Why is the Amazon one £250 and everyone says £1,500?

This is the question that brings most people to this site, usually late at night, with two browser tabs open: one showing a handpan for £249 with free delivery, the other showing one for £1,600 with a nine month wait.

Both tabs are telling the truth. Here is what is going on.

Where the money actually goes#

Four things stack up, and none of them are margin.

It is nearly all labour, and the labour is rare. Makers commonly quote forty to eighty hours of skilled work for a professional instrument. That work is not assembly, it is judgement: strike, listen, strike, listen. There is no apprenticeship system and no school. Almost every maker taught themselves over years, and the skill takes years to become reliable.

Every note is three tuning problems, not one. Each tone field needs its fundamental, its octave and its compound fifth brought into alignment, and moving one moves the others. Then the fields interact through the shell, so tuning note seven can pull note three back out. The difficulty rises faster than the note count.

Failure is built into the price. Steel under this much local stress cracks. Nobody publishes audited figures, but a loss rate somewhere around one in ten to one in five shells during forming, heat treatment or tuning is the number makers quote. A shell that fails at the tuning stage has already absorbed most of its labour.

There are no economies of scale. Even well known makers typically produce in the low hundreds of instruments a year, some far fewer. There is no production line to spread the cost of tooling, a gas furnace and a workshop across.

Add specialist steel sheet, nitriding or annealing, packaging robust enough to survive a courier, and after-sales support, and the price stops looking arbitrary.

What happens to your money, stage by stage#

1. Two steel blanks, usually 0.8 to 1.25 mm thick. The steel itself is a modest fraction of the price, but the grade and thickness shape everything downstream.
2. Shell forming. Each blank is sunk into a dome, historically by hammer, increasingly by hydraulic press or spinning. A press is a cost saving, not a mark of a bad instrument.
3. Laying out and raising the tone fields. Note positions marked, then each field hammered into the geometry that produces its harmonic series.
4. Heat treatment. Gas nitriding, or annealing for stainless. A real per-instrument cost, and often outsourced by small makers because it needs a furnace.
5. Tuning, and tuning again. The bulk of the labour. Makers describe somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 hammer strikes across a whole instrument, each a small correction checked by ear and by spectrum analyser. The instrument is tuned, rested, and retuned, because steel relaxes.
6. Assembly and finish. The two shells joined, then finished, oiled, and usually given a serial number.
7. Everything that failed. And the years the maker spent ruining instruments while learning.

The price ladder in 2026#

These are 2026 figures and they move. Steel costs, freight and exchange rates have all shifted repeatedly since 2020, and different sources disagree by a few hundred pounds on where each tier begins. Use the shape of the ladder, not the exact numbers. Most makers price in euros or dollars; convert on the day.

The touch test#

Here is the ten second check that settles most of it, and you can do it with the instrument in your hands or, imperfectly, from a close photograph.

Is the cheap end really that bad?#

No, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The cheap end genuinely changed through the early 2020s. Several volume producers, mostly but not only in Asia, worked out repeatable shell forming with enough hand finishing to make instruments that hold a tuning. The floor of the market rose. Ignoring that is as unhelpful as pretending the gap has closed.

What you are accepting at around £500–£700:

• Variance between units. Two instruments from the same batch can differ audibly. This is why a video of your specific instrument matters more here than at any other price point.
• Shorter, thinner sustain and more crosstalk between neighbouring notes.
• Less dynamic range. These instruments often need to be struck harder to speak — which is exactly the habit you do not want to learn.
• Limited or no service. Many volume producers will not retune, and many independent tuners decline to work on these shells. A £180 retune against a £440 instrument rarely makes sense.
• A narrow catalogue. Mostly the popular symmetrical scales in nine to eleven notes, because those batch well. Fortunately, D Kurd is one of them.

The rule that actually matters#

It is not cheap versus expensive. It is in tune versus not in tune.

Learning any acoustic instrument is largely learning to hear. A handpan whose partials are misaligned gives you constant confusing feedback: notes that sound wrong however you strike them, fields that trigger their neighbours, sustain that dies in a second. Beginners almost always conclude that they are the problem. Some quit. Others develop a hard, forcing technique trying to make the thing speak, and then have to unlearn it.

A well made £600 instrument is a fine first handpan. A poorly tuned £600 instrument is worse than nothing.

So:

1. Set a ceiling you are genuinely comfortable with — a handpan you feel guilty about is a handpan you play less.
2. Within that ceiling, buy the best tuned instrument you can find, rather than the most notes or the prettiest finish.
3. Insist on a video of that exact instrument, played slowly, note by note.
4. Accept that if you stick with it you will probably want a second instrument within two years anyway. Almost everyone does.

Do more expensive handpans sound better?#

Up to a point, clearly yes. Past the mid range, less than you would think.

Between a £300 factory instrument and a £1,100 artisan instrument the gap is not subtle: cleaner partials, longer and smoother sustain, controlled crosstalk, better tuning stability, and a far wider dynamic range so the instrument responds to a light touch. Any listener hears that.

Between a £1,300 instrument and a £2,600 one, you are mostly buying consistency, a specific tonal character the maker is known for, harder scales executed cleanly, better after-sales support, and some reputation premium. The correlation between price and sound quality gets weak up there. There are expensive instruments a knowledgeable player would decline, and mid-priced instruments that outperform their tier.

Where high-end instruments do consistently separate themselves is at the extremes: very quiet playing, fast passages where crosstalk control matters, and close-mic’d recording where every flaw is exposed. If you play softly, record often, or perform, the money is doing something. If you play at home for pleasure, it is doing much less.

Most of the recorded handpan music people fall in love with was made on instruments nowhere near the top of the market, played through microphones and codecs that flatten most of what the extra money buys.

Will it hold its value?#

Quality instruments from established makers hold value unusually well — commonly reselling at 70 to 90% of what they cost. Cheap factory instruments lose value fast, often half or more.

What drives resale: the maker’s reputation and whether they are still trading; scale popularity (D Kurd sells in days, unusual scales can take months); condition and tuning; documentation such as a serial number and original invoice; and geography, because shipping a handpan internationally is expensive enough that your realistic market is often regional.

A mid-band instrument you keep, and that holds most of its value, often costs less over five years than a very cheap instrument you replace within twelve months. Cheap is not the same as inexpensive.

What you actually need on day one#

Two things. Genuinely, two.

• A case. The most important accessory by a distance. Handpans are damaged in transport more than anywhere else, and a dent in a tone field is a tuning problem, not a cosmetic one. A padded soft case with a rigid base is fine for careful home use. A hard case is worth it if you travel or use public transport. Many makers include a basic bag — check whether it actually protects the surface or is just a dust cover.
• Protective oil and a microfibre cloth, if your instrument is nitrided or raw steel. Ask your maker what they recommend for their surface, because recommendations differ and the wrong product is worse than none. Stainless needs little more than wiping down.

Everything else waits. A stand: wait until you know how you sit. A seat at the right height: worth more than you think, but later. Microphones, pedals, loopers, mallets, a second instrument: all of these will happen, and none of them should happen now.

Next#

You know roughly what to spend. The next decision is the one that determines what music you can play for the whole life of the instrument.