Costs

Four complete build tiers, their running costs, and the arithmetic that turns them into a price per hectare.

Every figure is an indicative 2026 estimate in euro, with US prices broadly similar in dollars. Check the current vendor price before you quote anything. See Suppliers for where to buy each line.

Tier 0: prove the pipeline

No aircraft. The goal is to produce a prescription file that a real terminal accepts, from somebody else's imagery.

If you cannot get from frames to a file a sprayer loads, no aircraft will help. This tier is where most of the risk is retired.

Tier 1: one capability, earning

The wildlife search build, which is the cheapest route to paid work, or the field mapping build, which is the base layer everything else needs.

Both assume the Tier 0 processing box already exists.

Tier 2: full survey operator

Everything the detect capabilities need, plus a spare aircraft so a failure does not cancel a morning.

This covers 15 of the 19 capabilities. The four it does not are seeding, pollination, herding and unattended operation.

Tier 3: one dock station

Per station, on top of Tier 2.

The authorisation is the line that varies most, and the one people leave out. See Regulation.

Running costs, per year

For a Tier 2 operator flying roughly 3,000 to 6,000 hectares a season.

Now the same operator on rented processing and analytics, at a typical per-hectare per-year platform rate:

That line is why this documentation exists. It scales with your success, it never stops, and the one-off engineering cost that replaces it does not.

Cost per hectare

The number that decides the business. Take a Tier 2 operator:

Two things fall out of that table immediately.

Volume is everything, and volume means route density. A pilot in a van covers 3 to 6 farms a day if they are clustered and 1 to 2 if they are not. The same aircraft, the same software, the same pilot: the difference is entirely travel. Sell clusters. See flights as a service.

Docks change the shape, not just the scale. A dock removes the pilot from the per-flight cost and replaces it with capital and a supervision fraction. That only pays above a certain flight frequency, which is why the network is a later capability and why daily livestock patrols are its best first customer.

What a customer pays

For context, not as a recommendation. Prices vary widely by market and by what is included.

The rule that matters: price the constraint. For wildlife searches the constraint is a two-hour window, so price the morning. For scouting the constraint is travel, so price the cluster. For reporting there is no flight at all, so price the holding.

The three ways this goes wrong financially

1. Rented software at scale. Covered above. It is the big one.
2. Underpriced small fields. A 3 hectare parcel costs almost as much to visit as a 30 hectare one. Have a site minimum, always.
3. Unlogged batteries. Battery replacement is the largest consumable and it is invisible until a pack swells in April. Log cycles per pack from day one and retire at 80% capacity.