ONT has two separate purchase models: CapEx ($125k upfront + $300 per flow cell) and OpEx ($0 upfront + $475 per flow cell paid on flow cell delivery, minimum order 300 spread over 1 year).
This device was introduced during Clive Brown's technology summary seminar yesterday (see my notes here). The GridION X5 can sequence reads from up to five MinION flow cells at once, includes a local base-calling FPGA, and is supported by ONT for labs that want to do sequencing as a service [MinION is not licensed for sequencing services]. The included compute module has been designed to be able to handle local basecalling (in real time) of five flow cells running at 100% utilisation at 1000 bases per second (~400Gb sequence per day).
Aside: Current in-field output for well-prepared samples on a MinION flow cell is 3-10Gb per 48h run (ONT can do 20Gb per run internally). The first read is sequenced and base-called in a few minutes (during run QC). The longest end-to-end mappable sequence (so far) is 778kb, which would have taken about half an hour to go through a sequencing pore. The fastest sample prep (from extracted DNA) takes about 10 minutes (wall time) and allows for barcoding of up to 12 samples (multiplexed in a single run).