What Microduck Costs
Microduck costs $399. The pricing pages we publish here start from the total rather than the sticker, because a launch figure rarely survives checkout.
Pre-orders opened on 27 August 2026 and first deliveries are targeted before Christmas. Hugging Face has published a single one-time purchase price with no subscription and no usage fee attached. Check the live figure and stock on the Microduck product page, because pre-order pricing and delivery windows change without notice.
Shipping cost, regional availability, taxes, and warranty terms are not published in the launch material. Those are the four figures most likely to move your total, and none of them can be quoted from what is public today.
| Line item | Published cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Microduck robot | $399 | One-time purchase, pre-order price at launch |
| Shipping | Not published | Shown at checkout, and it varies by region |
| Taxes and duties | Not published | Varies by country, and a cross-border order can add a lot |
| Spare battery | $39 Charger pack, or a third-party NP-F550 | A common camera battery format, so spares are cheap either way |
| Training compute | Your own CUDA graphics card, or rented cloud time | Assumed by the training stack, not included |
| Subscription | None published | No recurring fee announced at launch |
What the $399 Buys
The $399 buys working hardware plus a training stack that already runs on it. That second half is the part a parts list cannot reproduce cheaply.
The actuation is 15 motors plus an articulated beak. For sensing you get a front camera, a compact lidar, an 8x8 time-of-flight matrix, two inertial measurement units (IMUs), microphones, and a speaker. Compute is a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage. A trained policy runs on the robot with no laptop tether.
On the software side you get seven trained behaviours and the open training stack: the SDK, the simulator, and the reinforcement-learning pipeline, all Apache-2.0 licensed on GitHub. Retraining a gait yourself is included in the price in the sense that nothing extra is charged for it.
The removable NP-F550 battery is worth its own line. It is a standard camera battery format rather than a sealed proprietary pack. A spare costs a normal accessory price and doubles your session instead of forcing a recharge break.
The Graphics Card the Price Assumes
Training a new policy needs a CUDA graphics card or rented compute, and that is the largest cost the sticker price hides. The reported figure is roughly one to two hours of training for a usable gait at 4,096 parallel simulated environments.
If you already own a suitable card, the marginal cost is an evening of electricity. If you do not, Pollen Robotics points at Hugging Face Jobs as the hosted route, and the $119 Dev pack includes Hugging Face credit to start with.
One route around it is worth naming. Cloud graphics cards rent by the hour, and a single one-to-two-hour run is a small bill. The cost only becomes real when you run twenty of them chasing a reward function that works.
Buyers who never intend to retrain the robot avoid this entirely and keep the seven shipped behaviours. That is a legitimate way to own Microduck, but it means paying a developer price for a fixed-trick machine, which is the mismatch we would flag before a pre-order.
Our reinforcement-learning robots guide explains what that training loop involves so you can judge whether the compute is worth committing to.
How $399 Compares to Other Robots at This Price
At $399 Microduck sits between the desktop companion robots and the DIY biped kits, and it is the only one of the three that ships a mobile trained gait. The price buys that combination.
Reachy Mini Lite matches Microduck exactly at $399, and the wireless Reachy Mini is $499. Both are desk-bound expressive robots rather than walkers, and both are sold as kits that take two to three hours to assemble.
Open Duck Mini v2 is the closest DIY equivalent, a fully open bipedal project targeting a bill of materials under $400. Reaching a walking robot that way costs you the build, the sourcing, and the debugging that Microduck has already done.
For what else sells near this price, our companion robot price guide and cheapest robots to buy cover what else lands near this figure.
| Robot | Published price | Format | Mobile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microduck | $399 | Finished product | Walks, and skates with the accessory rollers |
| Reachy Mini Lite | $399 | Kit, 2 to 3 hours to build | No, desk-bound |
| Reachy Mini Wireless | $499 | Kit, 2 to 3 hours to build | No, desk-bound |
| Open Duck Mini v2 | Bill of materials targeted under $400 | Self-sourced DIY build | Yes, walks |
Who Should Not Pay $399 for This
Skip Microduck at this price if you want a robot that performs a household job. Nothing in the shipped behaviour set cleans, fetches, or monitors, and buyers after that should start with our home robot assistant guide.
Skip it too if you have no graphics card and no plan to rent one. The training stack is the reason this costs $399 rather than toy money, and hosted training on Hugging Face Jobs is a running bill rather than a one-off.
Builders who want to fabricate and repair their own parts should also look elsewhere. Microduck's software is open and its mechanical and electronic designs are not. Pollen Robotics sells spare motors, and a broken leg is still a support ticket rather than a print job.
What would change our answer is a published price for a replacement leg or shell. Spare motors already come in the $119 Dev pack, so if the structural parts get a price too, $399 becomes a strong figure for a machine designed to fall over. Until then a cracked shin has no listed fix.
Bottom Line
Microduck's published price is $399 with no subscription, and the all-in figure adds shipping, a spare NP-F550 battery, and either a graphics card you already own or rented cloud time. It is well priced for a developer who will train policies on it, and expensive for anyone who will only run the seven behaviours it ships with.
Read our full Microduck review for the specs and shipped skills, then confirm shipping cost and stock on the Microduck product page before placing a pre-order.
FAQs
How much does Microduck cost?
Microduck costs $399 as published at launch on 27 August 2026, as a one-time purchase with no announced subscription. Shipping, taxes, and warranty terms were not published with the launch, and appear at checkout for your region.
Is there a subscription fee for Microduck?
No subscription or usage fee has been announced. The published model is a single purchase, and the SDK, simulator, and training stack are Apache-2.0 licensed rather than sold separately.
What is not included in the $399 Microduck price?
The price does not include shipping, taxes, a spare battery, or the graphics card the training loop assumes. The NP-F550 battery is a standard camera format, so a spare is a normal accessory purchase rather than a proprietary part.
Is Microduck cheaper than Reachy Mini?
No. Microduck at $399 costs exactly what Reachy Mini Lite costs, and $100 less than the $499 wireless Reachy Mini. Reachy Mini is a desk robot sold as a kit. Microduck is a mobile robot that walks. The same money buys a different job.
Can you build a robot like Microduck for less?
Open Duck Mini v2 is a fully open bipedal project targeting a bill of materials under $400, so the parts cost is comparable rather than lower. What you save is not money but supported assembly, and what you gain is published design files and full repairability.