That's just one example that came to mind. I guarantee I could dig for 30 mins and find a mobile manipulator platform from China that kills it on hardware-to-price ratio that is either 'open enough' or could be made so.
As someone who's dabbled in this before, I guess I'd rather just sit down and plan a BOM and do it myself if that's your markup anyways. Not that it's totally unreasonable for people who just want something super simple out of the box that works.
My general commentary is just that it's sad how much basic servos and what not cost in North America. We've completely ceded this industry to Asia.
Our servos come from Asia. If you can find a platform with everything we have for around $1k BOM happy to review it but we've been pretty deep in picking our components.
Also, fair to say that if indeed you're the kind of person who likes to assemble all of this yourself, you're not directly in our target :)
This is more for AI / software folks who don't want to have to assemble and calibrate everything and risk having an arm that is not repeatable and thus can't actually properly learn. We have seen many folks spend a weekend or more trying to put these together and end up with a barely working platform and then be disgusted of AI robotics