So the compression of profits in low-end performance rental is not a temporary cyclical fluctuation, but structural elimination. Those intermediary-type rental companies that live off information asymmetry will find business harder and harder.

Conversely, platforms like Qingtian Rent, which package the robot body, content, operators, and insurance into standardized service packages, have instead gained a foothold in the reshuffle. The reason is not complicated: when price is no longer a means of differentiation, delivery quality becomes the only moat. Renting out a bare machine is cheap, but when customers get it and find they cannot use it or cannot use it well, they will not come back.

Fourth, the old model of hyping concepts and pushing valuations no longer works. In the past two years, the robot sector has never lacked stories; what it has lacked is precisely orders. The capital market once bought heavily into the "concept" playbook, and valuations floated upward with imagination, but imagination always has times when it cannot be cashed in. Now the market is starting to come back to its senses. People no longer ask what label you have attached or how many rounds of financing you have raised, but directly ask: How many real orders do you have? Who are your customers? Have you proven your scenario works?

I think this is a good thing, and a better thing cannot be imagined. The sharp drop in robot rental prices is not a sign of industry decline; it is precisely the necessary stage for the industry to move from a "scarce resource" to "comprehensive practicality." Only when something becomes cheap enough, useful enough, and common enough can it truly penetrate into thousands of industries. After the early novelty bubble fades, what is revealed is real demand and real business logic. This is what the deep waters of commercialization should look like.

So, robot rents falling 70% in a year does not mean this business has gone out; it is precisely that it has begun to become normal. From a rarity to a common item, from telling stories to talking results, this industry is swimming into the deep waters of commercialization. When the tide goes out, we know who has been swimming naked; and we also know who really knows how to swim.

The views in this article represent only the author himself, and the 36Kr platform only provides information storage space services. +16

Good articles need your encouragement. Jianghan Vision Guest Author 0 Favorite +10 Comment Open WeChat "Scan," open the web page and click the share button in the upper right corner. Weibo Immersive Reading Back to Top Report Join the comments. Comments are millions, friendliness first. Log in to join the discussion. Submit comment 0/1000 You may also like these articles. Automakers "making humans," a crueler elimination round. Optimus mass production is imminent; Tesla has not crossed the three hurdles of robotics. Can it create another miracle? Humanoid robot stock prices are racing, but Unitree is the first to pour a basin of cold water on the industry. Rural aunties act as "mentors" for robots. DJI/Insta360/Qiyuan/Seeking Shadow increase investment in AI imaging. Is a robot that cannot take photos not a good embodied intelligence? Post-00s entrepreneurs build robots, the youngest is 22. Commercial performance rents plunge 90%; Unitree and others increase overseas investment, robots seek a bigger stage. Do robots and artificial intelligence need to pay social insurance? The first batch of robot unicorns begins lining up for bankruptcy. Jianghan Vision Guest Author

Senior Researcher at Pangu Think Tank, Master's Supervisor in Finance, has published 496 articles

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