10 ms·

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)

by jofer 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jofer 4y ago
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!
- brookst 4y ago
  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.
  - anlsh 4y ago
    I think I'm going to vomit :(
    - layer8 4y ago
      Don’t do that outside though! You’ll get ads for gastrointestinal medication.
    - NavinF 4y ago
      Local contractors driving by your home can do the same thing.
  - jofer 4y ago
    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.
    - heliodor 4y ago
      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.
      - oakwhiz 4y ago
        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.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  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.
  - jofer 4y ago
    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.
- lukefischer 4y ago
  we are STARTING with satellite imagery. drones, airplanes, stratospheric balloons are all in our partnerships. also partnering with analytic companies.
  - hammock 4y ago
    I want ultra high res for art. Can't wait
- lukefischer 4y ago
  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.
- GasTrader 4y ago
  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.
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
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.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  > 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.
  - Gemoto 4y ago
    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'.
teamskyfi 4y ago
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.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  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.
  - GasTrader 4y ago
    An existing image that is recent may cost 20 to 30 bucks at 5sqkm. Perhaps that would work. Existing images might only be a week old.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    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).
rmason 4y ago
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.
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  What about balloons? Have you seen Urban Sky? https://www.urbansky.com https://www.urbansky.com (I'm not affiliated with them, fwiw)
  - rmason 4y ago
    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.
iudqnolq 4y ago
My first thought was that I could build this into a wilderness trip planning app I'm working on. But that's not feasible because: - No resale/commercial use - No API - Minimum target size even for buying existing images
twelvechairs 4y ago
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.
px1999 4y ago
I'm in the long tail. I'll probably buy a couple of images, and likely a few more if they turn out to be useful. I'd never buy them via a non retail/contact us channel though.
SergeAx 4y ago
It also doesn't have a KYC phase. Email and Stripe billing info - that's all they got.
budget_rabbit 4y ago
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. What is Skyfi doing different here?

by jofer 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jofer 4y ago

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!

brookst 4y ago
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.
- anlsh 4y ago
  I think I'm going to vomit :(
  - layer8 4y ago
    Don’t do that outside though! You’ll get ads for gastrointestinal medication.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    Local contractors driving by your home can do the same thing.
- jofer 4y ago
  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.
  - heliodor 4y ago
    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.
    - oakwhiz 4y ago
      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.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
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.
- jofer 4y ago
  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.
lukefischer 4y ago
we are STARTING with satellite imagery. drones, airplanes, stratospheric balloons are all in our partnerships. also partnering with analytic companies.
- hammock 4y ago
  I want ultra high res for art. Can't wait
lukefischer 4y ago
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.
GasTrader 4y ago
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.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

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.

Sebb767 4y ago
> 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.
- Gemoto 4y ago
  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'.

teamskyfi 4y ago

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.

tomjen3 4y ago
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.
- GasTrader 4y ago
  An existing image that is recent may cost 20 to 30 bucks at 5sqkm. Perhaps that would work. Existing images might only be a week old.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  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).

rmason 4y ago

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.

larsiusprime 4y ago
What about balloons? Have you seen Urban Sky? https://www.urbansky.com https://www.urbansky.com (I'm not affiliated with them, fwiw)
- rmason 4y ago
  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.

iudqnolq 4y ago

My first thought was that I could build this into a wilderness trip planning app I'm working on. But that's not feasible because: - No resale/commercial use - No API - Minimum target size even for buying existing images

twelvechairs 4y ago

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.

px1999 4y ago

I'm in the long tail. I'll probably buy a couple of images, and likely a few more if they turn out to be useful. I'd never buy them via a non retail/contact us channel though.

SergeAx 4y ago

It also doesn't have a KYC phase. Email and Stripe billing info - that's all they got.

budget_rabbit 4y ago

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. What is Skyfi doing different here?