I just want to add some context here because i feel like there is a large gap in understanding of what a wheelchair actually is. Please click through these and get an understanding of the level of detail required to be properly fitted for a wheelchair.

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/hylifiyf/creative... - note the clinical rationale and notes sections on each of these options.

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/4ozh2ary/tilite-s... - seating cushions and backrests

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/npxlfuoh/tr-tra-o... - current ti lite order form.

https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/hjvhuqlw/tilite-p... - component list / prices. There are almost 11,000 individual parts that are available for purchase for years after the chair is sold so it can be supported through the expected life of 5 - 7 years usually.

And through all of this you are working with professional therapists that are trained to properly size all these measurements, because an ill fitting chair can cause more harm than good.

A manual wheelchair is less complex than a bicycle, and I can get a decent bicycle for a few hundred bucks. The fact that basic wheelchairs are crazy expensive has little to do with the chairs and a lot to do with insane bureaucracy.

I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers.

Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device markup and regulatory hurdles driving up costs?

I'm a big fan of his channel, but when I saw the price tag, it got me thinking for a moment. Wheelchairs are a great example of why niche products are expensive.

I think you're spot on with certifications.

I was stupid a few times and needed orthopedic equipment. Each time, the price flabbergasted me. But it didn't matter since the health insurance fully refunded it.

In a regulated market, if you can influence the cap, the item will cost exactly that, no less. And if the market is small enough to not allow any disruption, then it will stay that way forever.

I need to talk to my girlfriend who's a physiotherapist about it. But for now I'm hoping his YouTube fame would start a snowball effect.

Thinking he could do with the wheelchairs what Elon is pretending to do with EVs is truly exciting.

Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.

What do you recommend for my parent, they are using a crappy Medicare approved Medline wheelchair that’s like $300 on Amazon. They can’t use their right side of their body really due to a stroke paralysis.

The wheelchair is like starting to fall apart. What should I I get them that will last many years? Thanks!

So about the price of a Herman miller chair. Honestly sounds pretty reasonable to me. Though ideally it was less so price doesn’t limit access

Anything medical becomes a licensing nightmare. With how expensive power wheelchairs get I’m shocked they don’t come with a flight box.

Hey, would you get started on power wheelchair costs? Inquiring minds would like to learn more.

Device so essential to daily life is treated in such a costly, bureaucratic manner

> This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is

While it is absolutely true that he cares, I think you are selling his long term plans short. The primary growth factor for the channel was reviewing phones with the repairability / endurance focus, but somewhat recently he expanded to topics such as plugging abandoned oil wells which are leaking methane and wheelchair mobility issues. From what I understand he has a couple similar things in the pipeline.

I’ve been watching his channel for a long time and remember back before they were together.

If I remember correctly he first built her a wheelchair to go hiking in. That was kinda the beginning of their relationship. I think there was also a stair climbing wheelchair involved at some point, but that could have been a sponsored thing rather than something he built.

He’s also been working on an electric humvee. So he’s a lot more than just the channel where he scratches and tears apart phones.

You had to have cashflow to pay those bills and wait for a redund? Sounds terrifying.

>And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.

It's probably not a cost effective market to be in and getting a government monopoly is the only way to make it viable in the first place.

https://bikesdirect.com/

Lots of good bikes in the $300-500 range. I've had one for more than 12 years and thousands of miles without issue or drama.

I paid $300 for a single speed road bike from BD in 2012, it looks fancier than it is with a carbon fiber fork. Added some Gatorskin tires and it's worked ever since, I only clean and lube the chain every 5 years so far. Made in Canadia.

[dead]

My bike cost £75

You're in the right ballpark, though a good chair can easily get you into the 5 figures. Top-end is perhaps $20k.

From their front page : "For more than three decades, New Mobility has published groundbreaking content for active wheelchair users."

Fair from them to assume the (average) reader is familiar with the subject.

These wheelchairs are custom built to your dimensions. They're not adjustable one-size-fits-all ones.

There's another article by the same author about their quest to get a custom titanium chair paid for by their insurance - https://newmobility.com/finding-the-right-wheelchair/

It's really interesting to learn about all the variables that make a good chair - pressure distribution, the seat height, castor width, centre of gravity and other geometry variables. And all of those are unique to your body.

According to other comments here, a custom titanium chair costs about $4k, so $1k is cheap compared to that.

You are missing the experience of being tied to a wheelchair for a complete day.

None of the chairs you have shown are suitable for daily use. Even the "Magnesium" one.

One of the most important point (beside being the right size) is to be able to move the center of the rear wheels just behind the center of gravity. Too far rear and you have very good stability (hospital chairs), but you need to use most of your strength just to be able to turn (and you take a lot of space for turning). Too far ahead and it becomes dangerous. So it must be adjustable. In theory this should be possible on a cheap wheelchair, but I have never seen it. Probably the weight ditribution is too different (most is on the rear wheel) that the chassis must be thought differently?

I don’t know much about wheelchairs but I watched the video in the article and by the looks of it these are a certain class of wheelchair and they don’t look comparable to what you’ve linked to. My guess is photos are deceiving and there’s a handful of features worth having if you spend your waking moments in one of these things. The reviewer in the video mentioned some features he liked and disliked, wheels specifically can be a huge factor and tend to be expensive upgrades

My first kagi result also shows many options below AUD $1000 (USD $700 or so):

https://www.buywheelchair.com.au/

I suspect it's like anything in the US - despite much of the global research being done there at taxpayer expense, Americans seem to get screwed over on anything health or medicine related. And they continue to argue that their health system is a good one, for some weird Stockholm Syndrome-esque reason I suppose.

I would assume the wheelchairs I linked above are made in China and anyone enterprising could import them for < $500 USD per unit. I also assume their insurance cartel would have an argument why they're not suitable, despite being suitable for the other 7.8B people in the world.

The 3 things you're missing are:

1) How uncomfortable lower end chairs can be for their users

2) How many of the little design decisions in lower end chairs can add up to a lot of pain

3) The chairs you buy online are almost exclusively all made in China using Chinese labor and pricing, where as the one in the linked article is made in the US paying US wages

But I want to talk about 1 and 2 for a moment. My spouse has developed a need for a wheel chair from time to time, so we originally bought a cheap one, just like many of the ones listed there. Specifically we bought one of these Drive chairs for about $140 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008KMKVEK/).

Among the small "papercuts" of using this thing:

* It was extremely uncomfortable after an hour or so. Bringing extra cushions and padding was a must

* The bearings were pretty awful and there was quite a bit of rolling resistance

* After enough times being transported folded up in a trunk, the plastic wheels deformed enough that one side rubbed on the frame every rotation. Not enough to make it unusable, but enough to add even more rolling resistance, in addition to requiring constant adjustments to keep going straight

* Misc bolts and pieces on the frame would catch and lock with each other making un-folding or folding the chair unexpectedly complex at random times

* 41 lbs is a LOT of extra weight to be rolling around with just your arms when you're already trying to roll yourself along.

* There was so much slop in the frame, rolling over any uneven surfaces was an exercise in frustration at best. Everything moved and shifted and your balance was all over as things twisted and buckled under any surface that was a completely flat linoleum hospital floor. In fact the thing that finally did the chair in was a trip to a park where we needed to be rolling over the grass and roots and dirt. A twist too far going over a rough patch of ground broke some of the pieces that hold everything together.

It was a perfectly serviceable chair for an occasional need that lasted us about 4 years of light duty use (some of which was during COVID, so very light duty in some cases). And when we replaced it, we never even considered buying the same one. It wasn't worth the money saved. It's hard to really describe, but all the little pain points made it so that in many ways the chair felt more limiting than the medical condition itself. And we were and are extremely fortunate that we're still able to decide on a case by case basis whether to use or not use the chair. If it was something we had to use every day, all day, I would wager by the end of the first month we would have been looking for something else, and it might have lasted a whole year before breaking.

it seems to be similar with hearing aids. I recently saw a video explaining that the new airpods will be usable as hearing aids. the video went on to explain that this will make them great value for deaf people as hearing aids can run into the thousands of dollars. I just checked and you can get hearing aids in my country for less than $100. so what's going on?

I'm guessing this is either a non-problem, i.e. the expenses are being exaggerated by competitors; or it's some kind of private healthcare thing where everything is insanely expensive because the government doesn't negotiate prices centrally

Same in France (literally the first Google link): https://monfauteuilroulant.com/Fauteuils-Roulants/Fauteuil-r...

It looks like a US specific problem.

There's a group of people in Australia who recycle bicycles into makeshift wheelchairs for people living in countries with inadequate healthcare. They pack flat and are assembled on-site.

https://wheelchairtrust.org.au/

When bikeshare and scooter was gaining traction, I was hoping some manufacturer would look into collapsible electronic wheel chair for mass transportation. Maybe stupid, but think a few 100 million dollars and 1000s of engineer hours would make a pretty sweet slick wheel chair scooter for short commutes.

> if there was enough demand

I really hope there truly isn't in a real sense.

Old and new wars being fought with anti personnel mine and seeing the numbers of young and fit men and women losing limbs to uncaring political goals is disheartening reminder there well might be.

Each wheelchair is custom so it's totally different than other products.

The stuff Zack and Cambry are doing seems like it can exist even without the YouTube channel, once it reaches a point of awareness in the community and becomes self-sustaining.

Most of the other YouTube products I see seem like they'd die quickly without a YouTube personality to prop them up. They aren't really filling gaps in the market, or doing something new, they're just slapping their name on something as a way to diversify their income sources. Some do seem to put a good amount of effort into helping with the design, or even work directly with the manufacturers, but they're entering crowded and well served spaces, where their primary differentiation is their YouTube channel. Fans are their target market, and I find it unlikely that most will grow beyond their audience. I don't see LTT becoming the next Craftsman, or MKBHD becoming the next Nike.

Zack started out with the knife, which was a play on his YouTube success, but the various wheelchair adjacent things he's made stepped it up considerably. Others could do the same. It makes sense to test the waters and make some mistakes on something small before shooting for the moon. Time will tell how it plays out for all of them.

If nothing else, having some of these examples could inspire kids to want to start businesses making stuff instead of just wanting to be YouTube famous.

There’s Hank and John Green’s https://good.store e-commerce website that sells socks, coffee, and soap and donates 100% of the profit to charity.

It’s a borderline example since they largely sell to their fans, but the products have broad appeal and are not branded with their names like most YouTuber products.

They are aiming for the “Newman’s Own” model of creating good products and then donating 100% of profit to charity.

Youtuber Mark Rober started CrunchLabs from his youtube channel.

for better or worse the entire Mr Beast empire and, to an extent, Logan Paul and his ventures (Prime, etc)

I think you mean promotion instead of distribution?

That sort of “I googled for 30 seconds, and found a cheaper option, why does this project exist” type response is anti-curiosity and anti-learning.

It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.

I sort of think of left-handed people.

I am right handed, but overused it and switched to a left-handed mouse.

There are basically infinity right-handed mice, but basically zero left-handed mice, most of which are hedged ambidextrous mice.

so looking at office chairs and standing desks and all kinds of ergonomics oriented towards healthy sitting, it seems amazing that there isn't more competition for people who sit more than anyone.

I think the dismissals come because wheelchair users are already painfully aware of the options.

Yes, there are different kinds of wheelchairs, there's no reason a premade, presized wheelchair has to cost thousands and they don't. The premade chairs certainly serve a need - for those who can sort of walk but need the chair to go distances (etc).

But the reason for custom wheelchairs is they are for people who spend all day, everyday in the chair. And that's where the need and the pain is greatest and so exhibiting a "ready made" chair just isn't going to impress them.

Nevermind that the article is clearly written by a wheelchair-user, for a publication about wheelchairs / related assistive implements, and clearly explains the pros/cons of the pricing and direct-to-consumer sales model, and includes their positive impressions on having used the chair in question as a daily-driver.

In this case the OP is targeted towards people who are already familiar with this type of chair, so I can sorta understand why the reader who has only ever seen the hospital style chair is confused.

I think its just how cheap / rudimentary the basic model look for 1K. Like it seems there's a viable Indochino / send measurement to Asia manufacture model and get bespoke product back for fraction of the cost. Or some sort of modular break down kit that you can take to a bike shop to tune to custom needs for less. I admire Jerry's effort, but I think people correctly sees $200 product that cost $1000 in US, and somehow it's considered "affordable".

"I don't get it, you can buy a laptop from Walmart for $75, what's the problem"

Individual preference is offensive to a certain kind of worldview.

It's not odd because as you pointed out this is a tech oriented site and not a wheel chair oriented site.

I'm really curious about the hearing aid feature, but haven't seen any review actually featuring a patient using it in a real world situation. I was assuming there would be pre FDA approval reviews, but doesn't seem to be the case.

The older accessibility feature didn't seem to be that great, and I'm pretty eager to see how much it improves through the complete revamp of it before throwing money at it.

Here in Malaysia we can get pretty good quality wheel chair for US$46. I am genuinely surprised to see people consider $1k cheap for a wheel chair!

https://www.lazada.com.my/products/gt-medic-germany-ultra-li...

Those are not good wheelchairs for independent people to spend 16+ hours in.

I work in EMS and see all kinds of "budget" wheelchairs and they'll all shit.

The parts alone for this lightweight chair have to crack $300.

I am not a wheelchair expert but $1k is quite a lot, also there are quite a lot of cheap options in Europe for less than ~$350 and some of them are covered by the public health care system.

Customized to your dimensions wheelchair. Because people shopping for these are permanently disabled and are looking for long term comfort and performance. Performance meaning the chairs can actually be used to enjoy life instead of being a fragile "medical chair".

There are plenty of sub $200 wheelchairs on US Amazon.

Let me use a car analogy.

I have no idea why a car should be more than 10k. On Amazon you can get a go-kart for less than 100: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=go-kart

It is really the same comparison. A true every-day wheelchair or a "hospital" wheelchair that will make you sweat after 10 yards

There are a lot of variables. You can ask an occupational therapist about what sort of wheelchair would be best.

If it's a case where they move themselves indoors but get pushed by others outdoors, it arguably does not matter.

But if they are independent outside the home, you need a custom chair suited to them.

I know nothing about wheelchairs, but have you considered one with a joystick?

It is enclosed. They show a picture later and there's a green safety window to view the work piece in the machine, that material will be designed to block whatever wavelength of light the laser is using (most likely IR, and what do you know safety glasses for the IR bands are mostly green).

If you’re not in the market, I find it ironic you think you can assess if that $999 electric chair or those sub-$500 manual chairs are good deals. From the other comments here it seems like they aren’t.

Everyone is whooooooshing on this because they literally don't understand using wheelchairs.

Not-A-Wheelchair is offering wheelchairs customized to your dimensions. Many insurance wheelchairs that cost $$$$$ are also custom built/fitted to your dimensions. There are absolutely cheap wheelchairs in the US. But people in wheelchairs due to permanent disabilities want comfort and rightfully deserve it. The designs being worked on here by Not-A-Wheelchair are basically all "lifestyle" chairs, rather than boring "temporary injury" chairs.

it's funny seeing comments like this on the same website where people insist- not unreasonably- that buying $3k ergonomic office chairs and motorized sit-stand desks for office workers is a must. Why can't they sit on piled up packing pallets? It's much cheaper and still kind of chair-shaped.

Traditional power chairs are much bigger and heavier than lightweight manual chairs. They're a nightmare to transport unless you have a custom van with an elevator. They also can't handle curbs.

Ultralight manual chairs are often foldable, and light enough that you can transfer out of your chair into the driver's seat of a car, take the chair apart and put the pieces in the passenger's seat of a normal sedan. That level of independence is huge. Also, you can pop wheelies over curbs and other obstacles.

Finally, pushing yourself keeps you in shape, since you miss out on the baseline exercise from walking. Otherwise you decondition and get weak and fragile. Power chairs are for those who can't push themselves sustainably.

As many others have commented, every user's disability and body is unique. You're spending 16 hours a day in the chair. If it doesn't fit you, you'll get pressure sores or strain injuries. The cheap ones are for people who don't need to use them that much.

If it's a lightweight wheelchair custom to your body measurements (not a cheap amazon product) the going uphill is fairly easy. There are also attachments like the SmartDrive for steeper grades.

Unless you don't have function in your arms, it's best to avoid a fully electric wheelchair.

Most of this stuff is still a bit too expensive for DIY, Festool have an ExoActive exoskeleton that might be repurposable - though I think it's designed mostly for holding weight above the head.

There is the 'body braid' that is probably more suited for the tasks that the elderly have trouble with.

Mostly the machines the factory uses. You can cut tubes by hand and drill those holes, but the machines are more accurate and faster. However those machines will cost you in the million range each in some cases. (the $1000 Chinese versions for home use are kits that will cost you $10k to make accurate and the quality means they will wear out fast so while find for building a couple they are more expensive than the million dollar machines in the long run) That investment needs to be amortized across whatever you build and wheelchairs are not high volume.

You can't go with cheaper less flexible machines either because each wheelchair needs to be somewhat custom fit. That in turn means you need to the more expensive machines instead of simple jigs that. They also need someone to program the machines for your custom fit (or software to create that program)

First, have you purchased a bicycle? "High quality" bicycles start at $1,000. (quality dimensions = weight, comfort, durability, flexibility)

Second, small scale manufacturing is expensive.

Third, large-scale manufactured wheelchairs have the same problem as the rest of the medical equipment world: prices are subsidized/inflated by insurance.

It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.

You also lacks knowledge of bikes: a bike built from similar materials, at a similar quality of craftsmanship and weight would cost you north of $5k.

By chance, don't you know why we cannot have electric wheelchair for everyone who needs it? Manual wheelchair seems to be not very convenient and to require lot of effort to use it.

Those are not custom (typically come pre-sized) and are generally not very usable outdoors to get around other than short distances. Sometimes known as "hospital wheelchairs". For people with temporary injuries who are mostly taking time off from work it's fine.

This is a everyday wheelchair that people can use to get to somewhere a mile or two away and back, often used by people to get to work or around a university campus independently. It is custom made to your measurements: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

https://www.sammcintosh.com/blog/wheelchairtypes0620

There are obvious COL differences between regions which can account for a huge part of that. There's a reason we lost our manufacturing base in the west to China.

Are the chairs you're speaking of customized? Are they using the components of a similar quality? That may be a component, as well.

>I don't understand.

Almost completely different products.

Those are shitty wheelchairs not meant for use by people permanently disabled by western standards. We have plenty of imported cheap wheelchairs on Amazon in the US.

I mean sure you could use them, but they aren't customized to your body dimensions for life long comfort. They won't hold up to long term abuse actually going outside daily for life and work.

In the west, we actually legally mandate buildings and transportation accommodate wheelchair users, so they can actually live like normal people. Heck they can also legally drive.

Back to the wheelchair, the foundation of this $1k wheelchair which is bent aluminum instead of welded metal is a massive increase in reliability where a cheap chair could instead break a weld and leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere.

His name is Zack, not Jerry. I know, it's confusing.

More to the point, why are a bunch of techies who are probably sitting on $3000 ergonomic office chairs wondering why a good wheelchair might cost a few thousand?

Given your wonder, you should consider checking out the article. They clearly care a lot about customizations and comfort.

Why are we assuming that this isn't a quality/comfortable wheelchair?

These are not the same class of products.

The alibaba ones are almost like disposable lower quality solutions, have textile backs, and are foldable, etc. which also have their places and uses eg. after disasters, mass depoyment, handout at hospitals as temporary solutions.

The product in the linked article is clearly a higher quality item intended for longer term use by a single person.

1k$ is the cost of a decent office work-chair from any well-established low-to-medium volume vendor, as context. For a small shop like this it is an okay price, abeit the sum being a lot for many especialy in a new situation where they are forced to a wheelchair. Mass production could probably drive it down a lot, but you need volume for that.

ps: with volume you can also better amortize the engineering costs, which can be significant even for stuff looking simple and easy to do for those who did not do it yet... or did (even significant, core) parts of the product development in a large established firm. I also started a product development for simple looking stuff that turned out to be a lot lot more work when not being done only as a hack/PoC, but developed to a product. I abandoned the product before going for the official certifications (FCC, CE, etc.). For medical equipment they probably also need to meet regulations.

This is like saying a $30 display off Aliexpress is better than a $1000 display from a high quality brand. The only metric it will be better on will be the price, everything else will be a ridiculous comparison.

Shipping makes them pretty consistently $116ish/piece until you hit negotiated shipping numbers.

They're also not the kind of wheelchair people are looking for if they're self mobile which is the kind of chair the article is reporting on. Those are made lighter and more resilient to stand up to being used by one person out in the world rolling themselves around.

> 1k$ is pretty steep.

It's not if you don't want to sacrifice quality, USA made is also a bonus. Kudos to JerryRigEverything.

Go for it bud

Are you looking at "hospital" style wheelchairs, or dedicated use wheelchairs? The difference is huge. Those hospital style, one size fits all chairs are HEAVY, clunky, slow, and tire you out very easily if you don't have someone pushing you. Someone with a spinal cord injury or a variety of mobility constrants would be better off in a dedicated chair like this as they are lighter (sub 20lbs), designed to fit to the user, and offer more comfort which combats things like skin wounds.

If you look at wheelchairs from companies like TiLite or Quickie, you are starting off at almost double this price before any customization (rims, guards, etc). $1000 all in for a dedicated wheelchair is fantastic.

> What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?

Truckloads of paperwork, at least in the EU. Wheelchairs are regulated as "medical devices" since 2017, which does make sense given that people tend to spend a large portion of their day sitting in them and that they tend to be on the upper end of the body weight distribution... but the certifications make them much more expensive than they'd need to be, and they also prevent competition from entering the market.

Additionally, laws of scale apply here as well. Wheelchairs are a pretty bespoke, small scale industry - outside of large orders from civil protection agencies to be used in mass evacuation scenarios (the German THW and Red Cross for example have stockpiles, mostly used in foreign aid/crisis response and WW2-era bomb evacuations), every user has their own specific needs, making mass production all but infeasible.

From the article:

> When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality?

I have no idea though. Maybe there are sort of like… different classes of wheelchair, and they are trying to make not-terrible one? Like technically $5 headphones exist but not from a hobbyist point of view.

You can get perfectly viable inexpensive bicycles as well - but if you were expecting to replace ALL of your other vehicle transport with a bike would you start by looking at ones with welded steel frames? The classic 80s Schwinn 10-speed that weighs in at 40 pounds but is pretty indestructible?

That's a $500 wheelchair.

$500 buys you a decent enough but hardly "happy to live with" indoor chair. Not the kind of chair that you go shopping in.

Insurance approved I think is the key differentiator.

Most of them are under $200 in Amazon

These aren't basic wheelchairs like at the hospital imo. They are the wheelchairs that someone is going to spend their entire day/life in and use for mobility. Huge difference I think. It's also heavily customizable https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

hmm... looks like the ibot is available? $25-30k

https://newmobility.com/the-ibot-is-back/

also I looked and a walmart wheelchair is $149. Wonder why it sucks.

How many ergonomic office chairs go for $50?

Wheelchairs take several orders of magnitude more abuse and need to cope with several orders of magnitude more complex needs than your average office worker and your average nice ergonomic office chair is hardly cheap.

Can you ask the Amazon seller how much it costs to custmoize the wheelchair to my specific dimensions?

While you are at it, can you ask them how much it costs to make the frame out of a single piece of bent aluminum so there are no risks of welds snapping and leaving me stranded?

You know in the west that wheelchair users actually go outside right? We legally mandate that buildings and transportation require accomodations for wheelchairs. People in wheelchairs even drive cars.

Wheelchair users that are active need far better quality frames than "hospital wheelchairs" you can find for $50. And you can already buy these on Amazon.com US. There is no need to get into a game of trying to compete with the existing importers.

This is why reading comments before contributing to the conversation is useful. There are already several comments outlining why a $25 wheelchair, especially a used one found at thrift stores, isn't comparable. Build quality, weight, fit, convenience, portability - all of these are reasons to spend more on a wheelchair.

We don't question why different computers are more expensive than others even though they all do the same job. We don't question why one bike costs more than another despite using the same mechanism for propulsion. Wheelchairs are another good with varying levels of quality at different price points. It's arguably more important for quality goods to be accessible because for many, they're living in these things constantly.

You should do some research into wheelchairs and the differences in designs, materials, and life times to better understand why the $1000 price tag on what the company is offering is actually incredible. This is for someone who has a spinal cord injury and has to be in a chair fulltime, not those hospital style chairs you are probably thinking of.