Starlink now selling cheapest-ever $89 dish from self-service kiosk with $100 service credit

SpaceX is branching out and selling its Starlink satellite Internet service anywhere it can. After the first appearance of the Starlink Standard Kit in Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, or Walmart, SpaceX also brought it online to Amazon.

It then started setting up its own dedicated Starlink stores in underserved locations where there is still a lot of excess capacity and where SpaceX is giving away dishes for free or offering satellite Internet plans from just $40/month.

Even those dedicated retail channels didn't suffice for the SpaceX sales team, though, and it has now set up self-service kiosks to dish out discounted equipment and subscription bonuses.

Cheapest Starlink dish

A Starlink vending machine has been spotted at the Jordan Creek Mall in Des Moines, Iowa. That is not a location that Starlink listed as upcoming in the store roster it distributed not long ago, but it does fall in an underserved region where Starlink offers the dish as a free rental.

The self-service Starlink kiosk dispenses a Standard Kit for just $89, which is the cheapest that the Starlink dish has ever been sold for, and the equipment is yours to keep, rather than a $0 rental for the duration, as the website offers. To top it all off, those who get their Starlink satellite Internet equipment from the vending machine that also sells mounts and routers, will receive a Benjamin in service credits if they activate it within a week.

This essentially makes the Starlink dish free, just like it would've been if one ordered it at the same zip code from the website, but you don't have to return it if you end your service agreement, like with the gratis rental. Still, they get the retail experience with a physical product they can see and touch, but without all the pesky rep questions. Just buy a dish and set it up to get it for free.

It remains to be seen if this new way of Starlink satellite Internet shopping in stores and from kiosks will resonate with customers, but the sales team is evidently trying anything it can think of. Elon Musk recently said that the vast majority of SpaceX revenue comes from the Starlink side of the business. The satellite Internet network is up for a huge upgrade to gigabit speeds, provided that SpaceX masters the launch of the giant Starship 3 rocket so that it can bring the new high-capacity V3 satellites to orbit.