1X NEO Opens Pre-Orders: The First Home Humanoid With a Price Tag and a Delivery Window
1X opened NEO pre-orders in October 2025 at $20,000 or $499 per month, with US deliveries slated for 2026. It is the first serious attempt to sell a humanoid into homes — teleoperation caveats and all.
Every humanoid announcement of the past two years has targeted factories and warehouses, with one conspicuous exception. In late October 2025, 1X Technologies opened pre-orders for NEO, a humanoid designed explicitly for the home — the first time a consumer has been able to put money down on a general-purpose humanoid with a stated price and delivery window.
The offer
NEO is available two ways: an Early Access purchase at $20,000 with priority delivery in 2026, reserved with a $200 deposit, or a subscription at $499 per month. The United States gets first deliveries, which 1X says begin in 2026. As of the most recent independent reviews, no customer units had shipped yet — pre-orders are reservations, not deliveries.
The pricing is aggressive relative to industrial humanoids, which routinely list in the high five to six figures, and it signals 1X's thesis: the home market will not wait for factory-grade perfection, and early adopters will pay for a robot that does a growing set of real chores.
What NEO is built to do
NEO is a soft-bodied, tendon-driven humanoid designed around safety near people — quiet operation, compliant mechanics, and a knit suit instead of exposed hard shell. 1X demonstrates it loading dishwashers, folding laundry, tidying rooms, and fetching items, controlled by the company's Redwood AI model. The hardware choices reflect a bet that in homes, not hurting anyone matters more than lifting capacity or speed.
The teleoperation caveat
1X is unusually candid about the gap between demo and autonomy: for tasks NEO has not yet learned, owners can schedule sessions where a remote 1X operator guides the robot through the job — which both completes the task and generates training data. That means a camera-equipped machine in your home is sometimes, with your knowledge and consent, steered by a human. 1X describes privacy controls including operator-blurring and no-go zones, and frames the arrangement as the price of a robot that improves continuously.
Buyers should read that trade-off clearly. NEO in 2026 is not an autonomous maid; it is a learning platform with chore capability that expands over time, backed by a company that counts OpenAI among its investors and has raised substantial capital to fund exactly this data flywheel.
The subscription math is worth doing before dismissing it. At $499 per month, NEO costs roughly what a few hours of weekly cleaning help costs in a major US metro — the comparison 1X clearly wants households to make. The open question is not whether the price sounds reasonable, but whether the chore list is long enough, and reliable enough, for the subscription to survive its first renewal.
Why it matters even if you never buy one
NEO forces the rest of the industry to answer questions factory robots defer: what does autonomy mean in an unstructured home, what is a robot's help actually worth per month, and who is liable when it breaks a vase. Figure has signaled home ambitions for Figure 03, and Tesla executives discuss Optimus as a household product in the long run — but 1X is the only company currently taking deposits. Whether NEO's 2026 deliveries delight or disappoint, the experiment will produce the first real data on consumer demand for humanoids.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the 1X NEO cost?
NEO costs $20,000 as an Early Access purchase with a $200 refundable deposit, or $499 per month as a subscription. Pre-orders opened in late October 2025, with US deliveries slated to begin in 2026.
Does NEO work autonomously?
Partially. NEO performs a set of learned chores autonomously, and for tasks it has not yet learned, owners can schedule remote-operator sessions where a 1X employee guides the robot. 1X presents this as both a service and the mechanism that trains future autonomy.
When will NEO actually ship?
1X says US deliveries begin in 2026, with Early Access buyers getting priority. As of the most recent independent reviews, no customer deliveries had been reported — pre-orders remain reservations.
Sources
The Robot Report — NEO humanoid designed for household use, available for preorder