Yeah that’s what I have heard as well. definitely seems like they might be open to re-evaluating their decision when the supply chain recovers.
prove it. I would like to see someone prove that not all FRC teams consume large amounts of money, much more than vEx.
I’d like to think they learned from the past. Things have gotten better in the last few months for things I’ve needed.
Pretty clear to me that FRC teams tend to have larger budgets than VRC teams.
What is the highest budget FRC team? - FIRST / General Forum - Chief Delphi
Budget for Starting New Team - FIRST / General Forum - Chief Delphi
Me waiting for the Stereo AI camera to release in Q3 2021:
Just the cost of registration and attending a single event seems to be $6k, FRC costs are crazy high compared to VRC (I might me misreading, and I know that includes the base kit of parts, but still)
There were two points to the statement, though. Some FRC teams are “small” money consuming monsters. 
BTDT…
For now, VEX lets our organization get the most bang for our buck.
no. If we were getting the most bang for our buck, we could buy from resellers, and fix broken brain ports.
Don’t you just love having to change what you’re used to?
I suggest using the vex certified screws so that you will not get in trouble with the inspection groups at competitions.
why did they remove them
Scroll up, that is what this thread is about.
mood
Something like that. For the 2022 season, the fees breakdown as:
Regional Team Registration
- $6,000 = Initial team registration (event + “kit of parts”)
- $4,000 = Additional Event
- $5,000 = Work Championship
District Team Registration
- $6,000 = Initial team registration (2 district events + “kit of parts”)
- $500 = Additional district event
- $2,000-5,000 = District Championship
- $5,000 = World Championship
Most teams do 2 events, so that’s between $6,000 and $10,000 just in event registrations depending on your team’s geographic location. If you want to attend the world championship, it’s another $5,000-$10,000 (depending on location). In total, you’re looking at between $6,000-$16,000 in registration fees.
That doesn’t include:
- Parts to prototype and build your robot. The term “Kit of Parts” is misleading. Outside of a basic chassis (if your team decides that is what it wants to use), it contains little that is truly usable on the end product. It’s more like a box of Costco samples. Some are tasty, some are not, but none of it provides enough sustenance to survive. If you’re relying on the “Kit of Parts” to build your robot, you’re probably not going to have a good time.
- Tools (the number of tools needed to build and maintain a VRC robot pale in comparison to the number needed in FRC).
- Cost of transporting your robot and supplies. In VRC a robot and pretty much everything needed for a pit fits in a car. This is typically not the case in FRC. You usually need to split this stuff across several cars, or a truck (or two), or a trailer, or a box truck. Flying somewhere to compete? Imagine crating up your robot and paying freight to ship it across the country. Now imagine doing that for everything in your pit as well.
- Most FRC teams have at most 1 event close enough where they don’t need to pay for at least a night or two of hotel. Plus, in non-COVID times, every official event is multiple days long. Travel expenses can become a pretty sizable amount of a team’s operating budget.
- Buying field elements isn’t really a thing. If a team wants field elements to practice and prototype with, they have to build them. Usually out of wood. A team can easily spend over $500 on wood and supplies to make field elements. Also, this requires the team to build these themselves. Oh, and it’s not unusual for wooden field elements to behave differently than the official elements.
So yeah. FRC can guzzle up cash pretty fast. When I was involved in FRC it always surprised me how much money is spent each year outside of the robot. It doesn’t mean the program is bad, I learned a lot from my time in FRC. However, even at the bare minimum, it requires a considerable amount of cash.
Maybe “popular” was the word you wanted, FRC robots are much bigger (up to 34" wide some years and 104" tall)
Cost is one of the reasons I do VEX. A full FRC season costs ~30-45K and for that I can have 16 teams and send 5 of them to Worlds.
It’s like comparing apples to oranges. VRC is designed to be run by schools and other student groups where FRC is designed to be a partnership between businesses and those schools and student groups. One of the big benefits to those companies is the ability to attract and retain local talent for their future workforce. Go to thebluealliance.com and look at the official names of the teams. Ex:
148 - Innovation First International/L3 Harris&Greenville High School
118 - NASA-Johnson Space Center & Clear Creek Independent School District
1114 - General Motors/Ontario Power Generation/FIRST Canada/Vykan/Innovation First International/Johnson & Johnson/Embark&Governor Simcoe Secondary School
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be FTC to VRC, as both play with robots on the same scale (18x18x18 on the same size field). I don’t know much about the costs of FTC, though I have heard the robots are more expensive despite not being tied to a single vendor.
My point is that many on the forums seem to think VEX marks up prices because they are the single vendor for VRC.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Largely, VRC is “single supplier” while FTC is “buy from many vendors”.
Generally, FTC vendors/suppliers operate in the free market, which, according to theory, keeps prices low because buyers will chose the cheaper option when presented with the option to buy the same widget at different prices.
Most parts used in FTC are at least partially commoditized - e.g. metal suppliers will provide the same grade aluminum, possibly with precut holes, in uniform length, etc. that the “market demands”. So standardization can happen across vendors.
In this case, my point is to demonstrate that VRC costs are (probably) lower than FTC costs, despite FTC being multi-vendor, and that Vex is not artificially jacking up prices because they are a monopoly.
Yep, Closed system vs open system. The whole argument that led to FIRST VEX Challenge splitting to VRC and FTC. Positives and negatives to both. In my opinion, and many others we got the better end of the deal with more affordable robots, more challenging constraints, and way better games. (FTC has had the same cube as the major game piece 4 of the last 8 games?!?!???)