Every game room has one. A table tennis table folded against the wall, waiting for a second player who has a job, a commute, and no plans to drive over for a Tuesday rally. The table isn’t the problem; the empty side of the net is.
Pongbot’s Black Friday sale answers the empty side three ways, and each answer lives in a different room. A table tennis robot that clamps to the table you already own, at $299.99. A camera-carrying tennis coach that rides in your trunk, at $799.99. And a flagship that feeds balls at 80 miles an hour until your legs file a complaint, at $1,219.99.
The sale runs through December 6, and the cuts are the deep kind: $100 off the small one, $900 off the camera model, $780 off the flagship. All three sit in stock at the maker’s store, and the smallest one is matched on Amazon.
Here is the arithmetic, room by room.
The Nova S Pro turns the table into a practice partner
Start with the smallest footprint in the sale. The Nova S Pro clamps to one end of the table, holds 150 balls, and serves with topspin or backspin across nine spin variations, dropping serves in close to the net when you ask it to. At its fastest it feeds 90 balls a minute, so the rally rhythm builds fast and holds.
Coaches designed its 264 drills, and the app runs all of them: speed, spin strength across 21 levels, placement, and how wide the robot sweeps the table, with every shot drawn on screen before it fires. A small remote rides in the box too, for the nights your phone is charging in another room. Solo practice stops being you against a wall and becomes a session with a plan, at 10 p.m., in socks.
It weighs 8.8 pounds, packs into a backpack, and goes from case to first rally in five seconds. It comes off the table as fast as it clamps on, and the dining room gets its table back. A dining table seats six for dinner and hosts one robot after. That’s the whole trick of the object: it borrows the room instead of claiming it.
It eats standard 40+ balls from any brand, and a triple anti-jam system keeps the feed smooth when a worn ball wanders in. No proprietary refills, no special diet.
Buy it if your table spends its life folded and your practice partner is mostly theoretical. Skip it if there is no table to clamp it to, because this one borrows yours. Beginners get coached drills from the first night; league players get a spin library that keeps asking harder questions.
Price finishes the argument. The Nova S Pro is $299.99, down from $399.99, a clean $100 off. Amazon matches the maker’s price to the cent. A folding table used every night stops being stored furniture. It becomes the hardest-working surface in the house.
The Aura S brings the court home
Tennis runs the opposite problem. Courts are public, hitting partners are calendar negotiations, and club ball machines rent by the hour. The Aura S answers it shaped like luggage: 8.9 kilograms, just under 20 pounds, built to ride in a trunk and set up wherever you play. Its hopper holds 120 tennis balls, and the battery runs five hours, so the session ends when you do.
As a feeder alone it pulls its weight: spin, speed, depth, and frequency all adjust in the app, and the drills tailor to tennis, pickleball, or padel. Tell it what you want to work on and it builds the session; voice control runs through the app and an Apple Watch, no long walk back needed.
The camera is the point of the S. A dual-camera Spotter module watches at 120 frames a second and feeds Pongbot’s AI Coach, which reads your strokes, footwork, and shot patterns during play, then talks back with corrections while the rally is still warm.
Afterward it writes the report: where your shots landed, how the consistency held, what deserves the next session. Upload footage of a match and Match Challenge rebuilds those patterns, so Tuesday’s practice drills the exact shots that beat you on Saturday. That’s a coaching loop, not a ball feeder with better marketing.
Black Friday takes it to $799.99 from $1,699.99. That’s $900 off, 53 percent, the deepest cut in the sale. The plain Aura, the same robot without the camera, sits at $599.99, and the split reads easily: $200 buys the cameras and every drill the coaching builds on top of them. A household that only wants balls fed all afternoon can keep the $200 and lose nothing it planned to use.
One limit, plainly: at this price it covers one sport. Tennis, pickleball, or padel comes loaded, and the other two sit behind an unlock card. The 3-in-1 version with all three aboard costs $849.99. For a house that plays two of the three, that $50 step is the better buy on day one.
One machine for the three racket sports, one corner of the garage. That’s the storage problem it answers.
The Pace S Pro is the serious object
The Pace S Pro doesn’t pretend to be living-room furniture. At 22 kilograms, about 48.5 pounds, it is a two-hand carry that lives at the club or in the garage, built for players who already hold a court habit and a rating worth protecting. It serves up to 80 miles an hour, spins the ball at 60 revolutions a second, and flips between spin settings in a second and a half.
Its tracking samples your movement 100 times a second, which is how the Recovery Trigger works: it holds the next ball until you’re actually set to receive it. Too fast on the move and it waits; too slow and it feeds, because it also knows when you’re camping. There’s an art to timing feeds, and the Pace’s version of it is the first I’ve seen that doesn’t ignore your feet.
You get 564 preset drills with room to build your own, settings that span the full NTRP ladder from 1.0 to 7.0, and a battery that runs up to eight hours.
Everything you build syncs from the machine to the app to the cloud, and the whole drill library, all 564 of them, is shared across Pongbot’s machines, so nothing you program on the Pace stays locked to it. An over-the-air update grows what your machine does instead of freezing it in 2025.
Buy it for a rated player in real training, or for a parent coaching a junior who has outgrown casual rallies. It is the only machine here that trains like a coach rather than feeds like a ball bucket. At $1,219.99, down from $1,999.99, it’s the biggest check in this sale, and the one training that actually makes Saturday mornings shorter.
| Product | Price | Save | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nova S Pro | $299.99 | $100 · 25% | Amazon · Pongbot |
| Aura S | $799.99 | $900 · 53% | Pongbot |
| Pace S Pro | $1,219.99 | $780 · 39% | Pongbot |
Three rooms, one sale
Choosing runs on two questions. Where does the machine live? A table at home points to the Nova, a trunk that goes to the club points to the Aura, and a corner of the garage points to the Pace. A house that plays pickleball as often as tennis leans Aura. A house that plays one sport on one table leans Nova. A house that keeps score on a ladder stops reading here and buys the Pace.
Budget settles the rest. Under $300, the Nova is the whole conversation. At $800, the Aura S is the deepest discount in the sale and the only one of the three that coaches. Past $1,200, you are paying for training load: 80-mile feeds, 100-times-a-second tracking, eight hours of battery. Three rooms, three answers, one sale ending December 6.
My pick is the Nova, and it isn’t close: backpack-sized, $299.99, and it hands the loneliest piece of furniture in the house a nightly job. If my Saturdays belonged to a club ladder, the Pace would get my money instead. They don’t, yet.
