What's interesting to me is that the pricing isn't that unique. That's pretty normal for a list price. $7 sq km + 25 sq km min (basically the size of the image).
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.
It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs.
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.
> It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs.
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 team has 7 people and my company has 100.000 employees.
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'.
Lots of businesses just assume this is how their big features will be purchased. If it doesn't come with a sales rep and discovery call then it's not worth buying. This filters both ways.businesses that sell this way don't want to be bothered with anything less than a $certain amount$ and businesses that buy this way want the sales rep and sales engineering team to come in because the purchasing decision makers don't even know what they need or want.
They're saying that your business practice of upfront list pricing should be the norm elsewhere. This series of comments is a critique of other businesses, comparing their 'contact us for pricing info' opacity unfavorably to your transparency.
We clearly list our pricing on the app and our website and are the first to do that. On the website we display our pricing. When in the app you constantly see the pricing very clearly...if you desire a 5km2 area you'll see that price, 6km2 you'll see that price, etc etc. The fact that we've created an application that allows infinite variability on size of the image requested with multiple sensor types there is no way to list pricing for every scenario. I'd like to know more about what you'd like to see to make it simpler as we are always striving for perfection.
I think the chain of comments has been saying that they want others to do what you're doing, and complaining about the common practice of hiding costs, rather than any complaint about your pricing.
Yes, correct. I didn't realize you were the main OP. I very much appreciate the upfront pricing and have almost never given a "call for pricing" company a second thought.
I think one thing that was unclear to me was that the first thing you do in the app is select an area, and then you get the price for a new image, but no option to use an existing one (which is what I expected). Instead you have to go to a completely separate menu option to find the existing images.
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).
Good feedback, trying to condense all the info is tough but will obviously evolve. Pretty awesome to think this is our worst version and will only get better from here.
Yep. Until recently I worked for a profitable yet bootstrapped small business. Five people. No plans for insane hypergrowth, and in an industry where it’s very unlikely we’re going to be a billion-dollar company.
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.
This. I evaluate lots of software in my position. If you don’t post at least ballpark pricing on your public webpage and you do not have a feature I cannot live without I’m talking to one of your competitors that does. Every time.
Concur. This is so obvious to me I do not understand why not posting a price — no matter what it is — is still considered good business practice. Perhaps once upon a time before the internet but no longer.
One reason is that plenty of powerful people default to zero-sum thinking. If there's money involved, they would like most of it to be theirs. Long ago I read something from Philip Greenspun where he talked about Oracle's pricing strategy, and it went something like, "Take all of your money, and then another $50k/year for support."
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
I suspect it’s primarily a mix of three things. The first is price discrimination, like you mention. The second is wanting to have some control over the sales process (price anchoring, tempering sticker stock, etc.). The third is related to the second: focusing inbound sales efforts by subtly communicating that “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” for a large chunk of price-sensitive customers.
And the 4th is once I see those sorts of sales tactics I know what kind of people run that company and I am not interested in associating with them. Principal matters.
Why in the world would you try to put a positive spin on it? It's bad behaviour, and you should feel bad for engaging in it. It's greedy and dishonest. Pass.
its a backwards system and then when you combine sales teams that are commission based how can anyone realistically expect to get a fair price when a human's pay is based on getting as high a price as possible
I believe not giving you a fair price is the goal there. A fair price would mean leaving money on the table. Your money, which you probably should not have, especially when it's something they're helping you make.
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 isn't always true. Sometimes you want to stop large customers from performing naive cross-comparisons of price when the on-the-ground reality is more nuanced.
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).
That's exactly why I avoid those companies. If the price is hidden behind a quote, it means they're going to try to gouge you for every penny they can get away with.
That’s probably a valid point. I would liken that to car lots but most of them at least publicly post a starting price. I guess it’s no wonder why I instinctively steer clear.
Some products/service are really hard to quote upfront without knowing the customer's exact use case and needs. You don't want to scare everyone away with sticker shock but at the same time you don't want to mislead people into expecting a much lower price. Often this includes offering customers decent pre-sales support in the quoting process. Sometimes it's a sign they are willing to negotiate widely on price as well.
Yep. To me (and, I suspect, plenty of others) "call for pricing" = "call so one of our trained manipulators can figure out how to screw you out of as much money as possible".
>> will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs.
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...
> 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
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.
Google Maps uses aerial photos past a certain level of magnification, if it is available in a given area, even if it's still labelled as "satellite".
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.
The pricing page on our website is just the start. If you visit the desktop or download the mobile app (https://www.skyfi.com/download-app), you will see that we have dynamic pricing in-app. As you change the size of your area of interest (AOI), the price immediately changes. We are 100% focused on the UX for the end-user and will work hard to keep the purchasing process seamless. User feedback like these conversations is helpful.
Is there no way to get a preview of the resolution and "look" of the image being processed? The preview is low resolution but could you unhide a random 100mx100m section to show it?
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."
Yeah, that was my concern. I think this is probably fine for industrial use, where the question is "can I see the thing". But I have a large copy of this hung on my wall: https://www.over-view.com/shop/sflowangle#/
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.
Second this. Happy to pay for 5km2 although i'd probably crop out 1km2. But I'd love to be able to understand what size i'd be able to print that 1km2 at using 300dpi. I guess art prints aren't exactly the core use case for this though.
Round numbers: 0.5m per pixel at 300dpi is 150m per inch so a 1km box is 7 inches by 7 inches. My city website has aerial survey data that looks to be much higher resolution data so you could also try there.
I'm not going to download and install your app to discover pricing either. There's a fair chance you can't get me to install your app ever, and the more of your service is tied to it, the less likely I am to use your service at all.
Their website has similar functionality where you can highlight an area on the map and it immediately tells you how much the photo will cost, updating the price as you tweak options.
This so much. If I'm evaluating half a dozen different possible options for a product I'm not going to strike up a relationship with every single salesperson just to get the damn BOM line. Especially if they can't even get you a price without generating a full up purchase order which takes 2-3 days for no good reason.
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.
I started out doing aerial infrared photography for farmers in 1983 when it meant storing film in the refrigerator and renting a Cessna. Then in the nineties I moved on to buying satellite photos.
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.
Interesting idea if you aren't dealing with a heavy cloud cover like say Iowa or Illinois this might work. For taking pictures in a city this could be really useful.
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.
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).
SkyFi team here. We did fight hard to make the minimum size of the image lower than current industry standards. Many use cases don't need large swaths and it helps bring down the minimum price – making it more accessible. We also have one individual EULA for all of our data providers which is not currently standard for the industry. We are working on leading the Earth observation industry towards transparent pricing. It makes it a lot easier for the customer, which is our primary focus.
Just wanted to congratulate you on this. I know businesses like this are hard in that it's a lot of slow, hard work to bridge (entirely reasonable) user expectations with the (also reasonable) grubby details of technical realities and business practices.
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.
Thank you. Remember this is version 1.0. If you recall version 1.0 of your favorite apps they are significantly inferior to their current version. We have much more work to do and hopefully we have all the features you desire. Many more sensors and features to integrate in the next 6 months.
It is pretty cool and I was looking for a picture of my grandparents place as a gift they wouldn't buy since they don't know it can be made, but the mininum 5k area neglects that purpose. They aren't technical at all, but the idea that something so advanced as a satellite could take a picture of their house would blow their minds.
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.
Why is the 5 sqkm min area a problem? If you're getting 1 px per meter, it doesn't matter how much irrelevant area gets captured around your area of interest (and existing imagery prices are low enough that it shouldn't be a problem).
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).
The min area for archive is 5sqkm or about 20 to 30 bucks. The feature of "notify me when X is avail for archive" has been discussed and is on the product roadmap.
We will have blogs and customer education on Hyperspectral. It's quite amazing.
With that said, I'm still very skeptical that there's enough revenue in the "long tail" of small customers to make a viable satellite imaging company. Please prove me wrong there!
Hello jofer! I couldn’t help noticing your red 2017 Subaru Crosstrek was out in your driveway all winter, and probably needs a spring detail. We’re running a special this week!
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.
Good luck recognizing that level of detail! This isn't that type of imagery. You can tell just barely tell a truck from a car and can definitely tell the color of the vehicle, but that's about it. You're describing 1cm imagery from drones, not satellite imagery.
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.
In Puerto Rico, roofs are flat and get dirty within a few months. You absolutely can easily determine when it was last powerwashed as well as when it was last sealed.
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.
It's different for dyed sealant, but there is a time while the work is being done where old sections are stripped back and the new material is drying. Lots of false positives from HVAC work etc. though.
Actually the roof example can be done at scale cheap enough for a local contractor to market. I'd use hyperspectral but 30 cm optical might work in sure 10cm would. Thanks for the suggestion!
One might not need that level of detail to put together that message. If you already have a database of car ownership by address, figuring out which vehicle-like blob is parked in the driveway is not a hard problem. Worst case you accidentally send an advertisement to somebody that's not as personalized as you were hoping.
A frequent comment we get is "there's no consumer market cause it's been tried before"...false. Of course there has not been a consumer adoption because you have to buy huge chunks of earth, enter a contract for 5-6 figures, and the whole process takes months and months. Previous business model before we started was like Uber saying, "contact sales if you want a ride and they'll get you a custom quote for the year with a minimum price of $10,000". Uber would've lasted a couple weeks with that mindset. So why has the EO industry persisted, cause there has been no other options and the Govt has been the largest spender.
Depending on what you consider "viable", there's the potential for a few hundred every couple months from archaeologists (I used to be one). Every working archaeologist needs high resolution imagery as cheaply as possible on a fairly regular basis.
Oh, agreed! There's definitely a market there. A lot of my friends are archaeologists (I'm a geologist), and I've heard many stories of "if only I could get your company to sell me imagery instead of blowing me off because we can't buy enough". Similarly, my mom was a mine inspector for years (mostly open gravel pits). This sort of imagery would have saved her state department a ton in travel costs, as most of the "boots on the ground" checks were "did a ton of gravel make it into the creek downstream after that big rain". You still have to go out there for water samples/etc, but just getting up to date info on large scale runoff is huge, as you can get out there before the mine can hide the event or claim it didn't come from them.
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.
we are STARTING with satellite imagery. drones, airplanes, stratospheric balloons are all in our partnerships. also partnering with analytic companies.
We will do our best. It's bot as if we will ignore enterprise accounts but making it easy for everyone benefits enterprise as well. We democratize access for all.
Exactly! What I've seen of competitors (Maxar, Nearmap, Hexagon, Planet, etc.) is better images, more frequently updated, but everything has an opaque series of 'product' pages and they generally want you to talk to sales so they can determine who you are and how much value they think they bring to your company. I hope this kind of simplicity comes to the space faster.
It seems like these guys are late to the party. Companies like apollomapping.com and eos.com already have very similar offerings and companies like arlula.com have already negotiated 1 kilometer minimums with many of their suppliers already.
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.