Why did Drone Deploy increase monthly expense to $500/mon

That’s a good question for @Farai_Masheke.

That’s interesting. My Dronebase ortho jobs only require me to upload the images.
Plus I never saw an ortho job pay less that 120.00 (that’s a 30 min flight time one - the 1hr job I don pays 300.00, no processing)
Also from time to time Dronebase gives me a login to their DD account to download the missions and upload the images.

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Good advice, thanks for pointing that out :slightly_smiling_face:

Well shoot :joy: now I know!

Dang I wish we were offered rates like that.
Even the couple jobs I saw go unanswered for over a week, only went up to $140… that’s the highest I’ve seen before here.

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What kind of mission?

It’s a stock pile mission. They do orthos and then count stuff.
This one is like 325 acres, which takes about an hour, 4 batteries on an M2P. There is another one at the site I also do, which is 100 acres.
So for about 1.5 hours flight time I walk away with like 450.00.

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With Dronebase? What was your actual mission acreage? The math doesn’t add up or your market just pays way higher than ours. A 325 and 100 acre mission would be 180 minutes of flight with an M2P at 275ft and 75/70 overlap. That doesn’t even account for travel and flight ops. Our average for this year is +/- $85/hr with a few outliers closer to $150. Of course these are a small percentage of our volume so we can pick and choose until we hit our number.

I do the mission at 400ft as per their rules for these mission.

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I guess that makes sense if you are walking away with just flight time. The $85/hr I stated is after overhead which we include travel. I still think your area pays better and you probably are on a track that most aren’t.

If I am it’s just pure dumb luck. When these missions came up nobody wanted them, not sure why.
I don’t take many missions these days - the 2 other clients I had - I ditched them due to incorrect mission details, low pay, slow pay, and bad communication.

Would like to find other clients, but my day job pays too much so I can’t always schedule a mission when the client might want it.

These missions are in this huge aggregate plant way out in the boonies, they quarry limestone and make cement. The owner prefers that I do it on a Sunday because the plant is shut down, and normally I am the only one there, which suits me fine. The wife talks to god, I talk to the limestone.

Gems definitely pop up from time to time. I would have jumped all over those too! Drone mapping is still such a niche so it’s hard to generate interest. Particularly in construction and agriculture with a long standing of boots on the ground. I suggest that everyone read up on general operations of Construction and Surveying workflows so it is more relatable.

I think quarries are amazing. Central Texas Limestone has about 6K acres. I have flown a couple of 500 acre but told them anything beyond that needs to be a fixed wing or a bigger multi with lidar.

Well I have to thank Drone Deploy for the great mapping software. Others I tried did not work (not gonna cry about here).
DD has never failed me - if it says the mission completed I always have full coverage.
There are some oddities but once you get past that it’s all good.
(see the bug I posted, still not fixed) Plan Start Failed: Over maximum flight radius - #9 by jimd
Also after a battery change I have had it forget how much of the mission is complete in terms of time, but it always gets full coverage.

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To make real money in the Drone business, it is all about clients. I have only been able to find 1 but it became a whale of a client. I do this only parttime so it’s sufficient. To make the money you have to find your own clients. Over time your interactions with the client will become value added as you begin to understand their business better and what is important. I had an annual meeting for the first time this year and gave a short presentation about the growing season and before we finished the meeting, I had a 50% increase in business. It is sometimes very hard to have the interaction with your clients because they are busy running their business, but you have to show you are a value-added member of their team.

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So you had 1.5 clients? Lol. It’s all about consistent quality work and referrals. No drone pilot that isn’t in or moderately educated about the industries they are serving is going to have a rough time.

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Made an account just to talk about this. The amount per month DD is asking is absolute insanity. I’ve got a large family farm that I’d love to keep using this program on, but over $7,000 / year for all the features? That’s a turn off from both a business owner standpoint and from someone trying to get their foot in the door and start flying for other farmers.

And yes I’m aware I could check out the less pricey versions, which are still extremely over priced. The cost per month is triple what we pay for our payroll services and the packages leave out a ton of the features we could actually use on the farm.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying DD so far but there’s absolutely no way to justify these prices.

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Inflation sucks and DroneDeploy is going way beyond drone maps so it’s probably not going to get any better. I would still talk to a sales rep because they will probably work with you depending upon what you really need. That said, if you don’t fly and process every day I would recommend you look at some local processing. I know a lot of people rave about Pix4D and I agree if you are looking for highly detailed structural models but there are even better options for that. Personally I would take a look at SimActive Correlator 3D. Less than Pix4D Mapper on a yearly subscription but a little more on a perpetual license. IMO it’s more intuitive as they have really cleaned up the interface to make it easy to understand the step-by-step but in fact it is quite a bit faster than Pix4D the more data you put in.

Web-odm lightning. $35/month unlimited. Great customer service through their forum

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Thanks for that. How long have you been using it? Do you make 3D textured models of structures?

A couple of years. Yes it does everything a pix4d and dd does. Much cheaper and it does it in the cloud but be sure to look into webodm lightning. They have a local version that runs in a docker instance thats completely free but requires pretty heavy duty hardware to process.

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