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Comment by kpmcc | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks the price of this is absurd? 9k for an 8x8 box?!

It's a shed, but it's a fairly expensive shed.

Preparing the ground isn't mentioned. If you've never tried to make a chunk of ground perfectly level and compacted so that your shed won't sink and tilt... you won't get it right by yourself. Not the first time, anyway.

Is that included in the price? I was under the impression that this was going to be assembled somewhere else, then drop-shipped. From their site:

"After the units are built in the factory, they are fork lifted into a truck and driven to your property address. Once the truck arrives, a forklift will take the unit out of the truck and place it in place on your property."

This does not sound to me like they are doing anything beyond just building and finishing a box, and the price is fairly absurd for that.

All the rest of their modular homes don't include site prep so I assume you are correct.

Depends. I don't know which glass they are using but I did some back of the napkin calculations for a project I was dreaming of that had some "glass" and it would cost $8-9k just for the glass alone. It was not that much glass. Probably a bit more than this cube.

That's if you are looking for some premium glass that won't shutter into a thousand pieces and hurt you. Same for steel, aluminum, high quality wood, etc...

So yes, it can be very expensive. A cheap wooden dwelling can be pretty cheap though.

The didn’t mention if they’re storm windows so I’m going to guess not. That won’t work in the region of the country that deals with hurricanes.

Actually the $31 basic power cord seems the most absurd to me.

Couldn't just make that $0 with a $9k purchase?

Yeah penny wise, pound foolish there by these people.

$9k seem expensive, but I don't know the price of these things so half willing to accept it. Then seeing they are charging $31 for a power cord now makes know they are charging too much for the the main thing they are selling.

Nope. I was looking at that thing thinking I could knock that out in a weekend, with the most expensive thing being materials. (the wood/drywall version anyway)

Even if you weren't the sort of person who could build one in a weekend, you could almost certainly hire somebody locally to do it for less than $9k.

And as a bonus, they'd know your local codes and inspection requirements.

Its a business expense.

I went top of the line and got mine up to $25K USD! Why are you skimping on your human tank?

Woah!

I used to know someone whose entire house (about 900 sq ft in Beltrami county, MN) cost less than that!

I can almost see a more traditional tech company buying a bunch of those for their workers in the current climate, even at such a ridiculous markup, just to guarantee a "standard" workspace.

No, the prices are indeed absurd.

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