Unitree G1, tracked: the $13,500 humanoid you are not allowed to program
A base Unitree G1 costs $13,500 direct and was still backordered on 2026-08-07, and Unitree's own store page says it "does not support secondary development," so the model most buyers actually want is the quote-only EDU, which resellers list at $43,900 to $73,900.
You can buy a Unitree G1 right now. The store takes a card, the price is $13,500, and it ships from Hangzhou to a private address. Then you read the next line on the same product page: "This product does not support secondary development. For customization needs, please select the EDU edition."
The most purchasable full-size humanoid in the world arrives with the interesting part switched off. That single sentence is the whole buying decision.
G1 status box
- Orderable: Yes, maker-direct at shop.unitree.com, ships to individuals. The G1 EDU is contact-sales only (sales_global@unitree.cc)
- Price: $13,500 for the base G1, tax and shipping excluded. G1 EDU: no published price
- Stock: backordered, "will ship as soon as it is back in stock"
- Shipping: $300 to $1,200, quoted on the product page
- Customs: buyer pays "all applicable customs duties, taxes, and import clearance," and must supply a phone number and email for clearance
- Warranty: 8 months on the G1, 18 months on the EDU, per the comparison table at unitree.com/g1. The store page says nothing about warranty
- Secondary development: not supported on the base G1. Supported on the EDU
- Autonomy out of the box: none in the household sense. Research and demonstration platform
What $13,500 buys, in millimetres
All of it from Unitree's spec comparison at unitree.com/g1, with the two editions side by side because the gap is the story.
| Spec | G1 ($13,500) | G1 EDU (contact sales) |
|---|---|---|
| Height | 1320 mm standing, 690 mm folded | same |
| Weight with battery | About 35 kg | About 35 kg |
| Degrees of freedom | 23 (6 per leg, 5 per arm, 1 waist) | 23 to 43 |
| Hands | none listed | optional Dex3-1 force-control three-fingered hand, optional tactile sensors |
| Peak knee torque | 90 N.m | 120 N.m |
| Arm load | About 2 kg | About 3 kg |
| Battery | 9000 mAh quick release, about 2 h | same |
| Compute | 8-core CPU | 8-core CPU plus optional GPU, "such as Orin" |
| Sensing | Depth camera plus 3D LiDAR, 4-mic array, 5 W speaker | same |
| Secondary development | no | yes |
| Warranty | 8 months | 18 months |
Read that table as a buyer and the base G1 is a demonstration unit: 35 kg, roughly two hours of battery, a 2 kg arm load, no hands in the spec list, and no route to writing your own code on it. It walks and balances, and it does what Unitree's shipped software and the included manual controller allow.
The EDU is the machine every lab and every build video actually uses. It has no published price, and the resellers who will quote you one listed it at $43,900 to $73,900 as of 2026-07-25.
The price, compressed
The store page showed $16,000 from June 2024 through mid-October 2025; every capture from late December 2025 on shows $13,500. One cut of $2,500, about 16 percent, and the only humanoid price chart I maintain that points downward. The dated captures live in the G1 price history.
Where that puts it in Unitree's own lineup:
| Model | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Unitree R1 | from $4,900 | the cheap biped, R1-D from $4,290 |
| Unitree G1 | $13,500 | backordered |
| Unitree H2 | $29,900 | the newer full-size H |
| Unitree H1 | $90,000 | the original flagship |
| Unitree H2 Plus | $100,000 |
The middle rung, and the one carrying nearly all of the category's search traffic. For prices outside Unitree, the full humanoid price ladder has the rest.
The landed number
Add $300 to $1,200 of shipping plus buyer-paid duties and clearance, and a G1 at a US door is a $14,000 to $15,000 event before anything goes wrong.
Then consider that 8 month warranty on a machine with no described US service network. A fault in month nine means shipping 35 kg of research platform back to China at your own cost, or fixing it yourself. That is the case for paying a dealer instead: a third-party Amazon listing for the G1 was $17,990, and the RoboZaps buyer guide quotes the same $17,990 for US dealers. Roughly $4,500 over direct buys US-side logistics and someone to call.
What Unitree tells individual buyers
Most of this industry sells the dream. Unitree prints the disclaimer, and almost nobody in the category writes anything like it:
"Currently, the global humanoid robot industry is in the early stages of exploration. Individual users are strongly advised to thoroughly understand the limitations of humanoid robots before making a purchase."
Two more sit on the same page. One asks users to keep "a sufficient safe distance between the humanoid robot and people" because the machine has "extremely powerful power." The other calls the G1 "a civilian robot" and asks buyers not to modify it dangerously.
That is a maker telling you, on its own sales page, that the robot is strong enough to hurt you and unfinished enough to disappoint you.
What G1s actually do in public
G1s turn up in public constantly. Three dated examples:
- Boxing, May 25, 2025. The CMG World Robot Competition Mecha Fighting Series in Hangzhou staged the first humanoid robot boxing matches with G1 units, piloted by humans on handheld controllers.
- World Humanoid Robot Games, Beijing, August 15 to 17, 2025. Hundreds of robots across track events, soccer, dance and combat, with Unitree topping the medal table, per CNBC. The New York Times noted the machines fell down a lot.
- Wild boars, Warsaw, April 12, 2026. A customized G1 nicknamed "Edward Warchocki" was filmed chasing a pack of boars through a Warsaw neighbourhood, and the clip travelled via AP, Reuters and the BBC that week.
Every viral G1 moment is teleoperated, choreographed, or programmed for one narrow stunt by a team that bought the EDU. None of it is a robot doing unscripted work in a kitchen. The fighting leagues explainer has more on the piloted-versus-autonomous line.
The security disclosure nobody put on the product page
On 2025-09-20, researchers Andreas Makris and Kevin Finisterre published UniPwn, a Bluetooth Low Energy command injection flaw in the WiFi setup interface shared across Unitree's Go2, G1, H1 and B2 robots on then-current firmware. Their write-up describes encryption keys hardcoded identically across devices, an authentication check satisfied by the plaintext string "unitree," and unsanitised SSID and password fields passed into a shell command. They call it wormable: a compromised robot can infect other Unitree robots in Bluetooth range.
The repo's timeline is its own story. Discovered 2025-04-14, first disclosure attempt 2025-05-14, and on 2025-07-20 Unitree told them a fix would need full system iteration taking "quarters or years." No patched firmware is documented since, and I can find no Unitree security bulletin addressing it.
OTA fixes for this vulnerability have been pushed one after another (@UnitreeRobotics, 2025-09-29)
Wikipedia's summary of the same period also records a finding that the G1 reports multi-modal sensor data without notifying the operator. I have not read that underlying paper, so treat it as secondary and unconfirmed until I have. What I will say plainly: this is a camera, LiDAR and four-microphone machine on your home network, from a maker with an unresolved public Bluetooth vulnerability. Price that in.
What would change this page
Five triggers, all checkable:
- The store price moves off $13,500, or the backordered flag clears.
- The "does not support secondary development" line disappears from the base listing.
- Unitree publishes a price for the G1 EDU instead of routing it through sales.
- A patched firmware or a security advisory addressing UniPwn appears.
- Anyone outside Unitree films an unmodified base G1 doing a useful, unscripted household task.
Until then the tracker entry stands: the most genuinely buyable full-size humanoid on earth, sold plainly as a platform, with the platform part sold separately. If $13,500 is more than the experiment is worth, the same maker's R1 starts at $4,900 and the Go2 quadruped at $1,600.
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