The news: Agility Robotics cleared the SEC review it needs to list on Nasdaq in November, and its final filings show what a Digit humanoid robot costs.
Implications:
Price: A leased Digit costs $8,500 a month plus a one-time setup fee of about $25,000.
Shifts: At that price, a Digit costs less per hour than a worker only if it runs about 68 hours a week or more.
Floor space: Every Digit working today needs a fenced cell until Digit 5 arrives in 2027.
The News
Agility Robotics leases its Digit humanoid for $8,500 a month with software and maintenance included, plus a setup fee of about $25,000 per robot, its prospectus shows. Buying one instead costs about $200,000, plus about $20,000 to deploy it and about $36,000 a year for software and support.
The SEC declared effective Agility’s merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI on Oct 13, which made those filings final, and the deal is expected to close in November.
Why It Matters
Any DC can now set a humanoid’s price against its own labor costs before talking to a vendor. On one shift, a leased Digit costs more per hour than the person it would replace, so the case for it is staffing jobs a site can't keep filled.
What It Takes
The same filings show what a site would be signing up for:
Track record: Digit 4 is deployed or committed at nine customer facilities and has logged more than 65,000 hours, with about 98% accuracy at GXO and Schaeffler. Named customers also include Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre.
Fences: Every humanoid working today, Digit 4 included, sits inside a fenced work cell, CEO Peggy Johnson told analysts on Oct 6. Agility says Digit 5, its first version designed to work near people, reaches early customers in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027.
Vendor size: Agility booked $1.8 million in revenue in 2025 and $174,000 in the first half of 2026. It says that without the merger money there is substantial doubt it can keep operating for another year, so it can support a fleet only if the deal closes.
What It Costs
A year of leasing one Digit costs $102,000, plus about $5,000 a year if you spread the setup fee over the robot’s five-year life, by our math. On two 10-hour shifts, six days a week, the schedule Agility uses in its own pitch, that comes to about $17 an hour. On one 40-hour shift, it's about $51.
Agility compares the robot with a worker who costs $30.50 an hour with benefits, which it builds from a $21.49 median wage. That matches the BLS median for stockers and order fillers in warehousing. Against that rate, the lease pays off only past roughly 68 hours of work a week. Buying works out to about $13 an hour on the same two-shift schedule, but it puts about $220,000 per robot up front.
A leased Digit is cheaper per hour than a worker only on a multi-shift schedule:
Open Question
The cost comparison assumes a Digit gets as much done in an hour as a person, and Agility hasn’t published how many totes an hour Digit moves. Agility’s executives said throughput targets are set customer by customer in each contract, so each site has to pin down its own rate before the hourly math means anything.
Who’s Exposed
Multi-shift DCs: A leased Digit beats a worker’s hourly cost at sites that run repetitive tote moves across two shifts or more, especially in hard-to-staff jobs.
Single-shift sites: On one shift, a leased Digit costs well above a worker per hour, so the case for it rests on filling jobs that are hard to hire for.
Tight floors: Until Digit 5 ships, the robot needs a guarded cell, which takes floor space and can’t block aisles or machine access.
Peer Insights
The operators already running Digit started with one narrow job and made the robot earn more work:
GXO: Ran a proof of concept in late 2023 at a site near Atlanta that fulfills orders for Spanx, then signed a multi-year lease in June 2024. Digit moves totes from cobots onto conveyors there, and it had handled more than 100,000 totes by November 2025, Agility’s filing says.
Schaeffler: Chose a first job at its Cheraw, SC plant that Digit could already do and that repeats across plants: moving totes of bearing parts onto a wash line. With no humanoid safety standard yet, it put guarding around the robot and kept it clear of critical walkways and machine access, production engineer Courtney Baines said at Agility’s investor day. Schaeffler has since committed to scaling up with Digit 5.
Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada: Ran a pilot first, then signed a lease in February covering manufacturing, supply chain and logistics work.
The 1,000-robot buyer: The unnamed customer behind the $300 million Digit 5 order tied each new batch of robots to Digit passing specific jobs, with throughput, accuracy and uptime targets written into the contract, Agility’s executives said.
What’s Next
November: The deal is expected to close, which decides whether Agility has the money to support its fleets.
First half of 2027: Digit 5, built to work outside a fenced cell, reaches early-access customers.
End of 2027: Digit 5 becomes generally available.
Dig Deeper
The prospectus: the ‘Unit Economics’ section has the lease and purchase terms.
The investor day: Schaeffler’s deployment and the contract structure, in the transcript.
From us: our July coverage of the deal.
