Is a $100 standing desk worth buying?

As someone who works at a computer more or less all day every day and has chronic back problems, a standing desk is an important part of my office setup. I’ve been using one for over ten years and back then it was something of a luxury. But lately I’ve been seeing motorized standing desks, not dissimilar in design to the one I bought all those years ago, popping up for shockingly low prices. Are these super-cheap desks worth your money? 

I’ve used three different desks in the last decade of working from home and writing about technology — maybe four, depending on how you count all the various parts and components. And I reviewed another model for one of my previous employers, all from different suppliers, so I feel like I know what I’m talking about here. My latest one is something of a behemoth, to deal with my huge desktop and triple-monitor display. (Hey, I write for PCWorld, I come by it honestly.) 

Between the heavy-duty, four-legged, quadruple-motor Uplift frame and the custom-made six-foot desktop I ordered from a Dallas carpenter, the whole package cost me over $1,500. And I’m sorry if that sounds like flexing, but I literally spend more time at this desk than in my bed some weeks. It’s worth making it a good one. For the sake of comparison, the previous desks I’ve used and then passed on to friends or family members when I upgraded were all $600 or more. 

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Where are all these cheap standing desks coming from? 

But you don’t have to spend four figures on a standing desk, even a “fancy” one with a motorized raising and lowering action. In fact, I bought (or rather expensed for this very article) a motorized standing desk off Amazon for precisely $100. (The same model is $200 at the time of writing, but it’s easy to find alternatives.) Shipping was free, tax an additional $6. It was only the latest entry I’d seen on SlickDeals for super-low-priced standing desks, which got me wondering if they were actually worth the price, or in any way comparable to the more premium desks to which I’m accustomed. 

A hundred bucks is a pretty good price for a 55-inch bamboo desk all on its own. You might be able to find a particle board version of one at Walmart or Target, for example, to say nothing of a standing version. Or at least that’s what I assumed — in fact I found a nearly identical desk, only slightly smaller and lacking the keyboard tray, for precisely $100. Even less expensive ones are available if you look around.

So, clearly there’s been something of a race to the bottom in this market, with a hoard of overseas suppliers making desks as cheaply and quickly as possible. I suspect a spike in demand during the pandemic has created a huge surplus of these desks. But “cheap” doesn’t automatically mean “bad,” as my hard-working Kia Soul can testify.

The question I aim to answer is whether or not you should save some money on your setup by going with one of these ultra-cheap motorized standing desks or if you’re better off saving up for a more deluxe option from a reliable supplier. 

Putting it together 

The INNOVAR (ALL CAPS) desk arrived from Amazon in a shocking one day, and as it happened to be Saturday, I set to assembling it immediately. I’m no stranger to flat-pack furniture in the Scandinavian style, and I’ve assembled and taken apart similar desks about a dozen times, so it only took me about 45 minutes to put everything together. While there are commonalities in all of these desk designs, I spotted a few important differences. 

The first thing I noticed was that it was shockingly light. At 46.2 pounds (just under 21 kilograms) in the box, I was able to move it into my office in one trip, even with my back problems. Frankly this didn’t bode well: If there’s one thing I like in a desk, it’s some heft, especially when the important bits are steel. Upon opening the box, my suspicions were confirmed.

While the bamboo top is pretty typical and appears to be fine, all of the steel parts are made from ⅛” or 2mm panels. They’re all light enough to toss around…not that you should try it. For the sake of comparison, the frame of my old Fully Jarvis desk with a similar size weighed at least twice as much.  

Speaking of steel, I immediately noticed that there’s no top frame to the Innovar. All three of the previous desks I’ve used, plus one review unit, had steel crossbars that are affixed to the bottom of the desktop. The top is laid upside down on the floor, then the legs are bolted in place. Not so here: the instructions had me assemble the legs first, complete with the motor and the T-bars, then screw the entire assembly onto the bottom of the desktop, along with the included keyboard tray and plastic accessory hooks. 

Exposed innards

Being familiar with these desk designs, I did a double-take looking at the actual motor mechanism. It’s housed in a semi-exposed barrel on one side of the frame, whereas the other standing desks I’ve used had motors hidden inside the leg pillars. Note the plural there: this desk has just one rather weak motor driving both legs at once. It does this by means of a long hexagonal steel bolt, essentially a giant Allen wrench spanning between the two legs. 

The fact that this driver bolt was exposed to the bottom of the desk threw me for a loop. Not only is it exposed, just begging to get caught on cables or wires, it’s positioned on the front side of its crossbeam, facing the user. The odds of actually rubbing against your knees are pretty low unless you moonlight as an NBA player, but as someone who often runs wires all across the underside of a desk to keep the top nice and clean, it makes me nervous to see moving parts anywhere in there. 

Also, having an exposed mechanism like this means that 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. And to get them matched on a separate hexagonal bar that I had to install myself, I had a limited choice of approximately six positions to place the “master” leg at to match it to the other side. I think I was able to eyeball it reasonably well, but this is a problem I haven’t encountered on desks with mechanisms that are less threadbare. 

There are a couple of extra points in this specific desk package worth highlighting. First, it comes with a slide-out keyboard tray, something you don’t often see at any price. I prefer to raise my monitors up with VESA arms rather than lower the keyboard and mouse area, but it all achieves the same effect, so having the option without spending any extra money is a point in its favor. The cheap plastic hooks, presumably for hanging bags or headsets, I could do without entirely. I wouldn’t trust any kind of heavy bag to it (certainly nothing with textbooks inside), and second I’d rather see some more useful cable routing, like a tray for a power strip at the rear of the desk. 

Highs and lows

There’s one point in this desk’s favor: it comes with a four-setting, programmable height controller, complete with an LED readout. That surprised me — it was a pricey little upgrade when I bought a Fully desk. I imagine that these desks have become so ubiquitous that like Bluetooth in the head unit of a budget car, it’s just standard now. It’s a nice little controller with the LED readout smartly hidden within the white plastic. It’s just a shame that the power connector pins were so bent when I assembled it that I had to manually straighten them out with a flathead screwdriver. Some more stringent QA would have caught that. 

Bent pins were far from the only issue I found with the desk. While I was finishing the setup, I noticed that the front was seriously dipping down. This isn’t completely the fault of the desk, as there’s a bit of a bunched carpet pad near the wall in my office. But I never noticed it before because no other piece of furniture in my office was so light that it couldn’t press down level on this pad with its own weight. Thankfully there are plastic adjustment feet underneath the white steel legs, and I was able to juuuuuust about level the surface of the desk by putting the front ones at 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 works. You can program up to four positions simply by 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 action of the motor is analog, even though it’s measured digitally. 

Not quite a battlestation 

I proceeded to set up a pretty basic workstation: small laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. A lightweight lamp, heavy coffee mug, and a little LEGO set for flavor rounded it out, plus the various cables needed for everything with admittedly sloppy management. I’ve used it for a few weeks, but right away I could tell that this desk would be lacking in sturdiness.

To be blunt, the frame is just so light that the thing wobbles like a Weeble at the slightest touch. Every standing desk is going to have a little bit of give at the top of its height, even my massive four-poster. But this one is so unstable that I can see it shake with every single keystroke on my laptop, even when I wasn’t using any external display or keyboard, and even in the seated position. 

At a lower position the stability is alright, it doesn’t feel like I could flip it over accidentally. But at the standing position it wouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen pounds of pressure to get this thing to tip either forwards or backwards. I can imagine an incautious child, a big dog, or an especially clumsy internet writer achieving this all too easily. 

In the past I’ve mounted a full desktop with three monitors, lamps, and various and sundry other computing equipment to a standing desk with only a little 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 on this thing, and while the motor might be rated to lift that amount of weight, I have zero faith in this desk’s ability to actually stand up under that load for any amount of time. Just my admittedly “husky” desktop and 34-inch center monitor would weigh more together than the entire desk.

Save your money if you can

Is a $100 standing desk worth it? The answer will depend on your needs and your means, of course. My fellow tech writers and I often get into discussions along the lines of “how much does a budget laptop cost?” Well, 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 yeah, it’s worth it. 

But if you’re in this situation and you’re planning to create a workstation with a desktop PC at the center, then even that qualifier doesn’t apply to you. I can’t speak for every single desk on the market, but this Innovar model I’ve tested is so shaky and top-heavy that it can’t safely hold a big, beefy desktop. Get a regular desk or table instead. For this standing design and those of similar ilk, limit it to a small form factor PC at the absolute most, more likely a laptop and a lamp. I wouldn’t expect to pass this desk down as heirloom furniture, either. 

The phrase “you get what you pay for” comes to mind, trite as it might be. If you’re in a position to invest in a more substantial desk or if you can afford to wait until your budget is more roomy, then I suggest you do so, especially if you’re working from home or otherwise planning on spending a large amount of time with it.