Where it works
Unloading shipping containers and trailers. DHL was the first commercial customer and has expanded to more than 1,000 robotic units across its logistics network.
Container unloading is hot, physically brutal and hard to staff, which makes it the rare task where a very expensive machine still pays. The work is also unusually well defined: known box sizes, a confined space, one repeated motion. That narrowness is why Stretch reached a thousand-unit deployment while general-purpose humanoids were still running pilots.
No public price. Historical reporting puts units between 300,000 and 500,000 dollars.
What it means to own one
At a few hundred thousand dollars a unit, ownership sits with the logistics operator rather than with an investor. The economics work because the machine displaces a whole shift of the least fillable job in the building, every day, in one fixed location.
Stretch is the counter-example to the argument that cheaper robots always win. It is one of the most expensive machines in this catalogue and also one of the most deployed, because the task it removes is the one where labour is scarcest. Price matters less than how badly the work needs doing.