About Cheapbot Co

Cheapbot Co is a site about robot vacuums under $300, written by Scooter M., an enthusiast. Not a technician, not a certified anything, and not somebody with a test lab. What I do is read the manuals, compile the published specifications, do the arithmetic on what a machine costs to own, and publish all of it so you can check the work.

Scooter M. is an enthusiast who is genuinely into this stuff. I read the manuals, compile the published specifications, and do the arithmetic on what a machine actually costs to own. I have not tested these robot vacuums and I do not pretend to have. What I can do is tell you exactly what the spec sheets say, where the numbers stop meaning what the marketing implies, and at what point the expensive one stops being worth the money. No lab coat.

That is the whole biography, and the absence of anything else in it is deliberate. There is no certification, no industry background, and no claim to have handled these machines. If a site tells you its author has years of hands-on experience across half a dozen unrelated product categories, one of those claims is probably not true, and you have no way of telling which.

Because the sub-$300 tier changed very fast and almost nothing written about it kept up. Two years ago a budget robot vacuum meant bumping into walls and emptying a small bin by hand. Today LiDAR mapping starts around $149 and a self-emptying dock around $168 - both features that were flagship-only, at three times the price, very recently.

Meanwhile the pages ranking for these searches are mostly written from the top down: a general vacuum site's one article about the budget end, usually working from a two-year-old picture of the market, frequently recommending machines that are out of stock. For Cheapbot Co the $300 ceiling is the entire site, not one article on it, which is why we check availability and price against live retailer data before writing a page and drop the models that fail.

The competitors that rank well in this category mostly win on a test lab. Vacuum Wars states it has independently tested more than two hundred machines. RTINGS runs a documented protocol. Those are real credentials that produce real rankings, and imitating them without doing the work would be both dishonest and trivially easy to catch out.

So: I have not tested any of these robot vacuums. There is no lab, no unit count, no 'in our testing'. That sentence appears in the byline of every article on this site and in an explicit section on every review naming the specific claims I could not check.

I also will not invent a credential, quote a made-up expert panel, or write a testimonial. This brand is new and has no customers to quote, and inventing some would be the fastest possible way to deserve none.

Compile what the manufacturers actually publish, and score it against a rubric that is itself published. Five metrics, stated weights, a worked example on the how-we-pick page, and the source for every figure cited on the page it appears on with the date it was read.

That approach has a specific advantage over a test lab, and it is the reason it is worth doing: you can check it. A lab result asks you to trust the lab. A published rubric hands you the arithmetic, so if you think running cost deserves more than 20% of the score, you can raise it, rerun the numbers, and get a different ranking that is just as legitimate as mine.

It also turns up things a review round-up does not. Reading every listing carefully is how you notice that three major brands publish no suction figure at all, that a manufacturer quotes a coverage number for vacuum-only mode and lets everyone repeat it as the mopping figure, and that one company's more expensive machine publishes a dock capacity half as long as its cheaper one.

Affiliate links, mostly to Amazon. If you buy through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The full detail is on the affiliate disclosure page, and it is linked under every buy button on the site rather than buried in a footer.

The thing worth saying here is what that money does not buy. The ranking is computed from the rubric before any link is attached. Every list names a machine I would not buy - on the main ranking it is from the best-known brand in the category. And the troubleshooting guide deliberately recommends nothing at all, because somebody trying to fix the vacuum they own is not shopping, and selling them a new one would be a worse page for a slightly better commission.

A site built on published figures is a site that can be checked, which means when it is wrong, it is wrong verifiably. If you find an incorrect specification, a dead link, or a price that does not match reality, tell me - corrections take priority over new content, and the editorial policy sets out how they are handled and how quickly.