Whirrwork Insights · every Monday
The Robot Price Index
Once a week we report what happened to published robot prices: what moved, what we re-checked at the source, what got its first price, and what is still quote-only. Built only from our append-only price history, so every number has a receipt. When nothing moves, the headline says so.
Latest · edition 1No price moved in week one. Here is the baseline, and what we re-checkedWeek 43, 2026 · 19–25 Oct 2026 →All editions
Method
- Source data. Every price Whirrwork publishes is recorded as an observation in an append-only log (download it, or
/api/v1/prices/history). Rows are never edited or deleted. Each has a source URL, the date the source states (as of) and the time we recorded it. - Weeks. ISO weeks in UTC, Monday 00:00 to Monday 00:00. An edition is published once its week has ended and covers observations recorded and sources re-checked during that week.
- A move is a new observation that supersedes an earlier one in the same series (same job, provider, source, description, unit, region and currency), compared on the midpoint of the range. Fixes of our own recording errors are labelled correction and are never counted as moves.
- Re-checks. A script fetches each source and looks for the recorded numbers; anything not confirmed goes to a human, who appends the result. We report the latest result per series in the week.
- Medians only within one category, one currency and one unit, and only with 5 or more receipts. Below that, receipts are listed one by one. No currency conversion, no weighting.
- No forecasts. The index reports what sources published. It contains no projections or modelled estimates. (Our robot-or-human calculators do model costs, and say so.)
- Limits. Published prices are a small, biased slice of the market: many vendors quote privately, and rate cards lag real deals. Read a median as "what public sources say", not "what you will pay".
Standards for sources and corrections: research standards · corrections log.