5 ms·

I'm not sure. I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be a

I'm not sure. I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.

qurren 2mo ago
If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%. Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
- nsvd2 2mo ago
  Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
  - underlipton 2mo ago
    But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
- jfaat 2mo ago
  Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
  - yorwba 2mo ago
    The difference is that some of those businesses might buy a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently have employees doing robot work for a human salary.
- aantix 2mo ago
  Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than 20K. I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.
  - drusepth 2mo ago
    I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
    - rendang 2mo ago
      A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
      - brailsafe 2mo ago
        > A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
    - jader201 2mo ago
      Vehicles, when first invented, were 100% a luxury, not a necessity. They only became a “necessity” once they went mainstream and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a part of everyday life. I can certainly see the same thing happening with residential robotics.
- ACCount37 2mo ago
  People in the US buy cars. Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
  - qurren 2mo ago
    Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food, unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot is not.
    - scotty79 2mo ago
      People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them doesn't really need to.
    - jryle70 2mo ago
      The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by? Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
  - cj 2mo ago
    How does it compare to hiring a human? I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned. That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
    - scotty79 2mo ago
      You'd have to pay me this much to let a human inside my house to do that.
      - cj 2mo ago
        Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members. My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner. If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients. That makes it easier for me to trust her. (It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold) I would never use random online cleaning services.
- DrScientist 2mo ago
  To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ). Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
- si1entstill 2mo ago
  The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k. People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper. Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
- NichoPaolucci 2mo ago
  As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc... I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI. Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.
didibus 2mo ago
> We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but this also saddens me. What happened to our generation? We're scared of people.
- si1entstill 2mo ago
  Eh, I'm a pretty social and outgoing guy. I think its fair to have some reservations about people in one's own home. I'll admit I'm slightly neurotic in my own household in that I like things to be done a certain way. I'd also feel like I needed to maintain certain levels of tidiness to enable a traditional cleaning service to perform well.
  - didibus 2mo ago
    I don't think it's about being social/outgoing or not. There's clearly an anxiety we have, we avoid confrontation, or awkward dynamics. For example, you like things done a certain way, that's irrelevant, its that you feel anxious working with a human and have them understand how you want it done sounds stressful, but would be comfortable doing so with a robot. I share those feelings too, it's self-reflective.
idiotsecant 2mo ago
Sometimes I forget what a bubble HN really is.

qurren 2mo ago

If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%. Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.

nsvd2 2mo ago
Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
- underlipton 2mo ago
  But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
jfaat 2mo ago
Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
- yorwba 2mo ago
  The difference is that some of those businesses might buy a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently have employees doing robot work for a human salary.
aantix 2mo ago
Most people finance vehicles that cost much more than 20K. I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.
- drusepth 2mo ago
  I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
  - rendang 2mo ago
    A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
    - brailsafe 2mo ago
      > A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
  - jader201 2mo ago
    Vehicles, when first invented, were 100% a luxury, not a necessity. They only became a “necessity” once they went mainstream and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a part of everyday life. I can certainly see the same thing happening with residential robotics.
ACCount37 2mo ago
People in the US buy cars. Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
- qurren 2mo ago
  Not really. The car is a non-negotiable, like food, unless you live in Boston/NYC/SF or something. The robot is not.
  - scotty79 2mo ago
    People in Europe also buy cars, even though most of them doesn't really need to.
  - jryle70 2mo ago
    The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by? Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
- cj 2mo ago
  How does it compare to hiring a human? I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned. That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
  - scotty79 2mo ago
    You'd have to pay me this much to let a human inside my house to do that.
    - cj 2mo ago
      Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members. My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner. If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients. That makes it easier for me to trust her. (It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold) I would never use random online cleaning services.
DrScientist 2mo ago
To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ). Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
si1entstill 2mo ago
The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k. People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper. Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
NichoPaolucci 2mo ago
As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc... I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI. Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.

didibus 2mo ago

> We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but this also saddens me. What happened to our generation? We're scared of people.

si1entstill 2mo ago
Eh, I'm a pretty social and outgoing guy. I think its fair to have some reservations about people in one's own home. I'll admit I'm slightly neurotic in my own household in that I like things to be done a certain way. I'd also feel like I needed to maintain certain levels of tidiness to enable a traditional cleaning service to perform well.
- didibus 2mo ago
  I don't think it's about being social/outgoing or not. There's clearly an anxiety we have, we avoid confrontation, or awkward dynamics. For example, you like things done a certain way, that's irrelevant, its that you feel anxious working with a human and have them understand how you want it done sounds stressful, but would be comfortable doing so with a robot. I share those feelings too, it's self-reflective.

idiotsecant 2mo ago

Sometimes I forget what a bubble HN really is.