The $100 Standing Desk: A Decade of Experience Weighs In
As someone glued to a computer screen for the vast majority of my waking hours, and burdened with a chronically unhappy back, a standing desk isn’t just a perk – it’s a necessity. I’ve been a standing desk convert for over a decade, a time when owning one felt like a distinctly upscale choice. Now, I’m seeing motorized standing desks, strikingly similar to my original investment, popping up online for ridiculously low prices. The burning question: are these budget-friendly options actually worth the investment?
Over the past ten years of working from home and writing about tech, I’ve gone through three distinct desks (or perhaps four, depending on how granular you get with components). I even reviewed another model for a previous employer, each from different suppliers. Suffice it to say, I believe I have a good grasp on what makes a standing desk tick. My current setup is a veritable monument to ergonomic computing, built to handle my expansive desktop and triple-monitor display. (Hey, I’m writing for PCWorld – excessive tech is practically a job requirement.)
My current behemoth, comprised of a heavy-duty, four-legged, quadruple-motor Uplift frame paired with a custom-made six-foot desktop from a Dallas carpenter, clocked in at over $1,500. I know, I know, it sounds like bragging, but I genuinely spend more time at this desk than I do in my bed some weeks. Investing in quality is paramount. For context, the previous desks I’ve used and subsequently gifted to friends and family upon upgrading all cost $600 or more.
Thinking of adding a new monitor to your home office? PCWorld has an excellent roundup of the best monitors available. But back to desks: you absolutely don’t need to shell out four figures for a "fancy" motorized standing desk. Case in point: I recently purchased (or rather, expensed for the purpose of this article) a motorized standing desk from Amazon for a mere $100. (The same model is currently listed at $200, but comparable alternatives are readily available.) Shipping was free, and tax added a negligible $6. It was simply the latest in a string of ultra-cheap standing desk deals I’d seen on SlickDeals, prompting me to investigate whether these rock-bottom prices translate to functional quality, or if they are a world apart from the premium desks I’m used to.
One hundred dollars is a remarkably low price, even just for a standalone 55-inch bamboo desk. You might find a particleboard version at Walmart or Target for that price, let alone a standing version. Or at least, that’s what I initially thought. Surprisingly, I found a nearly identical desk (slightly smaller and lacking the keyboard tray) for precisely $100 at Walmart. Even cheaper options exist if you dig around.
The market has clearly experienced a "race to the bottom," fueled by a surge of overseas suppliers churning out desks as cheaply and quickly as possible. I suspect the pandemic-induced demand spike led to a massive surplus of these desks. However, "cheap" doesn’t automatically equal "bad," as my trusty Kia Soul can attest. My goal is to determine whether you can save money on your setup by opting for one of these ultra-cheap motorized standing desks, or if you’re better off saving up for a more robust option from a reputable supplier.
The INNOVAR (in all caps, apparently) desk arrived from Amazon in a shockingly swift one day. As it happened to be a Saturday, I eagerly began assembling it. Familiar with flat-pack furniture from a certain Scandinavian company, and having assembled and disassembled similar desks a dozen times, the process took me about 45 minutes. While these desk designs share common threads, I noticed some significant differences immediately.
The first thing that struck me was the weight – or lack thereof. At 46.2 pounds (just under 21 kilograms) in the box, I was able to move it into my office in a single trip, despite my existing back issues. Frankly, this wasn’t a good sign. If there’s one thing I appreciate in a desk, it’s heft, especially when it involves steel components. Opening the box confirmed my suspicions. While the bamboo top seemed fairly standard and acceptable, all the steel parts were made from thin, ⅛” or 2mm panels. They were light enough to toss around… though I wouldn’t recommend it. For comparison, the frame of my older Fully Jarvis desk, similar in size, weighed at least twice as much.
Another notable difference: the absence of a bracing frame under the desktop. The desktop simply screws directly into the legs. All three of my previous desks, plus the review unit, had steel crossbars that were affixed to the bottom of the desktop. The top was typically laid upside down on the floor, and then the legs were bolted into place. Not so with the Innovar. The instructions directed me to assemble the legs first, complete with the motor and T-bars, and then screw the entire assembly onto the bottom of the desktop, along with the included keyboard tray and plastic accessory hooks.
The motor mechanism itself was also an anomaly. It’s housed in a semi-exposed barrel on one side of the frame, unlike other standing desks I’ve used which had motors hidden inside the leg pillars. And note the plural: this desk has only one rather weak motor driving both legs simultaneously. It accomplishes this via a long hexagonal steel bolt, essentially a giant Allen wrench spanning between the two legs.
The fact that this driver bolt was exposed on the underside of the desk was alarming. Not only is it exposed, practically begging to snag cables or wires, but it’s also positioned on the front side of the crossbeam, facing the user. While the odds of actually brushing against your knees are low unless you’re particularly tall, as someone who meticulously routes wires across the underside of a desk to keep the top clutter-free, seeing exposed moving parts makes me uneasy.
Furthermore, having an exposed mechanism like this means the legs aren’t automatically level out of the box. I had to manually adjust the initial height of one side of the frame to match the other. I had a limited choice of approximately six positions to place the “master” leg in order to match the other side. I think I eyeballed it reasonably well, but this is a problem I haven’t encountered on desks with more sophisticated mechanisms.
The Innovar desk does include a matching bamboo keyboard tray, a surprisingly generous addition at this price point. I personally prefer raising my monitors with VESA arms rather than lowering the keyboard and mouse area, but both approaches achieve the same ergonomic goal, so having the option without extra cost is a definite plus. The cheap plastic hooks, presumably for hanging bags or headsets, are less appealing. I wouldn’t trust them with anything heavy, and I would have preferred more practical cable routing solutions, like a tray for a power strip at the rear of the desk.
One notable positive: the desk comes with a four-setting, programmable height controller, complete with an LED readout. This surprised me – it was a relatively expensive upgrade when I bought my Fully desk. I suspect that these desks have become so common that, like Bluetooth in a budget car’s head unit, it’s now standard. The controller is a nice little feature, with the LED readout subtly integrated into the white plastic. It’s just a shame that the power connector pins were so bent during assembly that I had to manually straighten them with a flathead screwdriver. Improved quality assurance would have caught that issue.
Bent pins were just the tip of the iceberg. While finalizing the setup, I noticed that the front of the desk was significantly dipping down. This wasn’t entirely the desk’s fault; there’s a slightly bunched-up carpet pad near the wall in my office. However, I had never noticed it before because no other piece of furniture in my office was so light that it couldn’t press down evenly on the pad with its own weight. Thankfully, there are plastic adjustment feet underneath the white steel legs, and I was barely able to level the surface of the desk by extending the front ones to their maximum height.
Finally, with everything set up to my satisfaction, I tested the raising and lowering action. It works. It’s slow, especially at the start, but it functions. You can program up to four positions by simply pressing and holding the corresponding buttons on the controller, and it measures height in increments of a tenth of an inch. In fact, you can set the surface even more precisely because the motor action is analog, even though it’s measured digitally.
I proceeded to set up a basic workstation: a small laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. A lightweight lamp, heavy coffee mug, and a small LEGO set added some personality, along with the various cables required for everything (with admittedly sloppy management). I’ve used it for a few weeks, and I immediately noticed the desk’s lack of sturdiness. To be blunt, the frame is so light that the thing wobbles like a Weeble at the slightest touch. Every standing desk will have some give at its maximum height, even my massive four-poster. But this one is so unstable that I can see it shake with every keystroke on my laptop, even when I wasn’t using an external display or keyboard, and even in the seated position.
At a lower position, the stability is acceptable; it doesn’t feel like it could tip over accidentally. But at the standing position, it wouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen pounds of pressure to tip it either forwards or backwards. I can easily imagine an incautious child, a large dog, or a particularly clumsy writer achieving this all too easily.
In the past, I’ve mounted a full desktop with three monitors, lamps, and other computing equipment to a standing desk with only minor warping of the wooden top surface to worry about. The Fully Jarvis, for example, is rated to lift 350 pounds (if not happily). Innovar claims a 198-pound capacity for this desk, and while the motor might be capable of lifting that weight, I have zero confidence in the desk’s ability to withstand that load for any length of time. Just my admittedly "husky" desktop and 34-inch center monitor would weigh more than the entire desk combined.
So, is a $100 standing desk worth it? The answer, of course, depends on your needs and your budget. My fellow tech writers and I often discuss "how much does a budget laptop cost?" If all you have to spend on a laptop is $300, then a budget laptop for you is $300, and not a penny more. If you find yourself in a situation where you simply cannot spend any more than necessary on a desk, and you need a standing desk for ergonomic or health reasons, then yes, it’s worth it.
However, if you’re in this situation and planning to build a workstation centered around a desktop PC, even that qualifier might not apply. I can’t speak for every desk on the market, but the Innovar model I tested is so shaky and top-heavy that it can’t safely support a large, powerful desktop. Get a regular desk or table instead. For this standing design, and similar ones, limit it to a small form factor PC at most, or more likely, a laptop and a lamp. And don’t expect this desk to become a family heirloom.
The phrase "you get what you pay for" comes to mind. If you can invest in a more substantial desk, or if you can afford to wait until your budget is more flexible, I suggest you do so, especially if you’re working from home or planning to spend a significant amount of time at it.
