The used industrial-robot market has a reputation: a black box. Ask what a second-hand arm costs and the answer is a phone number, not a figure. The trade takes this as a fact about the machines — that a used robot, unlike a used car or a used server, simply does not have a public price.
Against the receipts, that is not what is happening. The opacity is real, but it is not uniform, and it does not belong to the machines. It belongs to whoever is doing the selling. We pulled the same question — what does a used arm cost? — across archived public listings, and the market split cleanly in two.
Where one broker owns the listing, the price is a phone call
Start with the dealer-broker model: a single company acquires used robots, refurbishes them, and lists them under its own name. On robots.com — the former RobotWorx, one of the largest such dealers in the United States — we checked two separate listing pages in the archive: the general robots listing and the industrial-robots category. Between them, the number of dollar figures on offer was zero.
Every path to a price is the same path: "Call [877-762-6881]." Not a range, not a "starting at," not a configurator. A machine's specs, its condition, its controller, its year — all public. Its price — gated, uniformly, behind a call. On this seller, price opacity is complete: 100% of listings, on two independent pulls.
That is the version of the market everyone describes. It is accurate. It is also only half the market.
Where independent sellers compete, the prices come out
Now change the selling structure. On an open marketplace, the site does not own the inventory — many independent sellers post their own machines and compete for the same buyer. We sampled one industrial-robots category page on Surplus Record: 55 listing rows, captured on a single day.
Of those 55, 22 carried a visible dollar asking price — a specific number on the page, before any contact. The other 33 said "Contact Seller — Request Price," the same gate robots.com applies to everything. A 40/60 split: two of every five listings priced in the open, the rest quote-gated.
The priced ones are specific. Three examples, verbatim from the listing, all asking prices:
- A 2015 Fanuc M-20iA 5-axis arm with an R-30iB controller and pendant, part of a Weldon Solutions robotic assembly system — $19,999.
- A 2021 Fanuc ArcMate 120iD with a TIG shielding kit, a complete cell described as "minimal hours" — $99,000, listed "Or Best Offer."
- A 2013 Fanuc M-3iA/6S delta robot with an R-30iB controller in a pick-and-place cell, "6,700 working hours" — $9,000.
Same category of machine, same used market, same day. The difference between a blank "Call" and a number on the page is not the robot. It is who is standing between the buyer and the price.
What we could not see, and did not fill
Two listings in the sample stayed dark for reasons worth stating plainly, because reporting the gap is the job. On eurobots.net, a European dealer, we found no U.S.-dollar prices; the site lists in euros and we do not convert currencies to manufacture a figure, so we report no price there rather than a made-up one. And machinio.com, a marketplace we tried to include, returned an "Access Denied" page to our fetch — an Akamai block — so we captured no listings and make no claim about how it prices. An absence we can see is a finding; an absence we invent is not one.
The mechanism: opacity is a selling choice, not a property of the machine
Put the two shapes together and the pattern is not about robots at all. A dealer-broker who owns the inventory and controls the only listing has every incentive to keep price behind a call: it lets each quote be set to the buyer, protects margin, and gives up nothing to a competitor because there is no competitor on that page. A marketplace of independent sellers inverts the incentive — a visible price is a selling advantage when the buyer can scroll to the next listing, so prices surface on a meaningful share of them.
That is why "the used-robot market is opaque" is too coarse to be useful. Opacity is a knob the selling structure sets, and it is set to different positions in the same week for the same class of machine. A buyer who accepts the black-box framing stops looking one listing too early; a buyer who knows the split knows where to look for a number before picking up the phone.
Two caveats hold the finding to what the receipts support. Every figure above is an asking price pulled from a public listing — real transaction prices sit somewhere below, unobserved. And the 40/60 split is one category page, 55 rows, one day; it is a real observation, not a market-wide constant, and we state it as exactly that. What it establishes is not a percentage to bank on but a shape: the used-arm market has visible prices in it, and finding them is a question of seller structure, not luck.
The Robot Ledger is published by Pexara AI LLC. Figures may be cited with attribution; underlying archive available for verification inquiries.