Buy, Lease, or RaaS? A Cost Comparison for Cleaning Robots

Anyone looking to acquire a professional cleaning robot faces a simpler decision than the term RaaS (Robotics-as-a-Service) might suggest: in practice, there are currently two economically relevant models to choose from, purchase and leasing. RaaS is used as a term in the market, but it covers very different offerings, few of which come with public pricing or clear terms. This article compares purchase and leasing using concrete figures, highlights the pitfall where most leasing comparisons go wrong, and cleanly frames RaaS as a term.

Buy or Lease: The Real Decision

Balance Sheet and Tax, in Brief

Purchase and leasing affect the balance sheet and liquidity differently. With a purchase, the robot is capitalized and depreciated over its useful life, which affects the equity ratio. Lease payments, by contrast, are typically not balance-sheet-relevant and are immediately deductible as operating expenses, which preserves liquidity. For German trade tax (Gewerbesteuer), note that since 2008, 20 percent of lease payments above an allowance of €200,000 are added back to trade income. This overview does not replace tax advice; it merely outlines the general framework within which the decision is made. Readers outside Germany should note that this tax treatment is specific to German trade tax law and will not apply directly in other jurisdictions.

What Buying and Leasing a Cleaning Robot Actually Cost

Model	Purchase Price	Lease Rate (60 months)
Gausium Beetle	€17,980	€375/month
Gausium Mira	€22,980	€434/month
Pudu MT1 Vac	€19,490	€409/month
Pudu CC1 Pro	€23,980	€482/month

These figures come from Upgrade Robotics' own quotes (as of August 2026, leasing partner Grenke, 60-month term) and should be understood as a concrete, current example, not a market average. Leasing providers such as Grenke purchase the machine and make it available to the customer for a monthly rate; the minimum volume is around €500, with term and add-on services freely negotiable. A so-called service-inclusive financing option can also bundle refilling, maintenance, and repair into a single invoice.

Why Two Leasing Offers with Similar Monthly Rates Aren't Comparable

This is where most leasing comparisons go wrong in practice: a lower monthly rate is not automatically the better offer. Leasing banks calculate their rates differently, for example by setting a higher residual value at the end of the contract or, conversely, requiring a down payment to the dealer. An offer with a €3,000 down payment and a high residual value is not economically equivalent to an offer with no down payment and a low residual value of, say, 10 percent, even if both monthly rates look similar at first glance. These differences are often buried in the fine print and get overlooked in a pure rate comparison.

A two-step approach makes more sense: first compare the net price of the robot across providers, then compare several leasing-bank offers structurally, examining down payment, residual value, and term individually rather than relying solely on the monthly rate.

Practical observation from Upgrade Robotics, not externally verified.

Service Packages: The Underestimated Third Cost Block

Purchase price or lease rate are not the total cost. Sales partners for various robot brands typically offer service packages as a separate, add-on option; there is no uniform industry standard for this. One to three service tiers are common: an entry-level package often runs around €199, a premium package up to around €299. The packages differ in, among other things, response time, discounts on wear parts, and the frequency of staff refresher training. In practice, satisfaction with a cleaning robot clearly depends on how quickly a local service partner can respond and secure fleet availability. The details of tier structures are the subject of a separate article; the point here is simply not to overlook this cost block.

Practical observation from Upgrade Robotics, not externally verified.

What RaaS Actually Means

RaaS stands for Robotics-as-a-Service, but the term is used inconsistently in the market. In practice, three variants can currently be observed. Some manufacturers offer pure subscription models with no public pricing; one example is BrainOS Clean Suite from Brain Corp, whose terms are negotiated individually. At the reseller level, there are also leasing offers with publicly listed prices and tiered service packages, broadly in the range of the figures shown above. And finally, some service providers position themselves as RaaS providers to large enterprise customers, without any publicly available market data or adoption figures to back that up.

This three-way split explains why RaaS cannot be described as a single, comparable model in the cleaning-robot market the way purchase and leasing can. For Upgrade Robotics, RaaS is currently not a service the company offers itself; this classification serves purely to clarify the term.

Market Growth: What the Numbers Actually Show

According to the IFR (International Federation of Robotics) World Robotics 2025 report, cleaning robots rank third among application categories in professional service robotics, with 34 percent growth and more than 25,000 units sold; floor cleaning is the main application. This figure refers directly to cleaning robots.

Separately, the IFR reports 31 percent RaaS fleet growth for the service robotics industry as a whole in 2024. This figure is not broken down by application category and cannot be applied specifically to cleaning robots. Reading both figures together should not be understood to mean that RaaS for cleaning robots grew by 31 percent; that cannot be derived from the available data.

Conclusion

For the concrete acquisition decision, purchase and leasing are the relevant options. Those who want to preserve liquidity and avoid balance-sheet impact tend toward leasing; those who value ownership and depreciation tend toward purchase. Which option makes more economic sense depends on the individual financing situation and should be reviewed case by case with tax advice.

For leasing offers, it always pays to compare the net price first and then examine residual value, down payment, and term individually, rather than relying on the monthly rate — that's where most comparisons go wrong. RaaS, meanwhile, is a term that describes the market but does not itself represent a uniform third model.

Those who want to dig deeper into the economics will find the relevant methodology in our articles on total cost of ownership and ROI calculation. Those who aren't yet sure whether a robot is worthwhile at their own site will find the basis for that in our site-assessment guide.