Even just a ballpark is helpful. As an industrial engineer, I deal with this all the time - I don't have time to go to lunch with you and talk about one of 300 components on my machine, but is your fancy gizmo worth it? When the tech specs are public PDFs, that's great, when they're locked behind an account creation email flow to spam me later, that sucks (and you'll get a company disposable email), when the account doesn't get created until your sales rep looks at my company website to estimate how much money you can take us for, it's too late; I've already designed in something else. And what's the price difference between the standard and deluxe models? Is it 20%, or a factor of 3? If your product is moderately compelling but has public pricing, you're in the running, if I have to wait for a quote you'd better be really compelling.
I might be one of those long tail customers for SkyFi, my Dad's birthday is coming up and I think he'd love a print of a satellite photo of his cottage on the lake up north...it needs to be better than Google Maps, but I'd never make it through a manual sales pipeline.
Yes! Especially since 'contact us' can usually be translated as 'not financially viable for a private person' (or even small company).
Even if pricing is not easy to say (like for companies doing custom car mods etc.), at least a rough idea or example projects with their costs help to know whether you could reasonably afford something.
My budget as that single team is not 'just getting the company credit card out and paying 5k / year for some services I wanna use'.
I'm pretty sure this type of practice is just stupid and we do see how much easier it is to just be allowed to click a VM on was, gcp and co in comparison to all of these 'contactnus for pricing shit'.
It’d be nicer if the list of the existing images for an area just showed up in the same options dialog that allows me to choose the options for new images (probably as another choice next to medium or high resolution).
If I felt myself getting pulled into high-touch sales for a SaaS product, I’d move on to the next thing. I’m not an idiot. I know it’s not profitable for you to have salespeople talking to people with a budget like mine. So don’t pretend that you will. The worst thing you can do is actually follow through and contact me, because it tells me that your business model is such that I’m going to get screwed in a couple years time, so I’m just as uninterested.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea but there are plenty of smart cookies who seem to think it maximises revenue.
If you want to counteract, have a shitty little startup with no funding and ask for the quote for them.
Some businesses think of you from the perspective of partners. Others think of you from the perspective of farmers or ranchers, where they try to pen you in and extract what they want, but understand the necessity of at least some investment on their part. And then there are those who are more like poachers.
This can be price levers on individual features, security track record, non-obvious user patterns that deliver a lot of value, etc. You're given more opportunities to pitch the full value of your product in a way that engages the customer with their particular pain points.
Maybe we should still all use transparent pricing, but I don't think it's fair to say it's used to extract more cash (though some companies definitely do that).
Which reminds me of a quote from Brian Cantrill: "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
THIS!!
Having run small businesses in several technology industries, I cannot emphasize how much this is true.
I very well understand that pricing can be complex.
But if you cannot give me even an order of magnitude as to whether your prices are even remotely feasible for me or my customer's project, I likely don't have the time or motivation to find out.
Yes, I get it, you think your likelihood of sales is better if I talk to someone and they can pitch me on how wonderful your stuff is.
Bullshirt. Maybe one in 500 times is that true. You are wasting my time and yours.
And, no this is not a filter to weed out the small players. My small shops have done work for anything from individuals to the largest multinational corps and governments. If your product is a fit, I can get the budget. But putting in that kind of wall is just offputting.
This is very much like how the real estate industry used to treat the address of a property as a state secret, as if nothing is ever a 'drive-by', the sale will be lost if they can't talk with the customer, blah, blah, blah. Then the dam finally broke, and now they all put addresses and maps, and guess what? They save themselves tons of time because the buyers self-qualify! They check out the places themselves, and only call when it already looks like a good fit.
Sales and marketing types really can get stuck in naive wrong ideas for decades...
From the preview I wouldn't pay for what I could see. I work with GIS and there are lots of aerial photos with crisp resolution of details but the season or lighting that day or color processing makes it look like a "bad photo."
That's mainly an aesthetic choice, not a practical one, and the sample images would not give me any confidence that I'd be getting the kind of thing that, say, would make a frame-worthy gift for somebody.
It's not, it's drastically worse than Google Maps, not even comparable.
That was my use case as well, I bought images (at the highest offered resolution) of my house upstate and the place I got married, thinking they'd be nice little framed items, and they're completely unusable.
Google maps is probably 10-50x sharper. It's a confusing product. I guess there's a use case of tracking a something like how many warehouses your competitor has built, or avalanches, or forest fires, or all sorts of time sensitive things, but I feel like they could do a way better job of actually explaining what they are actually selling.
If you compare areas where there are no such photos - e.g. large natural parks - the hi-res samples on their website don't look any worse to me than Google.
We will get into aerial in the next few months.
(I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)
I looked into something similar. If the photo only needs to be somewhat recent I would recommend plane photography. My state does a yearly plane survey, so I used that. If you know anyone in geotech or environmental engineering, they can probably point you in the right direction.
We’ve also identified signs of water damage on your roof, which was last replaced 22 years ago according to public records. Our local affiliate will provide a repair estimate free of cost, and we’ll throw in a discount on the car detail.
Regardless, insurance companies are big customers for similar reasons. Recognizing swimming pools in imagery is tougher than you'd think, but a classic thing (and real) that gets brought up is your insurance company raising your rates because you put in a pool and didn't tell them. Insurance companies would love to (and sometimes do) detect that from satellite imagery instead of boots on the ground.
Either way, those are big companies / big contracts, rather than individuals buying imagery directly.
Sealing will leave you with a pure white roof for about a month or two. Powerwashing will leave you will light to medium gray. They'll turn dark gray to black within a few months in the parts where the water pools.
The issue, historically, is that these cases didn't make for large enough contracts for an imaging company to work with. Would you rather chase one $2 billion contract or 1000 $1000 contracts? (No, the amounts aren't the same either -- that's the point.)
It's not that the demand isn't there, it's that most companies focus exclusively on the very large contracts, as they're more lucrative.
I completely understand if my request is impossible, but at least one other commenter mentioned this idea in the thread, and I think it would be a pretty common thing.
One other point. Would it be possible to subscribe to an area and get notified when photos become available?
Actually a final point: on the website it mentions the technical resolution of the images. Could you have one example of each size photo that I can see? 500cm doesn't really mean anything to me, nor does multispectural.
That said, I suspect Google Maps and other public mapping services likely already have higher resolution pictures. Like you said, I also can't really imagine much under the "100 cm" description, but zooming in on a random place of middle-of-nowhere, Alaska, I can clearly make out the triangular shape of tree shadows that measure around 6 meters length-wise, so I assume the resolution is better than "100 cm". Middle-of-nowhere Siberia was worse, but in a random 360 people village I could clearly distinguish left and right tire tracks.
I only see very few benefits a service selling historical pictures would provide for curiosity/novelty/hobbyist use cases - specific times (including newer imagery) that aren't available in the Google Earth history, getting the picture officially and without watermarks rather than having to screenshot or otherwise extract it, and maybe some edge cases in terms of areas covered.
Being able to request a new picture is much more interesting, but I suspect at the resolutions available, it won't be too useful either (edit: again - for curiosity/novelty/hobbyist use cases, for which pricing will also be a big hurdle).
We will have blogs and customer education on Hyperspectral. It's quite amazing.
I know my first reaction was to scoff because it didn't do the obscure thing I wanted in the way I wanted. But my second reaction is to appreciate how much of a step forward this is. Best of luck on your hopefully numerous future steps.
But there was a fundamental disconnect between how a fertilizer company wanted to buy photos and how the satellite company wanted to sell them. We ideally wanted to buy them by the field, the section or township at worst. The satellite company wanted to sell you a 'scene' which was 10-12 counties. Most farmers trying technology as a test would give you 5-10% of their acreage. Try telling your boss you wanted to buy photos where you weren't going to use 99%+ of them.
Then to make it worse here in Michigan it is quite cloudy. You get your photos and 50-60% of them are ruined by cloud cover. When it worked the photos were a godsend. Getting three or four flyovers a season allowed you to spot trends as well.
I personally think drones will win the ag market. What I wanted to do back in the nineties was launch a drone from the county airport and have it automatically fly to a given set of gps coordinates and return at nighttime. Cost is lower, I don't have to buy any extra photos that I don't want and because its below the clouds all the photos are useable.
But back then the technology didn't exist. But the tech has been there since 2010. Since 2015 its been possible to fly around other planes in the sky and geofence fields near airports. But the FAA won't grant permission, even for tests. I know at least two Michigan startups that went broke waiting and I suspect there are many more. So for now you have no choice but try using satellite companies. As a result the market is 1-2% of what it could be.
(I'm not affiliated with them, fwiw)
But if you have to stay below the cloud cover you're going to probably cover no more than a township(?) at a time. If I have to send a guy out in a pickup who launches, grabs a photo, pulls it back in and then drives to the next township it is slow and expensive.
People will be able to purchase very high resolution images from fixed wing and balloons.
(I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)
Why would an aerial photo plane fly when it's cloudy? Makes no sense
That’s why my reading is that he’s referring to the satellite photos, not airplane.
I worked on earth scale digital mapping the late 1980s on a product that ultimately fed into Keyhole | Google maps | Hexagon.
As a state we flew air photos every summer (and started with digitising these) and acquired various sat feeds through our ground station.
Polar precessing orbits (MODIS, etc) do a full loop about the planet roughly every hour or so, and their orbit walks about the planet to maintain a roughly constant ground sun angle (~ sun-synchronous), returning overhead in 24 hours (or within the week, depending on interlacing patterns).
The point being, we delivered high resolution images (digitised or, on request, blown up from good quality large format film negatives) over the urban areas from the summer surveys and ensured clear images OR we delivered sat imagery from a clear day (in the visual spectrum) or multi band spectrum data from whenever requested.
A cloudy day can be easily rejected from many sat feeds - unless its areas such as PNG that are famously Obscured by Clouds [1] and required near ground helicopter survey work to map (fun times).
- No resale/commercial use
- No API
- Minimum target size even for buying existing images
I'd never buy them via a non retail/contact us channel though.
What is Skyfi doing different here?
That's probably because they're (I think?) buying tasking capacity from other companies, so the pricing can't be below the rate they negotiate. That probably results in then negotiating a below list price from a few companies and then setting prices that wind up being close to the average list price for the industry.
The difference is two very key things: 1) no minimum overall buy 2) fully public pricing
That price is pretty normal, but usually you have to commit to at least a few thousand dollars worth. 25 sq km min per target is also pretty normal, but the contracts usually require you committing to at least a few hundred of those.
Next is public list pricing. Every company has list pricing, and that's basically what smaller customers will pay. Large customers negotiate it down, of course. But just explicitly advertising the list pricing is also a big deal and not normally done. It's usually way too hidden.
A lot of folks (hi there Joe) have been pushing for more transparency in pricing, and a lot of companies have been talking about chasing the "long tail" of small customers for a long time, but it's really good to see someone actually doing it.