What is cost-efficient phenotyping? Optimizing costs for different scenarios

•New technologies considerably reduce the costs of sensors and automated vehicles.•Low investment in sensors, vehicles or pipelines present trade-offs with labor costs.•Plant/plot handling and labor costs represent the major proportion of costs in phenotyping experiments.•The costs of high-throughput experiments in the field and in automated platforms is similar regardless of vehicles.•The development of software applications (e.g. imaging, analyses, models, information system) is a major part of costs.