I’ve been waiting for the right moment for
Years to get a farmbot I’ve been following along with this product from iteration to iteration. And finally when I’ve bought my own home and have a square of land that I can realise my dreams of having an amazing support system the price sky rockets out of reach. Why did it jump so much is it realistically 3-6k better than the original versions. What’s going on 
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The problem is: you waited for the right moment. Every time we wait until the right moment, the cost goes up. The prices of all materials needed to make the thing work has gone up across the board for sure. But remember, it is an open source project. With a little leg work, you can do it far cheaper on your own!
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The increasing material costs of aluminum and other components like the electronics, motors and the major impact of global tariffs from the EU, USA and China have had a significant impact on the price of a FarmBot.
Just look at the price of a Raspberry Pi 4 since 2019 to 2026 the prices are up by multiples. The original debut price was $35 USD. Now they are significantly more.
The engineering team at FarmBot has done everything possible to keep prices affordable. When material costs and tariffs jump overnight it is really tough on import/export businesses like FarmBot.
Watch the FarmBot website for sales and watch the FarmBot Forum for people selling their used FarmBots.
Marc
You’re absolutely right re waiting- I’ll give the DIY a go and see how I get on. The education I’ll learn about building automated systems will be as useful to me as the degree like cost for the system.
Hey Marc,
Thanks for the sage wisdom.
However.
- The farmbot uses a raspberry pi3 no? (https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/farmbot-open-source-cnc-farming-robot/)
- It is currently available in Ireland for 31.50eur.
(Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - The Pi Hut) - I spoke with someone here who was selling their v1.6 xl for 100-200 more than the current price.
So excuse me if I still don’t see your point.
Lanturnn
Looking at the FarmBot Genesis v1.8 currently for sale on the FarmBot website, it is equipped with the RPi 4.
The link that you referenced from the raspberrypi.com website may be from 2016.
This is the link to the product page:
Hi Marc,
This is great to hear, I believe the argument given was that costs of production had gone up no?
The raspberry pi4 with (undisclosed) memory, for arguments sake is 2gb.
Stands now at 55€ ( 65.21 USD)
Pi hub 4b 2gb ram
At 2x the cost as technology advances that’s understandable. However if all the components doubled over the debut of the product, which it hasn’t.
I checked on this launch site and the cost for a raspberry pi4 with 2gb of memory was 45usd at the time:
I factored inflation into the price and it came to roughly 57usd.
So it seems that that component uhasn’t really increased in price at all.
Can the same be said for Farmbot?
The only thing I can see is that there have been larger orgs that have had to come online to justify themselves from the original mission and have thus each non money generating group has had to validate their existence (eg marketing, to wait for a promotion) which is fine, however please don’t insult the intelligent community you moderate by placating the rising cost of doing business for the astronomical price hike.
Kindly but quite simply finished with this thread.
Lanturnn
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