Lovot sells affection with a hardware price and a plan

Lovot's maker prices a subscription-model companion robot around care plans, as its own pages state on retrieval.

Site publication

September 18, 2026

What happened

GROOVE X, a Japanese robotics company, sells LOVOT, a companion robot it describes on its own site as built for one purpose: 'to be loved by you'. The company's product page places LOVOT in 2019 as a fourth category of home robot, after entertainment, task and communication types, and states it as a 'Slow-Relation Robot' designed to deepen a bond over time rather than perform tasks efficiently. Its corporate page describes the company's own operations as spanning research, manufacturing, and what it calls 'one of the world's largest B2C robot hospitals' for repair.

What the documents show

As retrieved on 16 September 2026, GROOVE X's web store prices LOVOT hardware from 449,900 yen for an older model or 577,500 yen for the current one, payable in instalments, and separately requires an ongoing monthly care plan: 9,900 yen for a minimum tier, 12,980 yen for the recommended 'Basic Care' tier, or a 'Full Coverage' tier starting at a discounted 12,980 yen that rises to 19,800 yen after seven months. The product page states LOVOT has 'over 10,000' units active in homes, with more than 90% still in use after three years — a retention figure the company presents as its own, without an outside audit cited alongside it.

The mechanism

Selling a subscription alongside the hardware separates the emotional product from the physical one: the device itself is a one-time purchase, but the Full Coverage plan's own pricing — cheap at first, rising after seven months — is structured around a repair-and-replacement promise rather than around any software or memory feature, unlike the subscription tiers seen in text-based companion apps. GROOVE X's product page also cites third-party research, stating that contact with LOVOT is associated with 'higher baseline urinary oxytocin levels' and reduced cortisol; these are the company's own citations of studies it summarises rather than reproduces in full here, and are recorded as claims the company makes about its product, not as independently verified findings.

What it leaves open

Neither page states an exact 2019 launch date, only the year, so this record does not fix a specific day. Neither page discloses what proportion of owners choose the cheaper Minimum Care plan over Full Coverage, or what happens to a LOVOT's software if GROOVE X's own cloud service were ever discontinued — a risk this record notes only by comparison with cloud-dependent companion hardware elsewhere, not because either page addresses it. The oxytocin and cortisol figures are attributed to research the company references but that these two pages do not themselves reproduce.

• Is a wellbeing claim about a companion device the company's own citation, or an independently published study?
• Does a repair-and-replacement plan's price rise over time, and on what schedule?
• What happens to a physical companion's software if the maker's cloud service ends?

GROOVE X's own pages describe a business that sells affection twice: once as a physical object, and again, every month, as a promise to keep repairing it. What that promise depends on technically is not something either page fully documents.

Sources & reading trail

The company's own description of LOVOT's purpose, launch year, unit count and retention figures.

Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

The maker's own description of its business lines, including repair operations.

Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

The company's own current hardware and monthly care-plan prices.

Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

Company documents, filings, studies and official records establish the record; the reading and the questions are Lovebot Journal editorial analysis. This retrospective draft does not imply the site published on the event date.

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Published September 18, 2026, not on the date of the event described.