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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I just bought and received imagery of my rural property, just for fun.
The resolution is very poor. Technically you might be able to make out 50cm things as a pixel, but it’s blurry and has a lot of artefacts. The colours are also not brilliant. If you’re expecting anything at all like what you get from google earth, you’ll be disappointed.
However, it was a very recent image (a few weeks ago), and with clear and sensible pricing. I can see how for some uses it would be perfect.
I had someone come and map 170ac for about AU$1k using a drone. Extreme resolution (and 3D + DSM too), so there are a lot of options.
> The resolution is very poor. Technically you might be able to make out 50cm things as a pixel, but it’s blurry and has a lot of artefacts
The CEO in this thread says they use Albedo for imagery.
I feel like Albedo is way overselling their capabilities because it’s not real 10cm imagery. It’s essentially computational photography taken at a way worse resolution (>30cm), and does a poor job computing a better image.
If you read about it in their blog post and actually zoom
in on their example simulated 10cm image, it looks quite bad. Way worse than just Google Earth.
What’s also super confusing is SkyFi uses Google Earth to be the viewer you use to find the image you want to buy from them, so you’re essentially being shown a way higher resolution (Google) aerial photo than what your actually buying.
Back to Albedo, what’s also frustrating is they rarely include the word “simulated” when they talk about 10cm imagery (should ALWAYS be stated as “simulated 10cm”). Which leads people to believe their image products are higher resolution than they really are.
> When placing a SkyFi order for Existing or New Images, you’re purchasing a license to a digital image.
I was curious what the license was and found their FAQ, for those curious:
> What is SkyFi’s licensing policy?
> SkyFi has the most user-friendly licensing in the satellite industry. You are free to share purchased images on the web and social media (and we encourage you to tag us @SkyFi.App or #SkyFi). Please make sure that provider and SkyFi attribution is clearly visible on all shared images. You are also free to use the images to do analysis and sell the results of that analysis. You cannot re-sell images you purchase on the SkyFi platform, nor can you sell products you create that contain the images themselves. Please click here for more information on the SkyFi EULA (End User License Agreement).
Seems fairly reasonable, though I haven’t read the full EULA.
I wish I was creative enough to have some cool ideas I could do with this imagery.
I have to hard disagree on the reasonableness of a licensed image. Firstly, I’m the one framing the shot. This isn’t a photographer making art, this is me paying a company to point a camera at xyz coordinates and capture the earth as it is, unprocessed. So if I personally plan out the perfect beautiful shot, now SkyFi gets to pitch it to others to make additional money off it?
Secondly, calling this “democratized” satellite imagery is a farce. Democratized to me means here’s the pixels you bought, it’s yours to do whatever you want with.
This is a contract of sale? There's no copyright, surely, as they're but creative images - they bound by technical restrictions not artistic ones. AIUI slavish recreations don't attract copyright.
Maybe in USA there's a carve-in for satellite images?
Not sure how space treaties fit with copyright; what's the jurisdiction, is it where the satellite was launched from?
I think they are way overestimating how much an average person – who is not building a commercial product – cares about sharing a satellite photo on social media. Given those licensing terms I'm struggling to think of any use case for this site. Who is their target customer?
Their final point means that you can't use these in a youtube video, even if you only show them for a few seconds and spend way more than the cost of these images on your video.
> After a further review in 2019, the NOAA reversed itself and dropped the GSD limit to 0.4m in a decision published in the Federal Register on 21 July 2020.
So I think "high resolution" is fine as it is >= 50cm
I honestly expected the resolution to be better? The sample preview (https://app.skyfi.com/sample-preview) really isn't that great? Where it the idea this is 50cm resolution from?
Did you zoom in? When I zoom in on one of the major intersections and look at the cars, it looks about right. Half-meter resolution means that each car should be several blurry pixels wide, and that's what I get.
The 50cm resolution is much better than what I expected (you can clearly see lines that are much less than 50 cm wide), but the 75 cm resolution is much, much worse than the 50cm one. Is it possible that some of the "50 cm" imagery is actually much better than 50 cm (which would defeat the purpose of a sample)?
It looks about right You can plainly see the 5 yd line markers on House Field (in Austin, TX) on the image. Those lines are at most 15cm wide - enough to seriously desaturate the green in any pixel that contains a line, but nowhere near enough to show as a sharp line.
Last year, I was hiking with a crew of Scouts in Philmont, New Mexico, and at one point used my Garmin inReach to send a text via Satellite to a friend to tell them where we were and that we were safe.
At that point I said to the group - when you come back here with your families, you won't need to do this - they'll pay $40/month to watch a real-time live video feed, from space, in 4k, of our 12 day hike.... This is a step toward that future.
Another use great use case! Using thermal cameras in the future would also allow you to see through some of the vegetation. Search and rescue is a great area to enhance since it's all about speed.
I’m generally sceptical of latent EO, but I’ve never seen such a slick B2C play.
Few thoughts:
(1) Depending on your acquisition contracts, you may have scattered access to historic imaging. For a consumer, having an image of my house around e.g. the time of a break-in is valuable. (As a party trick, recent imagery will work in a way “wait a day” doesn’t.)
(2) You’ve heard this, but it bears repeating: four hours is an order of magnitude more valuable than 24 and an order less than one. You should be able to predict fast-return windows, given orbits and ground station coordinates, for a given AOI. Bonus: natural time pressure on the sale.
(3) Multispectral options unclear. May be worth discriminating by band.
(4) Exclusivity pricing. Where you sell the image to me, fully, and without retaining the right to re-sell it to anyone else.
There also appears to be a name collision with an Israeli ISP?
The statements in this thread by the company founders are concerning. How long until you can pay them to drive or walk or drone fly past someone's house with a 360° camera, Google Maps style? Not long, it seems. And if not them, then others.
The implications of this are worrying. Public spaces are public, but the social contract has never included being unexpectedly and repeatedly monitored. This is taking the privacy mores of the Internet and applying them to the physical world.
If we're not cautious to nip this in the bud right now, we'll end up with a pervasive surveillance scenario similar to that in Stephen Baxter's The Light Of Other Days.
What is the equivalent of Let's Encrypt and HTTPS Everywhere for the real world? As we're going to need it before much longer.
I heard an interesting interview recently with someone who uses satellite imagery to trade stocks.
According to him there are data vendors who use such imagery to do things like (for example) look at how full the parking lots of certain retail stores are and then use that information to help them estimate how successful these businesses really are, and make stock trades based on that.
FYI if you're working on a federal grant, you technically have access to Maxar imagery for free for legitimate purposes via the NextView license, though in practice getting access is a bit harder (if you work in polar programs, the Polar Geospatial Center will help...).
I remember starting my career in GIS in 9th grade. We had a bunch of Landsat 5 (I think?) imagery and it was just the wildest, coolest thing ever. Especially when we began using the infrared bands to make vegetation pop out in false-colour composites.
Back then 30m resolution was pretty high. :)
Then Google Maps became a thing and it all slowly expanded into the public space. The rest is history.
The good news is, after overcoming confusion and annoyance about "launching" their website I was able to quickly and easily define, select and purchase an image.
The bad news is that I have dollar-votes that I can cast in the marketplace and I just voted for a product that reshapes my cursor to some cutesy thing for no good reason.
Does this allow me to use purchased images as a reference for OpenStreetMap contributions? Or even better, donate them to OpenStreetMap for other contributors to reference?
Occasionally the available imagery around important features is too outdated (e.g. completed construction of public infrastructure) and I’d love to be able to fund a prioritized update.
[+] [-] jofer|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rmason|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] teamskyfi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jofer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twelvechairs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] budget_rabbit|3 years ago|reply
What is Skyfi doing different here?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iudqnolq|3 years ago|reply
- No resale/commercial use
- No API
- Minimum target size even for buying existing images
[+] [-] px1999|3 years ago|reply
I'd never buy them via a non retail/contact us channel though.
[+] [-] SergeAx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliotshep|3 years ago|reply
The resolution is very poor. Technically you might be able to make out 50cm things as a pixel, but it’s blurry and has a lot of artefacts. The colours are also not brilliant. If you’re expecting anything at all like what you get from google earth, you’ll be disappointed.
However, it was a very recent image (a few weeks ago), and with clear and sensible pricing. I can see how for some uses it would be perfect.
I had someone come and map 170ac for about AU$1k using a drone. Extreme resolution (and 3D + DSM too), so there are a lot of options.
[+] [-] alberth|3 years ago|reply
The CEO in this thread says they use Albedo for imagery.
I feel like Albedo is way overselling their capabilities because it’s not real 10cm imagery. It’s essentially computational photography taken at a way worse resolution (>30cm), and does a poor job computing a better image.
If you read about it in their blog post and actually zoom in on their example simulated 10cm image, it looks quite bad. Way worse than just Google Earth.
https://albedo.com/post/albedo-simulated-imagery
Direct image link:
https://assets.website-files.com/5fd162c9a5bb9e401ce96317/62...
What’s also super confusing is SkyFi uses Google Earth to be the viewer you use to find the image you want to buy from them, so you’re essentially being shown a way higher resolution (Google) aerial photo than what your actually buying.
Back to Albedo, what’s also frustrating is they rarely include the word “simulated” when they talk about 10cm imagery (should ALWAYS be stated as “simulated 10cm”). Which leads people to believe their image products are higher resolution than they really are.
[+] [-] m2fkxy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truetraveller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cornstalks|3 years ago|reply
I was curious what the license was and found their FAQ, for those curious:
> What is SkyFi’s licensing policy?
> SkyFi has the most user-friendly licensing in the satellite industry. You are free to share purchased images on the web and social media (and we encourage you to tag us @SkyFi.App or #SkyFi). Please make sure that provider and SkyFi attribution is clearly visible on all shared images. You are also free to use the images to do analysis and sell the results of that analysis. You cannot re-sell images you purchase on the SkyFi platform, nor can you sell products you create that contain the images themselves. Please click here for more information on the SkyFi EULA (End User License Agreement).
Seems fairly reasonable, though I haven’t read the full EULA.
I wish I was creative enough to have some cool ideas I could do with this imagery.
[+] [-] TheJoeMan|3 years ago|reply
Secondly, calling this “democratized” satellite imagery is a farce. Democratized to me means here’s the pixels you bought, it’s yours to do whatever you want with.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|3 years ago|reply
Maybe in USA there's a carve-in for satellite images?
Not sure how space treaties fit with copyright; what's the jurisdiction, is it where the satellite was launched from?
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghastmaster|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment
[+] [-] thaufeki|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstejerean|3 years ago|reply
So I think "high resolution" is fine as it is >= 50cm
[+] [-] andai|3 years ago|reply
Fascinating.
[+] [-] conor_f|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IceWreck|3 years ago|reply
But it looks like explore is based on google earth. So the free preview is better than the paid thing ?
[+] [-] invalidator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walnutclosefarm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertox|3 years ago|reply
Here's [0] an interesting What If (XKCD) which deals with the resolution of the Hubble Space telescope if it were pointed at the earth.
[0] https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/
[+] [-] chadd|3 years ago|reply
At that point I said to the group - when you come back here with your families, you won't need to do this - they'll pay $40/month to watch a real-time live video feed, from space, in 4k, of our 12 day hike.... This is a step toward that future.
[+] [-] lukefischer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebarker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukefischer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Finnucane|3 years ago|reply
Also, it would be nice to be able to search for available images without the app.
[+] [-] stefan_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|3 years ago|reply
I expect I'll never go back and use it now. Jeez, who signed off on this?
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
Few thoughts:
(1) Depending on your acquisition contracts, you may have scattered access to historic imaging. For a consumer, having an image of my house around e.g. the time of a break-in is valuable. (As a party trick, recent imagery will work in a way “wait a day” doesn’t.)
(2) You’ve heard this, but it bears repeating: four hours is an order of magnitude more valuable than 24 and an order less than one. You should be able to predict fast-return windows, given orbits and ground station coordinates, for a given AOI. Bonus: natural time pressure on the sale.
(3) Multispectral options unclear. May be worth discriminating by band.
(4) Exclusivity pricing. Where you sell the image to me, fully, and without retaining the right to re-sell it to anyone else.
There also appears to be a name collision with an Israeli ISP?
[+] [-] pwdisswordfishb|3 years ago|reply
The implications of this are worrying. Public spaces are public, but the social contract has never included being unexpectedly and repeatedly monitored. This is taking the privacy mores of the Internet and applying them to the physical world.
If we're not cautious to nip this in the bud right now, we'll end up with a pervasive surveillance scenario similar to that in Stephen Baxter's The Light Of Other Days.
What is the equivalent of Let's Encrypt and HTTPS Everywhere for the real world? As we're going to need it before much longer.
[+] [-] lukefischer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nileshtrivedi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heliodor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|3 years ago|reply
According to him there are data vendors who use such imagery to do things like (for example) look at how full the parking lots of certain retail stores are and then use that information to help them estimate how successful these businesses really are, and make stock trades based on that.
[+] [-] technological|3 years ago|reply
Thanks and awesome website
[+] [-] cozzyd|3 years ago|reply
FYI if you're working on a federal grant, you technically have access to Maxar imagery for free for legitimate purposes via the NextView license, though in practice getting access is a bit harder (if you work in polar programs, the Polar Geospatial Center will help...).
[+] [-] yellow_lead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
Back then 30m resolution was pretty high. :)
Then Google Maps became a thing and it all slowly expanded into the public space. The rest is history.
[+] [-] rsync|3 years ago|reply
The good news is, after overcoming confusion and annoyance about "launching" their website I was able to quickly and easily define, select and purchase an image.
The bad news is that I have dollar-votes that I can cast in the marketplace and I just voted for a product that reshapes my cursor to some cutesy thing for no good reason.
[+] [-] aendruk|3 years ago|reply
Occasionally the available imagery around important features is too outdated (e.g. completed construction of public infrastructure) and I’d love to be able to fund a prioritized update.
[+] [-] slowhadoken|3 years ago|reply