The 2 founders literally have no agricultural expertise. One's last job was at a no-name business school accelerator and another worked in an administrative role in the non-profit world. There is a conspicuous absence of any kind of agronomy experience here.
As someone who has some perspective on the conditions of the purported customer for this they are so out of touch it is ridiculous and.
I don't know what is the thing with startups and containers :-)
There were the very same kind of guys proposing the aquaponic version of a farm container for 20k€. I made a 2-minute napkin calculation, keeping the ridiculously high advertised yield for the whole duration, assuming no other starting cost (which is not true), assuming not any running cost (which is of course far from true), assuming not incident at all, assuming no opportunity cost, assuming a relatively high equivalent price of the vegetables.
So with all those positive assumptions, it would take 13 years to just break even. If you factor in that not everything is going to be so perfect and that, perfect or not, there are needed running costs, you can easily push that date back to, I don't know, 20 or 30 years.
All this point, your original installation isn't worth a penny any more and you can re-new it.
You haven't saved a penny. And what you have been eating for 20 years: indoor off-ground vegetables that taste no better than the industrially produced vegetables.
But yeah, it was two 25-year old city-dweller ex-business-school-students who claim they know things coz granpda was a farmer and they once went to his farm when they were 12, and they have an uncle they visit a week a year who has a garden.
To be fair... you could've said the same thing about solar 15 years ago: 20-30 year unsubsidized payback, with energy that is the same as industrially-produced energy.
As someone who has some perspective on the conditions of the purported customer for this they are so out of touch it is ridiculous and.