I was just wondering how do different teams distribute their money, which is part of a bigger question of what sets the top teams different from others?
Can you elaborate on this question? Are you asking about how teams handle paying for things (like reimbursement) or like what teams cost breakdowns look like (like this % of money goes to the robot, this % for travel, etc), or something else?
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Here’s the rough numbers we pump out to our team. It should shed some light on where our money flows.
Per student…
It costs $260 to build a robot.
To take that robot to our local event, add in $230.
To then take that robot on the road to another event (with all travel costs), add in another $500
To then take that robot to champs (with all travel costs), add in another $1400
Based on our area and current level of sponsorship, we don’t ask students to start chipping in till traveling starts.
TL;DR: Registration & Travel costs outweigh robot costs by a lot.
Our team prioritizes trying to use the local event and the robot itself to make the team as open-to-all as possible (and we’ll happily cover travel fees if a student’s been showing up a bunch, but has some financial constraint to where they can’t start to chip in).
I’ve heard other approaches too: at least one team used to say “Travel is on your own - make your own reservations, travel, etc. Just be at the venue at X time”. That wouldn’t fly as well with our current student population, but might work better if the team wanted to keep focus on the robot and event experience, and parents/students were interested in optimizing their travel themselves.
Update:
Since others have used the percentage format, here’s the translation. A full season lays out ~$2400 per student.
Robot = 11%
First regional - register & attend = 9.6%
Second (travel) regional - register & attend = 21%
Champs - register & attend = 58%
There is a specific reason I laid it out the earlier way though - it should give some sense of how we’d plan to grow by student population or team scale as sponsorship goes up or down. All of those costs (robot included) scale roughly by student count (abet with some discrete steps). More students = gotta get more $$$ from somewhere. Or cut back (skip champs? Skip travel regional?).
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Rough breakdown of our budget from 23-24
- Registration 14%
- Robot 26%
- Tools 12%
- Hotel/travel 22%
- TRI 8%
- Storage 3%
- Food 4%
- Other 11%
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How are you spending only $260 to build a robot?
$260 per student
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225 was like this, we would typically spend $15-20k on registrations, $15k on COTS/materials, ~$5k on misc other things like insurance, accounting, and infrastructure, and $0 on travel.
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Rough Totals for our 2025 - 2026 budget
- Fundraisers 15%
- Robot 17%
- Tools 13%
- Non- Profit 2%
- FLL 0.5%
- Hospitality 2%
- Hotels 10%
- Business Consumables (includes team apparel) 5%
- Competition Registration 8%
- Fuel 0.5%
- Worlds (registration, hotels, flights, ect: 27%
Gotta love champs being more than 25%
If you’re going to say $260 per student, it would help to also share how many students you have.
Do you subsidize students’ travel costs?
Mostly team cost breakdowns b/c I want to see how other teams allocate their money for robots
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gerthworm: You said you spend $260 per student on the robot. If your team has only five students, that is a different total than if your team has 50 students.
We do. For competitions the students only have to pay for their own food, although they can request accommodation need be. We also ask they help pitch in for gas if we have parent drivers.
The ask was for distribution (which I gave), not total (which I agree, scales massively by the number of students).
We’ve had anywhere from 20 to 50 in the past, currently trending toward 30.
We do currently file a 990 if you want our real numbers for this last year.
Wait this is super interesting. Do most teams file a 990?
This is our breakdown for 2024-2025
- Robot Components (Two 118 Robots, 10118 Robot, Everybot & Prototyping) 38%
- Event Registration (For 118 and 10118 plus off-season) 13%
- Outreach (Everybot donations, outreach events etc) 9%
- Tools (Hand tools, machinery, computers) 9%
- Other (Banquet, Shipping, Field build, website and Slack) 9%
- Travel (Hotels and charter bus for travel regional) 8%
- Raw Materials (Sheet stock, box tubing, 3D printer filament) 5%
- Uniforms 4%
- Food 3%
- Facility (Improvements, Consumables, etc.) 2%
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New team this year?
Only if you are registered as a non profit in the United states.
And, actually, in our case, the entity is a booster club that supports the team, not the team itself.