What can I get built with a $1,500 to $4,000 prototype budget?
Anvol's engineers put a simple connected device inside that budget: about $1,500 to develop a smart planter with a screen and voice, about $2,000 for a desk AI companion or a voice-controlled robot dog, and $3,000 for a robot-arm car kit, plus a cost per unit. These are reference figures for a similar build from our project sheets, not quotes.
Updated
Builds that fit
| Build | What it does | Development | Per unit | Development time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI voice companion | Battery device you talk to, answering through a speaker and screen over an existing cloud AI service | $1,200 | About $25 in parts, enclosure included | About 10 days |
| Smart planter | Reads soil moisture and temperature, shows a face on a small screen, talks | About $1,500 | About $18 in parts | About 15 days |
| LED pixel board | ESP32 LED matrix with a browser editor for drawings and animations | About $1,700, 10 prototype sets included | About $10 in parts | About 10 days |
| Desk AI companion | Bluetooth desk character that shows a computer's AI agent status on its screen | About $2,000 | Under $20 in parts, within 10 sets | About 15 days |
| Voice-controlled robot dog | Four-legged robot with offline voice commands, an OLED face and a speaker | $2,000 | About $25 in parts | 10 days |
| Six maker kits | Six sensor-and-screen kits with teaching material | $2,000 for all six | $25 a set, custom logo and packaging | About 30 days for six |
| Robot-arm car kit | Mecanum-wheel car with a robot arm and a remote | $3,000 | About $150 a set in parts | 15 days |
| Tracked gel blaster robot | Tracked chassis with a launcher, servos and a 2.4 GHz remote | $3,000 | $500 in parts | 15 days |
Reference figures from our engineers for a similar build, not past invoices and not quotes. Per-unit figures assume the quantity on each build's page. None includes certification (FCC/CE), shipping or duties.
Below the range
- 24-channel logic analyzer
- $500 development and about 3 days, because the firmware was reused open source; about $15 in parts per unit at 50 units. Reference figures →
What pushes a project past $4,000
- Walking robots with many servos
- A six-legged robot with a phone app, a wheel-legged balancing robot and a voice-controlled quadruped were each $5,000 to develop and about 20 days (reference).
- Robots that map and navigate
- A ROS 2 robot with lidar and a depth camera: $4,500 and 18 days. Larger robots and underwater vehicles: $10,000 to $30,000 (reference).
- Our delivered batch
- 10 lidar line-following cars: $5,000 development plus $150 per car, $6,500 in total. Development was about 77% of it. The build →
- Certification
- FCC or CE testing is done by a test lab and quoted separately.
- Device types we have no build for
- A custom phone or 4G handset. We would not put a number on one.
How to stay inside the budget
- Start from a development board or an existing module where it does the job, and design a custom board only where it has to differ.
- Reuse proven firmware. It is why the logic analyzer cost $500 to develop.
- Use a 3D-printed or machined enclosure for the first units instead of a mold.
- Write down what "done" means before work starts. With us, major changes are re-quoted, with a new date, before work continues.
What the same budget buys elsewhere
- US product design firms
- $5,000 to $15,000+ for a works-like prototype1, and $10,000 to $50,000 once it needs a custom circuit board2, by their own published ranges.
- Freelancers
- Hourly, usually one discipline per person. Side-by-side comparison →
Sources
- RMA Engineering, prototype cost, 2026-08-19
- LA New Product Development Team, how much does a prototype cost to make, updated 2026-09-02
More numbers: what a hardware prototype costs → · how long a prototype takes → · what NRE adds to each unit →