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I would love to know if this is cheaper than fireworks for municipal displays.

ttul 7y ago
Assume each drone is $500. That’s $1M or so in total. If I were renting out these things for fireworks displays, I would probably want to recover a healthy return over my financing cost. Imagine I could obtain money for 10% - $100K per year against the $1M inventory. Then assume the drones depreciate to zero in three years - that’s another $333K. Operating cost is per-event. Assuming no cost for my time to operate the drones, the rental charge would have to be enough to generate $433K a year. Assume you can run 10 events per year. You thus have to charge $43K per event just to break even on the financing of the drones. Add in a few thousand for operating costs of each event and maybe its $50K? I don’t know what fireworks cost, but it seems likely to be within the same range to me.
- ChrisLomont 7y ago
  The huge city shows cost a few million per year.
- nexuist 7y ago
  >Then assume the drones depreciate to zero in three years I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. Other than the battery, which would have to be replaced in 3 years, the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts. I guess the electric motors would be a strong replacement contender, but even then if you are buying in bulk it shouldn't hurt the budget too much. Maybe I'm applying my hobby perspective to the industrial world, but I don't really see a drone as "broken" until it suffers a gnarly crash that breaks the frame. Everything until then can be swapped out in a few minutes, and even if the frame breaks you can transplant the rest of it to another frame. It's not like the smartphone world where everything is soldered shut to save space.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    > I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. Other than the battery, which would have to be replaced in 3 years, the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts. The drones not blowing up in 3 years just means you make extra money. If the cost is competitive when assuming the worst case, then that means you stand to make money if things go well.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    It's not an analytical calculation of the amortization, it's a standard accounting assumption. https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/11/useful-life https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/11/useful-li...
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    "the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts" Consumer grade smartphones, of course, last as long as...uh, three years? I mean, I'm pretty sure the lifespan of whichever Google phone I had that started rebooting and wouldn't stop was less than that.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    > I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. I agree with you, but not for the same reason. They could easily get more than 30 performances (aka 3 years using numbers in the example) in my experience. Probably in the hundreds per drone. But over the course of three years, they’ll have vastly improved HW designs so they’ll want to replace their primary fleet. That doesn’t mean the older models are now trash (aka worth $0), just that they won’t likely pull top dollar performances anymore, which is fine as there’s plenty of room for them to be used at less viewed events.

ttul 7y ago

Assume each drone is $500. That’s $1M or so in total. If I were renting out these things for fireworks displays, I would probably want to recover a healthy return over my financing cost. Imagine I could obtain money for 10% - $100K per year against the $1M inventory. Then assume the drones depreciate to zero in three years - that’s another $333K. Operating cost is per-event. Assuming no cost for my time to operate the drones, the rental charge would have to be enough to generate $433K a year. Assume you can run 10 events per year. You thus have to charge $43K per event just to break even on the financing of the drones. Add in a few thousand for operating costs of each event and maybe its $50K? I don’t know what fireworks cost, but it seems likely to be within the same range to me.

ChrisLomont 7y ago
The huge city shows cost a few million per year.
nexuist 7y ago
>Then assume the drones depreciate to zero in three years I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. Other than the battery, which would have to be replaced in 3 years, the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts. I guess the electric motors would be a strong replacement contender, but even then if you are buying in bulk it shouldn't hurt the budget too much. Maybe I'm applying my hobby perspective to the industrial world, but I don't really see a drone as "broken" until it suffers a gnarly crash that breaks the frame. Everything until then can be swapped out in a few minutes, and even if the frame breaks you can transplant the rest of it to another frame. It's not like the smartphone world where everything is soldered shut to save space.
- jrockway 7y ago
  > I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. Other than the battery, which would have to be replaced in 3 years, the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts. The drones not blowing up in 3 years just means you make extra money. If the cost is competitive when assuming the worst case, then that means you stand to make money if things go well.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  It's not an analytical calculation of the amortization, it's a standard accounting assumption. https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/11/useful-life https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/11/useful-li...
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts" Consumer grade smartphones, of course, last as long as...uh, three years? I mean, I'm pretty sure the lifespan of whichever Google phone I had that started rebooting and wouldn't stop was less than that.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  > I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. I agree with you, but not for the same reason. They could easily get more than 30 performances (aka 3 years using numbers in the example) in my experience. Probably in the hundreds per drone. But over the course of three years, they’ll have vastly improved HW designs so they’ll want to replace their primary fleet. That doesn’t mean the older models are now trash (aka worth $0), just that they won’t likely pull top dollar performances anymore, which is fine as there’s plenty of room for them to be used at less viewed events.