Digit 5 Costs $150,000 to Build and Beats a Worker Only After 1.6 Shifts

Agility Robotics says its Digit 5 humanoid can work a 20-hour day, lift 22.7 kilograms and stand next to people without a cage. The number that matters here is not the payload but the price: IEEE Spectrum, citing the company's SEC filings, puts the first Digit 5 bill of materials at $150,000 to $200,000 and the service fee at about $8,500 a month.

Agility unveiled the robot on September 15, 2026, and says early access starts in the first half of 2027 with general availability at the end of that year, according to its announcement. Everything below separates what the company has shipped, which is Digit 4, from what it has announced.

What Digit 5 changes against Digit 4

The specification sheet is a straight comparison, and every Digit 5 figure is vendor-supplied. Digit 4 figures come from the Robot Report's account of the June 24 SPAC announcement.

Spec	Digit 4	Digit 5 (vendor)
Payload	35 lb	50 lb (22.7 kg)
Reach	5.5 ft	7.2 ft (2.2 m)
Daily operating time	16 hours	20+ hours
Bill of materials	$125,000	$150,000 to $200,000 (IEEE Spectrum)

The bill of materials moved the wrong way. A robot that lifts 43% more and reaches 1.7 feet further costs more to build, which is unsurprising; the production target is what carries the argument. IEEE Spectrum's Evan Ackerman reports a projected production cost under $50,000 per robot at 10,000 units a year. Agility has not built anywhere near that volume.

1. Digit 4 today125K USD
2. Digit 5 initial, low150K USD
3. Digit 5 initial, high200K USD
4. Target at 10,000 units a year50K USD

Source: Robot Report (Digit 4, June 24, 2026); IEEE Spectrum citing SEC filings (Digit 5), accessed 2026-09-30

The 20-hour day is a duty-cycle claim

Digit 5 runs on a 90-minute battery and charges in 9 minutes, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio in Agility's wording. Do the division: 90 minutes of work per 99-minute cycle is 91%, which is 21.8 hours in a 24-hour day. The Robot Report's SPAC coverage quotes about 22 hours, so the company's own figures agree; "20+" is the conservative rounding.

That only holds if a charger is free every 90 minutes and a dock is a few metres away. It also assumes the work is available at all hours, and the only deployment count we have is Digit 4: 9 customer facilities, more than 65,000 cumulative hours, and more than 100,000 totes moved for GXO in 2025. Agility's press release says the robot reached about 98% field accuracy at a GXO site; it does not say on what task or over how many picks.

The labour arithmetic behind $8,500 a month

Ackerman reports that filings put annual employer savings near $100,000 per robot against a human wage of $30.50 an hour, with service priced around $8,500 a month. My arithmetic, not the filing's: $8,500 times 12 is $102,000 a year. One human on a 40-hour week (2,080 hours) at $30.50 costs $63,440 before benefits.

So a Digit 5 on a single shift costs more than the person it replaces. It wins only when it covers roughly 1.6 shifts or more, which is why the runtime claim is the load-bearing one. The $100,000 saving in the filings presumably assumes that multi-shift utilisation; I could not see the filing's assumptions, and Ackerman warns that treating the robot as a drop-in replacement for human labour has no historical support.

Then the hardware side. At the initial $150,000 to $200,000 build cost and $102,000 a year in fees, the fee alone recovers the bill of materials in 1.5 to 2 years, before service, spares, warranty and overhead. Those costs are exactly what the filings would have to show.

Safety claims and standards status

Agility says Digit 5 is the first humanoid to pass an independent OSHA field evaluation, and that it contributed to ANSI/A3 TR R15.108 and to ISO 25785-1, described as the first international humanoid safety standard. The design lets the robot stop, avoid people or sit down before someone gets near, so it cannot fall on anyone. Those are the company's descriptions; I found no independent test report. An EU and UK launch depends on a CE mark that Agility lists as expected, not granted, with sales there planned for 2027.

Nvidia's Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge A.I., is quoted in the release saying safe operation around people is what moves humanoids from pilots to industrial deployment. Nvidia is a partner in the announcement, not an auditor.

Orders, the SPAC and what would change my read

Agility reports more than $300 million in multi-year orders as of May 2026, and IEEE Spectrum says that covers fewer than 1,000 units. Divide: at least $300,000 per unit over the contract term, well above the $102,000-a-year fee, which suggests multi-year terms of three years or more or bundled services. The company's SPAC deal with Churchill Capital Corp. XI targets $620 million in gross proceeds at a $2.5 billion pre-money valuation, with a ticker of AGLT and a close expected in 2026.

Compare that with the funding picture elsewhere: Feather raised $7.6 million to build software for other people's robots, and Sima.ai's $1.45 billion round bets on the chips inside them. Agility is the one selling the whole machine, and its unit cost is the number to watch.

What would change my read is delivered utilisation. If the first customers report Digit 5 working two shifts or more at the quoted fee, the $102,000 undercuts labour. If it idles between tote-moving tasks at one shift, it does not.