I've been excitedly following the development of Opulo's LumenPnP for the last couple of years. An open-source PnP machine for small business PCB assembly.
For 5-10 samples, doing it by hand is perfectly viable. For 100+ samples, the manual act of loading and unloading PCBs already takes so much time that you are probably better off outsourcing it to China. Companies like JLCPCB do it for prices which are so low it is basically free, order to delivery is four to six days - including the PCB which you already have to order, and quality control is going to be way better than you can do on your own.
It is cheap enough that buying one is very tempting, but I have a feeling it'll just be another toy that will end up sitting on a shelf unused.
With 3D printing, any company can just get one for a one-off $1000 and have a physical representation of their design in a few hours. That kind of innovation radically alters the entire industry.
It worked alright, but took some considerable effort to get things working smoothly. (I wasn't the one doing that work, so I can't really comment intelligently about exactly what that means.)
Here's a little video about the badge, briefly showing the LumenPnP machine in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZriUMNpLc