What Monitoring Costs a Buyer
What does it cost a company or agency to monitor an area with satellites for a year, and how do resolution and revisit change the bill?
Chapter summary
Setcoin's buyer's cost model multiplies the area by the number of looks a year and the price per square kilometre, adds processing and minimum order sizes, and adds analytics.
Key takeaways
- 1
Monitoring 1,000 square kilometres weekly with 50 cm flexible tasking at $12 per square kilometre, with 30% processing and $2 per square kilometre of analytics, costs about $915,000 a year.
- 2
The same with free Sentinel-2 data costs only the analytics, about $104,000; with 3 m monitoring imagery at $1 per square kilometre, about $172,000.
- 3
Most commercial buyers should start with free or medium-resolution data and buy high resolution only where something changes.
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