Show HN: Droners.io – Get anything filmed by a drone | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Droners.io – Get anything filmed by a drone

droners.io

65 pointsdaveumr42 comments

In case anyone else was wondering, here's the pricing...

> 11. DRONERS.IO SERVICE FEE

> Pilot will pay Droners.io a transaction-based fee for Droners.io’s services and technology provided through the Site and otherwise (the “Service Fee”). For each Job Agreement, the Service Fee shall be equal to 10% of the total price that Pilot bills to the User with whom Pilot enters into the Job Agreement, excluding taxes and shipping or delivery costs. Pilot shall include in taxes only sales, use, or similar transaction-specific taxes that Pilot is required to collect and pay by virtue of the Job. Pilot shall include in shipping or delivery costs only Pilot’s actual out-of-pocket costs for shipping and delivery.

> The Droners.io Service Fee shall not exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000) per Job.

Source: https://droners.io/terms-of-service-pilot

This is getting to be a competitive market ( http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/29/dronebase/ )

However my understanding is that it might be illegal to do this at all without FAA approval on a case-by-case basis since its for profit. You can just google "drone realtor" to see the many issues they have faced in the market of using drones to take shots of homes for sale.

Drones are currently classified by the FAA as "model aircraft" and the FAA has tried and failed to sue a person for flying one commercially [1]. The FAA thought they regulated commercial "model aircraft" in 2007, but it was thrown out in court in 2014. Until the FAA can pass it's newly proposed rules, commercial operation of drones is unregulated (aside from standard safety regulations).

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-06/drone-pilo...

That article is outdated, the FAA regulations were drafted this year. I posted a link to them in my other comment (currently directly below)

Section 333 is from 2012, but the FAA failed to sue a commercial UAV operator in 2014.

That is correct Dan, it is illegal to commercially operate a UAV without obtaining the FAA's 333 exemption (https://www.faa.gov/uas/legislative_programs/section_333/). As I mentioned in another comment, there are now 1100 pilots who have obtained the exemption.

Could you comment towards or provide insight about what deckar01 said above:

> Section 333 is from 2012, but the FAA failed to sue a commercial UAV operator in 2014.

If this is the case then you wouldn't need this FAA 333 exemption would you?

Not to mention you can also just rent a drone yourself if you want to skip out on the hefty pilot fees. Unregulated indeed.

Hi George, Dave here at Droners.io. I've seen a lot of pilots actually offer that as a service to their clients. Have you seen any of the FPV races from a pilots POV (i.e. on Youtube)? Its pretty insane, feels like your in the middle of a Star Wars movie. VR goggles would really push it to another level :)

I don't understand the AirBnb angle? Is that meaning it is a marketplace? Buyers and sellers?

Agreed. It reads like they're offering accommodation for drone pilots. Only rooms with a skylight perhaps?

Thats correct. Clients can search for a pilot and accept a bid from them. After the work is complete, the pilot creates an invoice, and the client pays them through the marketplace.

It sounds like something useful, but the AirBnb mention seems like a stretch. Based on your description, it could also be the 'Uber' for drones, if you get my drift.

Yeah the airbnb angle is confusing, quit the name-dropping.

The AirBnb angle is completely misleading. It seems for a marketplace like this to momentum you need talented drone pilots as quickly as possible. Currently the quality of the sample footage is terrible e.g. 2 out of the 4 videos look like they have had no color correction done and the drone is very jerky.

We've currently on-boarded almost 400 pilots in the last 10 days. The FAA has also began issuing 333 exemptions at a faster rate. To date there is now ~1100 exempt pilots that able to commercially operate a UAV, earlier in the year there were only around 100.

Regarding video quality, there is a wide range of pilots, giving clients a wide range of services for the price.

So my drone charges in another drone owners living room. Right?

It sure seems like there are alot of drone imagery marketplaces coming up. Exactly how much business is there for all of them to survive? I think this pricing model will be the nail in the coffin for Dronebase, though. You can't set pricing as the exchange. You've got to make a commission off whatever the buyer and seller agree is "the price".

Droners.io is currently a one man shop. I'm hoping I can continue to run it lean, and offer a great service without taking too much money from the people working for it (the pilots). The current fee is 10%, and that is capped at $1,000 max per job. I've seen other sites take a flat 20%, no cap.

why the cap?

I know money makes the world go round, but it just doesn't feel right to me to take thousands of dollars for a referral fee. I use to work at CustomMade.com and we implemented the cap also for our makers. CustomMade made it possible for artisans to make a living doing what they love, perhaps Droners.io will do the same for UAV pilots. I don't know what will happen as it scales up, but for now at least, the cap seems fair and feels right too.

"Airbnb for drone pilots" yeah that is not misleading at all

I was half expecting "have random DJI Phantom owners come and sleep on your couch!"

Another part of wonders if they're attempting to demonstrate an "old school" attitude or a sense of age or history by using "AirBnB for … " instead of the current every-new-startup-tagline of "Uber for … "

(Now I'm thinking of pitching some fictitious random startup idea with the elevator pitch of "We're Pets.com for $dumb_thing!" and with all our API doc examples and sample code written in Perl4 or ColdFusion - to try and give the undeserved impression we've been around for 20 years, or at least since before the first dotcom bust...)

One thing I might suggest is that the payment is made in advance and kept in an escrow. Allowing people to hire a drone operator and then trusting them to pay after the footage is delivered seems like a lot of risk for the operator. It's not normally expected with photography that you get the full deliverables before paying. The pre-pay business model is pretty standard for hire-a-freelancer services too, so I don't think it would detract from the service.

Thats something I'm considering implementing in the very near future, giving the pilot the ability to select from several payment terms (1/3 upfront, 1/2 up front, 100% upfront).

Many drones are flown by using the first person point of view. I wonder if you could hire a person to fly the drone and then stream to you the first person view?

Of course I'd want to have the glasses on to get the real effect, but with the VR goggles coming out that may work.

No goggles usually, the pilot might but spectators typically get a screen, or so I heard from someone who knows about this stuff for factory inspection work.

Sounds alot like Skycatch's Workmode that already has tons of pilots and clients on it. It'll be interesting to see how Droners intends to compete with a company that already has a strong network effect going in its favor.

SkyCatch is geared more towards B2B, particularly architecture/construction/scanning, there is still quite a market in the other areas.

Regarding pilot base, we've on-boarded almost 400 pilots in the last 10 days.

Well, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Lots of people are using multi-copters armed with the amazing skills provided by ignorance and a total lack of consideration for fellow human beings, property, dogs, cats and small animals.

Despite a lame attempt at humor, the problem is very serious when viewed with the eyes of someone with over thirty years of experience designing, flying and, yes, crashing, all manner of model aircraft, from high performance 200 mile-per-hour carbon fiber gliders to lazy electric powered thermalling machines to high performance helicopters that can decapitate you if you are not paying attention.

Not one person in the several model aircraft clubs I've been a member of or have flown in would ever think of doing some of the crap people do with these drones. Why? Because we know they are unreliable and dangerous toys. I own highly modified RC helicopters costing upwards of $8,000 and have built and flown amazing ducted fan jets that cost many times that amount. And they are ALL toys. They are built with hobby-grade parts and can fail catastrophically on the "anytime-anywhere" plan.

The mass marketed multi's are even worst. They don't use the best, most expensive and most reliable battle-tested components. Something that retails for $500 is likely to have $50 to $75 in parts, whereas a high-quality aircraft built by a true model aircraft enthusiast might have propellers that cost that much.

To be clear, spending $3,000 to $5,000 on these fancy looking multi's doesn't make them any safer. They are flying bricks. With a plane you can glide and hope to have a controlled crash away from people (believe me, I've crashed many over the years). With a helicopter you have auto-rotation that, when coupled with training, allows the pilot to execute a safe descent and landing.

Training, that the other key element. Learning to build, fly and operate model aircraft requires time, dedication, tutoring and many hours training. It it also marked by starting-off with simple and nimble models and progressively moving up to faster, more expensive and more capable models as your skills evolve and improve. None of that exists in drone-land.

And, because of this, someone goes out and buys a $1,000 rig and thinks nothing of flying it over a crowd, someone's home, over kids at the park, near full-scale aircraft, near firefighters, etc. They have no clue. They don't care. Or both.

To be sure, the industry has done a great job of pushing these toys to increasing levels of capabilities and to a level where knowing how to build, maintain and fly them seems irrelevant. Point and click. And, at the same time, they've also done a great job of nurturing a disaster in the making. With the morons out there buying these things en-masse it is only a matter of time until one gets sucked into a passenger aircraft in flight and a major disaster unfolds.

You guessed it! I'm not happy at all about this. Because of what I see coming: These morons (and I am including the companies who are behaving irresponsibly in that statement) are going to destroy a wonderful hobby some of us have enjoyed our entire lives. Eventually something really ugly will happen. And that will lead to the government coming down hard on all things that have to do with RC flight. The fact that some of us (lots of us!) have been flying "drones" for decades without ever making news --due to operating the aircraft responsibly, with consideration and within designated areas-- won't matter, we are are going to be thrown into the same bag as the idiots who cased the problem.

Constructive note: Hey, droners.io folks, you might want to edit "Principle Broker" on your home page and change it to "Principal Broker". Not the same thing.

I'm sitting here replacing "multi-copter" with "personal computer" and laughing about how elitist and resistant your statements are.

Pause for a minute and really think about what you said.

Then go and google the definition of "elitist".

You are creating a false equivalency between drones and PC's. You are screaming "elitist" --using some twisted definition of the term-- at someone advocating for operating drones within rules of conduct proven to protect life, limb and property. You make no sense whatsoever.

It also works with "cars" circa 1910, or even "books"...

See also this opinion of an actual commercial pilot about the risk of a drone hitting a passenger aircraft:

https://jethead.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/airliners-vs-drones...

I would be careful comparing low quality aircraft with cars and books. These things are more different than they are alike.

Also as someone pointed out: there are other aircraft than passenger aircraft. I live in a city with a hospital near the city centre. At all hours of the day helicopters take off and land there. Depending on where they have been, they follow different flight paths entering the city. Meaning that they cross through airspace trivially reachable by drones.

I've seen people fly drones over the river that runs by the hospital. Every time I see that I imagine the medical helicopter hitting a large drone and crash into the hospital. And I guess the pilots imagine this too.

Many, many people have argued that cars and, yes, books, would destroy civilization; and maybe they did, as they changed it beyond recognition.

But it's very annoying when a new technology gets opposed in the name of "safety". New things are dangerous, but usually less so than old things.

Where did I say drones would destroy civilization? Show me! Where?

That's the problem with some HN readers. Well, they don't read.

What the fuck?

All I said, by using years of flying hundreds of what people might call drones today in support of my statement, is that multicopters are being flown by people in complete disregard for the potential consequences of their actions. And that a system is already in place with rules and a code of conduct for model airplane enthusiasts to follow in the form of a model aircraft community with hundreds of years of history.

In the US most modelers fly under the umbrella AMA rules (and membership): http://www.modelaircraft.org/

This also means I (and other responsible modelers) carry a ONE MILLION DOLLAR insurance policy to cover potential injury and/or damage I may cause. People buying these damn DJI's take them out of the box and go fly them over people and property in completely irresponsible ways and don't even have the consideration to be insured.

As for cars. You know that thing called "road" and that thing called "stop light" and that thing called "rules of the road"? Them's rules. And people behave with reasonable courtesy and care while operating them. What is happening today with drones is the equivalent someone buying a car to then drive it on a busy beach, a park full of kids, your backyard, on the sidewalk, etc.

As for books, well, you are creating a false equivalency and make no sense at all.

That pilot isn't thinking straight. There's a HUGE difference between hitting an organic object (a bird) and a metal and carbon fiber object with lithium polymer battery packs. One will disintegrate. The other can cause severe damage. And, BTW, airliners are not the only full scale ships in the air.

This is not a joke:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/us/california-freeway-fire/

Stop and think.

Wow. It's a whole new world isn't it. This is "deeply interesting"

Yesterday we had 'Like Airbnb, but for algorithms?' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10044783) and now this. I see no reason for this namedropping but clickbait. It's getting kind of silly.

It's because "rent-a-drone-pilot" doesn't sound like a 1bn dollar company.

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