Pricing
Pricing is one page holding two things: what your business costs to run, and what you sell. Keeping them together is the point — each service sits next to what it actually earns you per hour. The page has a cost-basis band across the top, then a split below it: your service list on the left, the editor for whichever service you picked on the right.There are no packages and no Good/Better/Best tiers. A service is one offering. If you want a
variation, make it a second service. This is deliberate — a client choosing between three
versions of the same job is a decision you should be making for them.
The pricing wizard
If you do not know what to charge, start with the wizard. It walks five short steps and writes your services and your rates in one go.
The band on the price step draws up to four layers, and each one only when it is real:
- Your break-even and your target, always — they come from your own cost basis.
- An anonymised peer band, only once at least five other operators have comparable data.
- A modelled rate from the same eight-factor model behind the public drone pricing calculator.
- A published US range, plotted only for a workspace billing in USD.
Services
Each service is one offering. The fields:Units
Per hour · Per day · Per flight · Per mile · Per area · Per project · Per sq ft · Per acre · Per sq m
Why typical quantity matters
It is what makes a non-flat unit mean anything. A per-acre service at €12 with a typical quantity of 40 is a €480 job. Without it, the page can only work out what a flat-priced service earns. Leave it at 1 for per-project, per-flight, and per-day services.Effort hours
Every service carries the hours a typical job takes, split four ways:
You do not have to fill these in. Each one inherits the default for the service’s category until you override it, and you can override just one — setting your own editing time keeps flight, report, and admin inherited. Clearing a field puts it back to inherited, which is not the same as setting it to zero.
These hours are the one number the app cannot work out for itself, and they are what turns a price into an hourly rate.
Your cost basis
The band across the top of the page is your business, as one live equation. Four numbers drive everything else:
Change any of them and every service’s earnings-per-hour updates as you type.
Where these numbers come from
Rather than guessing at an overhead percentage, list what your business actually costs. Open Where these numbers come from in the cost-basis band and add your real costs:
dronelist works out what your equipment and overhead rates really are, from a rolling twelve months of accepted work. Your own entered rates sit beside the derived ones, and Use these numbers copies the derived values across.
Nothing is written until you press it. A number you set on purpose is never overwritten.
This is not an expense log. There are no dates on spend, no receipts, and no per-job costs — just the handful of fixed costs behind your rates, entered once and revisited yearly.
What each service earns
With a price, a typical quantity, and effort hours, the page can show what one job of each service actually returns per hour, against your target.
On Pro, once a service has enough finished jobs behind it, the figure switches from your estimate to what those jobs really paid — and the page tells you what price would fix a service that is losing money. See Plans & billing.
Where this shows up
- Proposals pull their line items from your services, and the publish check shows the margin on the quote before you send it.
- Home and the monthly money review use the same arithmetic, so a month’s total can never disagree with the jobs inside it.
- The public API exposes name, description, price, currency, and unit. Your effort hours and typical quantity are internal cost data and are never exposed.
Tips
Run the wizard first, tune later
Run the wizard first, tune later
The wizard gets you a whole price book in a few minutes. Adjusting one number afterwards is
much easier than starting from an empty page.
Enter your real costs before trusting the margin
Enter your real costs before trusting the margin
The default overhead and equipment rates are placeholders. Ten minutes listing what you
actually pay for is what makes every margin in the app mean something.
Set effort hours for the services you sell most
Set effort hours for the services you sell most
Leave the rest inherited. The hours only need to be right where the money is.
Revisit after ten real jobs
Revisit after ten real jobs
That is roughly when the derived rates stop being a guess and start being your business.