Decide in this order: your floors first, your pets second, your budget third. Everything else — suction numbers, app features, dock size — is a tiebreaker, not a starting point.

Floors first, and it isn’t close

The single rule that saves people the most money is to match the machine to your floors before you look at anything else. Mostly hard floors opens up almost the whole market and makes mopping worth considering. Mostly carpet narrows it fast and makes brush design and suction matter more. A real mix means you need a robot that lifts its mop over carpet reliably, which is a specific feature and not a given.

If you start with suction numbers or dock features instead, you can spend a lot of money and still buy the wrong robot for your house.

Then pets, then budget

Pets change two things: you need a genuine anti-tangle roller, and you need a self-emptying dock or you’ll be dumping a fur-packed bin every single day. If anyone in the house has long hair, treat that the same way.

Budget comes last on purpose, because until you know what your house requires, a number is just a number. Once you know you need, say, mop lift and anti-tangle, then you can find the least expensive robot that does both well rather than the most expensive one you can afford.

Or let me do it for you

I spent a year building my quiz, and I built it out of thousands of real questions from viewers rather than out of spec sheets. It asks about your house — your floors, your pets, your dock space — and never asks you to know anything about robots. It takes about ninety seconds.

Dad’s Take

Anybody who leads with the suction number is selling you a spec sheet, not a robot for your house.