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Buy hi-resolution satellite images of any place on earth

skyfi.com

713 pointsfor_i_in_range337 comments

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.

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!

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.

I think I'm going to vomit :(

Don’t do that outside though! You’ll get ads for gastrointestinal medication.

Local contractors driving by your home can do the same thing.

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.

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.

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.

If this is such an issue, why not have sloped roofs? (Just curious)

Actually the roof example can be done at scale cheap enough for a local contractor to market. I'd use hyperspectral but 30 cm optical might work in sure 10cm would. Thanks for the suggestion!

One might not need that level of detail to put together that message. If you already have a database of car ownership by address, figuring out which vehicle-like blob is parked in the driveway is not a hard problem. Worst case you accidentally send an advertisement to somebody that's not as personalized as you were hoping.

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.

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.

we are STARTING with satellite imagery. drones, airplanes, stratospheric balloons are all in our partnerships. also partnering with analytic companies.

I want ultra high res for art. Can't wait

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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'.

Can you elaborate on what you'd like to see?

Not op, but I'm sure, like many people, are saying they would like to see advertised, upfront pricing.

We clearly list our pricing on the app and our website and are the first to do that. On the website we display our pricing. When in the app you constantly see the pricing very clearly...if you desire a 5km2 area you'll see that price, 6km2 you'll see that price, etc etc. The fact that we've created an application that allows infinite variability on size of the image requested with multiple sensor types there is no way to list pricing for every scenario. I'd like to know more about what you'd like to see to make it simpler as we are always striving for perfection.

I think the chain of comments has been saying that they want others to do what you're doing, and complaining about the common practice of hiding costs, rather than any complaint about your pricing.

Got it, thanks IanCal

Yes, correct. I didn't realize you were the main OP. I very much appreciate the upfront pricing and have almost never given a "call for pricing" company a second thought.

I think one thing that was unclear to me was that the first thing you do in the app is select an area, and then you get the price for a new image, but no option to use an existing one (which is what I expected). Instead you have to go to a completely separate menu option to find the existing images.

It’d be nicer if the list of the existing images for an area just showed up in the same options dialog that allows me to choose the options for new images (probably as another choice next to medium or high resolution).

Good feedback, trying to condense all the info is tough but will obviously evolve. Pretty awesome to think this is our worst version and will only get better from here.

They're saying that your business practice of upfront list pricing should be the norm elsewhere. This series of comments is a critique of other businesses, comparing their 'contact us for pricing info' opacity unfavorably to your transparency.

Lots of businesses just assume this is how their big features will be purchased. If it doesn't come with a sales rep and discovery call then it's not worth buying. This filters both ways.businesses that sell this way don't want to be bothered with anything less than a $certain amount$ and businesses that buy this way want the sales rep and sales engineering team to come in because the purchasing decision makers don't even know what they need or want.

If SpaceX (https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/) can have public pricing so can everyone else.

Yep. Until recently I worked for a profitable yet bootstrapped small business. Five people. No plans for insane hypergrowth, and in an industry where it’s very unlikely we’re going to be a billion-dollar company.

If I felt myself getting pulled into high-touch sales for a SaaS product, I’d move on to the next thing. I’m not an idiot. I know it’s not profitable for you to have salespeople talking to people with a budget like mine. So don’t pretend that you will. The worst thing you can do is actually follow through and contact me, because it tells me that your business model is such that I’m going to get screwed in a couple years time, so I’m just as uninterested.

This. I evaluate lots of software in my position. If you don’t post at least ballpark pricing on your public webpage and you do not have a feature I cannot live without I’m talking to one of your competitors that does. Every time.

Concur. This is so obvious to me I do not understand why not posting a price — no matter what it is — is still considered good business practice. Perhaps once upon a time before the internet but no longer.

It’s not that they have a fixed price they’re not sharing with you. They want to estimate how much you’ll pay first - look at Crunchbase, etc.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea but there are plenty of smart cookies who seem to think it maximises revenue.

If you want to counteract, have a shitty little startup with no funding and ask for the quote for them.

I suspect it’s primarily a mix of three things. The first is price discrimination, like you mention. The second is wanting to have some control over the sales process (price anchoring, tempering sticker stock, etc.). The third is related to the second: focusing inbound sales efforts by subtly communicating that “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” for a large chunk of price-sensitive customers.

anytime you hear "custom quote" it means a sales person is try to maximize his or her value out of you

When in fact the opposite should be true. How can I as a company maximize my value to you. This is the type of companies I choose to partner with.

its a backwards system and then when you combine sales teams that are commission based how can anyone realistically expect to get a fair price when a human's pay is based on getting as high a price as possible

I believe not giving you a fair price is the goal there. A fair price would mean leaving money on the table. Your money, which you probably should not have, especially when it's something they're helping you make.

Some businesses think of you from the perspective of partners. Others think of you from the perspective of farmers or ranchers, where they try to pen you in and extract what they want, but understand the necessity of at least some investment on their part. And then there are those who are more like poachers.

This isn't always true. Sometimes you want to stop large customers from performing naive cross-comparisons of price when the on-the-ground reality is more nuanced.

This can be price levers on individual features, security track record, non-obvious user patterns that deliver a lot of value, etc. You're given more opportunities to pitch the full value of your product in a way that engages the customer with their particular pain points.

Maybe we should still all use transparent pricing, but I don't think it's fair to say it's used to extract more cash (though some companies definitely do that).

And the 4th is once I see those sorts of sales tactics I know what kind of people run that company and I am not interested in associating with them. Principal matters.

A more positive spin would be that richer companies are subsidising poorer ones.

Why in the world would you try to put a positive spin on it? It's bad behaviour, and you should feel bad for engaging in it. It's greedy and dishonest. Pass.

That’s probably a valid point. I would liken that to car lots but most of them at least publicly post a starting price. I guess it’s no wonder why I instinctively steer clear.

That's exactly why I avoid those companies. If the price is hidden behind a quote, it means they're going to try to gouge you for every penny they can get away with.

classic https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

Some products/service are really hard to quote upfront without knowing the customer's exact use case and needs. You don't want to scare everyone away with sticker shock but at the same time you don't want to mislead people into expecting a much lower price. Often this includes offering customers decent pre-sales support in the quoting process. Sometimes it's a sign they are willing to negotiate widely on price as well.

One reason is that plenty of powerful people default to zero-sum thinking. If there's money involved, they would like most of it to be theirs. Long ago I read something from Philip Greenspun where he talked about Oracle's pricing strategy, and it went something like, "Take all of your money, and then another $50k/year for support."

Which reminds me of a quote from Brian Cantrill: "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

100% agree, nobody wants to contact sales so I outlawed that. Easy decision

Yep. To me (and, I suspect, plenty of others) "call for pricing" = "call so one of our trained manipulators can figure out how to screw you out of as much money as possible".

>> will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs.

THIS!!

Having run small businesses in several technology industries, I cannot emphasize how much this is true.

I very well understand that pricing can be complex.

But if you cannot give me even an order of magnitude as to whether your prices are even remotely feasible for me or my customer's project, I likely don't have the time or motivation to find out.

Yes, I get it, you think your likelihood of sales is better if I talk to someone and they can pitch me on how wonderful your stuff is.

Bullshirt. Maybe one in 500 times is that true. You are wasting my time and yours.

And, no this is not a filter to weed out the small players. My small shops have done work for anything from individuals to the largest multinational corps and governments. If your product is a fit, I can get the budget. But putting in that kind of wall is just offputting.

This is very much like how the real estate industry used to treat the address of a property as a state secret, as if nothing is ever a 'drive-by', the sale will be lost if they can't talk with the customer, blah, blah, blah. Then the dam finally broke, and now they all put addresses and maps, and guess what? They save themselves tons of time because the buyers self-qualify! They check out the places themselves, and only call when it already looks like a good fit.

Sales and marketing types really can get stuck in naive wrong ideas for decades...

The pricing page on our website is just the start. If you visit the desktop or download the mobile app (https://www.skyfi.com/download-app), you will see that we have dynamic pricing in-app. As you change the size of your area of interest (AOI), the price immediately changes. We are 100% focused on the UX for the end-user and will work hard to keep the purchasing process seamless. User feedback like these conversations is helpful.

I'm not going to download and install your app to discover pricing either. There's a fair chance you can't get me to install your app ever, and the more of your service is tied to it, the less likely I am to use your service at all.

Their website has similar functionality where you can highlight an area on the map and it immediately tells you how much the photo will cost, updating the price as you tweak options.

Doesn't seem to need a download: https://app.skyfi.com/explore

thats actually pretty good

Is there no way to get a preview of the resolution and "look" of the image being processed? The preview is low resolution but could you unhide a random 100mx100m section to show it?

From the preview I wouldn't pay for what I could see. I work with GIS and there are lots of aerial photos with crisp resolution of details but the season or lighting that day or color processing makes it look like a "bad photo."

Yeah, that was my concern. I think this is probably fine for industrial use, where the question is "can I see the thing". But I have a large copy of this hung on my wall: https://www.over-view.com/shop/sflowangle#/

That's mainly an aesthetic choice, not a practical one, and the sample images would not give me any confidence that I'd be getting the kind of thing that, say, would make a frame-worthy gift for somebody.

Second this. Happy to pay for 5km2 although i'd probably crop out 1km2. But I'd love to be able to understand what size i'd be able to print that 1km2 at using 300dpi. I guess art prints aren't exactly the core use case for this though.

Round numbers: 0.5m per pixel at 300dpi is 150m per inch so a 1km box is 7 inches by 7 inches. My city website has aerial survey data that looks to be much higher resolution data so you could also try there.

> 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

It's not, it's drastically worse than Google Maps, not even comparable.

That was my use case as well, I bought images (at the highest offered resolution) of my house upstate and the place I got married, thinking they'd be nice little framed items, and they're completely unusable.

Google maps is probably 10-50x sharper. It's a confusing product. I guess there's a use case of tracking a something like how many warehouses your competitor has built, or avalanches, or forest fires, or all sorts of time sensitive things, but I feel like they could do a way better job of actually explaining what they are actually selling.

Google Maps uses aerial photos past a certain level of magnification, if it is available in a given area, even if it's still labelled as "satellite".

If you compare areas where there are no such photos - e.g. large natural parks - the hi-res samples on their website don't look any worse to me than Google.

Absolutely! Google uses aerial for popular locations (large cities).

We will get into aerial in the next few months.

(I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)

This so much. If I'm evaluating half a dozen different possible options for a product I'm not going to strike up a relationship with every single salesperson just to get the damn BOM line. Especially if they can't even get you a price without generating a full up purchase order which takes 2-3 days for no good reason.

> photo as present

I looked into something similar. If the photo only needs to be somewhat recent I would recommend plane photography. My state does a yearly plane survey, so I used that. If you know anyone in geotech or environmental engineering, they can probably point you in the right direction.

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.

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.

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.

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).

The min area for archive is 5sqkm or about 20 to 30 bucks. The feature of "notify me when X is avail for archive" has been discussed and is on the product roadmap.

We will have blogs and customer education on Hyperspectral. It's quite amazing.

Just wanted to congratulate you on this. I know businesses like this are hard in that it's a lot of slow, hard work to bridge (entirely reasonable) user expectations with the (also reasonable) grubby details of technical realities and business practices.

I know my first reaction was to scoff because it didn't do the obscure thing I wanted in the way I wanted. But my second reaction is to appreciate how much of a step forward this is. Best of luck on your hopefully numerous future steps.

Thank you. Remember this is version 1.0. If you recall version 1.0 of your favorite apps they are significantly inferior to their current version. We have much more work to do and hopefully we have all the features you desire. Many more sensors and features to integrate in the next 6 months.

Thank you for working to unfuck this industry. I often have to buy building or block level imagery and it is an absolute nightmare.

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.

What about balloons? Have you seen Urban Sky? https://www.urbansky.com

(I'm not affiliated with them, fwiw)

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.

We are getting into aerial in the very near future.

People will be able to purchase very high resolution images from fixed wing and balloons.

(I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)

> here in Michigan it is quite cloudy. You get your photos and 50-60% of them are ruined by cloud cover

Why would an aerial photo plane fly when it's cloudy? Makes no sense.

You’re right, that would make no sense.

That’s why my reading is that he’s referring to the satellite photos, not airplane.

Try reading the comment again. In that section they're talking about satellite photos, where they don't get precise control of the timing.

Got it thank you

Even then it exposes an issue with delivery.

I worked on earth scale digital mapping the late 1980s on a product that ultimately fed into Keyhole | Google maps | Hexagon.

As a state we flew air photos every summer (and started with digitising these) and acquired various sat feeds through our ground station.

Polar precessing orbits (MODIS, etc) do a full loop about the planet roughly every hour or so, and their orbit walks about the planet to maintain a roughly constant ground sun angle (~ sun-synchronous), returning overhead in 24 hours (or within the week, depending on interlacing patterns).

The point being, we delivered high resolution images (digitised or, on request, blown up from good quality large format film negatives) over the urban areas from the summer surveys and ensured clear images OR we delivered sat imagery from a clear day (in the visual spectrum) or multi band spectrum data from whenever requested.

A cloudy day can be easily rejected from many sat feeds - unless its areas such as PNG that are famously Obscured by Clouds [1] and required near ground helicopter survey work to map (fun times).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Di8-NzSMrg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib-sqVe5mOM

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Google Earth/Maps imagery is mostly aerial, so that makes sense.

> 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.

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.

Their write up is a little confusing, especially when combined with your statement.

> The imagery starts with panchromatic plus 4 color aerial imagery that was collected at a native GSD of 3.8 cm, which enables accurate removal of aerial sensor properties and resampling to the Albedo 10 cm resolution and camera properties.

Makes it sound like they have a spatial resolution of 3.8cm per pixel. This isn't panchromatic in a single pixel, but that's also true of things like Bayer mosaics in digital cameras.

Where do you see 30cm+?

Native Multispectral GSD: 40nm

https://albedo.com/product-specs

https://albedo.com/post/approved-for-10cm

Albedo hasn't launched any satellites yet...

The weirdest thing about Albedo is that their header image was taken with a commercially-available drone, at least according to the file name: https://assets.website-files.com/5fd162c9db04e672a0b0e2b7/60...

You think you'd at least be proud enough of your stuff to have it as a header image.

Well that sure seems like false advertising!

Albedo is a partner but they have not launched yet. When we post our resolution, it is native not enhanced. In version 1.0 we have not turned on 30cm. We do intend on adding this feature once we finish the QC process. Typically Google earth is Arial imagery in dense areas or approximately 4Ocm inagery. Hope this clarifies.

> Typically Google earth is Arial imagery in dense areas or approximately 4Ocm inagery

Where I live (large US metro), Google earth is definitely <20cm or better where I live.

I can almost distinguish individual roof tiles on my home.

How legal is using a drone to map own property?

Most places - 100% legal unless you live in a no-fly zone or exceed regional elevation ceilings.

Here are some links you might find helpful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094603

https://www.opendronemap.org/

> 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.

I didn't read their site in detail, but usually you're not actually framing the shot. You're buying images that they've already taken. Imaging satellites don't let you task the angle or direction and they simply continuously take pictures of anything underneath them as they pass overhead.

The linked page prominently talks about pricing for existing images from a catalog of existing images, OR paying for an entirely new image

"An entirely new image" probably means them buying either time on an existing satellite passing over your spot or just buying a set of pictures from a provider and hoping that someone else will buy a picture nearby too.

It's not like a satellite will fire its rockets to get to that position.

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.

Is that true? I would think a YouTube video would fall under the first part, sharing on the web/social media. You don’t sell a YouTube video, you distribute it

There are people doing reactions to content so I feel like an analysis that includes the video from SkyFi should be okay.

If you monetize the video then you are using it for commercial use. Anything in a monetized YouTube video requires you to get a commercial license unless fair use applies. Most content creators knowingly ignore this and just pray that they don't get sued or have their channel taken down from the massive amount of copyrights problems they have. So for at least for games this strategy has worked well unless you make a publisher mad. Entire sites like Twitch are built on top of people infringing game's copyright like this.

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?

The jurisdiction question is an interesting one.

>Not sure how space treaties fit with copyright; what's the jurisdiction, is it where the satellite was launched from?

According to the Berne Convention it is the country you publish it from. The country you took it from doesn't matter

If you copy an image as it's broadcast off a satellite then, no copyright exists (?) in the image, you can then publish it first and sue the satellite owner if they publish the same image?

I'll have to review Berne as that seems inconsistent with copyright existing from the point of creation of a work (I know that there are late-publishing rights too). If you publish an image I took, but I did not publish, what would be the jurisdiction -- of your assertion is correct this would seem to be indeterminate.

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?

Keep in mind that if you are looking for "Hi-Resolution" images of Israel, the results may be limited by the Kyl Bingaman Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment

> 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

Wow its not even an international agreement, it's just straight up an American law for Israel's benefit in particular

I wonder why!

>U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel.

Fascinating.

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.

When I zoom into my property, a Google logo is display. So I assume they are sourcing from them.

The explorer is actually Google Maps. It looks like they are using it for you to have a tool to select the area that interests you.

Maybe there should be a disclaimer.

I zoomed in, was also disappointed. Don't know the use case for these photos, but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo, SkyFi is nowhere near as good.

I'm sure there must be a market for these photos, but for most people I think a drone is probably better and more cost effective.

we have drone partnerships, airplane, stratospheric balloons, etc and are just STARTING with satellites. Drone imagery is better but a problem of scale but we are trying to solve that. Think of it not as photos but more so of data....we could never list the complete use cases here because there are so many

> but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo

Comparing a satellite/plane photo to a drone is apples to oranges.

There’s no way to scale a business in providing global drone level coverage.

Now there are services that fly planes with high res imagery that can get down to ~20cm. And even these business are super difficult to scale.

Yes, an image that's taken from three to four orders of magnitude further away is much worse than one taken from close up. Unless you spend a lot on the optics and make the satellite really big. But while the NRO is busy pointing space telescopes at earth, the private sector has so far been more interested in using these images to estimate crop yields over entire countries, or look at how full parking lots of certain companies are. For those use cases it's more useful to launch more lower-cost satellites to get more coverage more frequently, at the expense of quality.

That's about what you get with a satellite. What maps like Google contain is aerial imagery.

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/

I'm curious for a re-write of this for JWST

https://app.skyfi.com/explore is much better than the sample preview at https://app.skyfi.com/sample-preview which is weird cause they claim that the sample preview is fully processed and better.

But it looks like explore is based on google earth. So the free preview is better than the paid thing ?

A lot of Google Maps "satellite" imagery is actually aerial imagery, not satellite. Getting that kind of detail and resolution with satellite photos is extremely hard / expensive.

If you want up to date imagery, you could certainly choose to task an airplane yourself, but that is going to cost a lot more than what SkyFi is charging for one-off satellite images.

So, no, the free “preview” is not better than the paid thing, and the reason they're using Google Maps is clearly to help you precisely mark the area that you want them to capture.

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.

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)?

I'm also not sure what's up with the difference between 50 and 75cm. But being able to see some features that are less than 50cm wide is what you should actually expect, even though it is a bit counterintuitive. Think of it like this: each pixel is the average color of a 50x50cm square. Now a square of black asphalt will have a very dark average. But square of asphalt with a 10cm wide white line running through it will be about 10/50 = 20% lighter. Easily enough to be visible. And many road markings are wider than that.

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 dislike that this website replaces my cursor with a circle. Is there any good reason to do that?

It actually is making my mouse cursor disappear entirely (Chrome on MacOS). It's like they built it only for touchscreens?

I expect I'll never go back and use it now. Jeez, who signed off on this?

Do you have javascript disabled? Some design heavy sites like to replace the default cursor. The CSS standard[0] still only really supports the few custom cursors that we've had for decades now and provides no way to style them so the only way to achieve this is through javascript currently

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor

No, but it might uBlock origin blocking something, I dunno.

I went into devtools and modified the CSS attribute and was able to get past it.

Dumb.

> It actually is making my mouse cursor disappear entirely

Same. Brave on Windows

Thanks for the feedback. We may go back. I signed off on it

Ok my iPad it makes a dot where I touch the screen. It does seem like an irrelevant distraction.

Also, it would be nice to be able to search for available images without the app.

I like how it goes from full black to full white background. Anything to blast my eyes.

It’s all opinions but good feedback. The cursor was a design choice. We may go back

Firefox 109.0 on Windows 10 shows no cursor at all. It is not possible to use the site.

Be aware that MacOS/Safari still has occasional bugs where the cursor shape gets stuck on whatever the web page switched it to. I know how to deal with that, but it's an annoyance when it happens.

I like it FWIW :) maybe removing it on information pages like for pricing and keeping it on the landing page with the interactive glove is a good compromise

Luke, any chance you could resell Maxar 15cm imagery? (Or if something is better, that)

Dealing with their sales process is horrible. I’d love to buy it from you given how easy you make it.

https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2020/introducing-1...

That's the goal...we have some interesting partnerships and a partner of ours is Albedo- 10cm resolution. A lot of our work deals with negotations to get them to believe the mission. Most have incentive to keep selling to the Govt, which I totally understand.

Two follow up questions.

1. Isn’t Albedo fake “10cm”. Meaning aren’t they using 50cm imagery and apply computations to it to “simulate” 10cm.

The image on this blog post, when zoomed in is actually quite bad

https://albedo.com/post/albedo-simulated-imagery

2. Can you explain why you mean when you say “most have incentivizes to keep selling to govt”.

Are you implying they can’t work with you?

Hi, I will try to address these.

1 - Our partners (Albedo) will have 10 cm native as per their own site.

2 - The govt operates with large orders via face-to-face b2b sales channels. This is quite different than distributing to a large number of b2c (smaller) customers. Any commission based sales model targeting large customers will struggle with the second model.

Disclaimer - I am affiliated with SkyFi. I am the company’s CTO.

Re: #1, isn't that 10cm only for Panchromatic (grey-scale). For what people care about, Multispectral (color), it's 40cm - which is considerably worse than what Google Earth provides.

https://albedo.com/product-specs

just submitted the design change to go back to the regular cursor...thought we were being cool, guess not lol

Kudos on being so responsive to that feedback!

I didn't notice initially but now that I do I thought it was mildly cool.

How many complaints have you actually gotten?

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?

Excellent thoughts! Once more supply comes then there is obviously more consumer optionality (time of a break in). We test internally on ordering a New Image via tasking a satellite (aka pass prediction) but I'm not willing to release it to the wild until its reliable and a magical experience. We aren't there yet.

Speed of delivery is extremely important. Again, more supply means better speed and future tech will enable downloads faster.

Copy all on multispectral and will put that into the pipe to clear up re: bands

Exclusivity pricing is interesting and what we talk about a lot. It's a tougher problem because you may buy that image from us from a specific provider but then another provider could take the same exact image and it's not unique anymore. Regardless, will work on it and if there is enough demand then I'm all about it.

I first read that you were talking about the consumer as the one planning a break-in (for whom this would also be a useful service for sure)

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.

> we'll end up with a pervasive surveillance scenario similar to that in ..

Bob Shaw's slow glass series of stories, including Light of Other Days (1966) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_of_Other_Days

Biased being the CEO but just gotta say the comments are great and will help us better serve you all and the rest of the world

Do you plan to sell off-nadir imagery too? It's one thing I notice that seems to be missing, and I think that can create some of the coolest looking satellite photos.

Although, I wish your license actually allowed me to sell the photos if I pay for the satellite tasking. It could make for some cool t-shirts or something!

Off nadir is something in the roadmap. This was our first baby step in launching last week. It's trick to sell imagery...you can sell the derivative works so let me do some more clarification on the t-shirt idea...i like it and would buy one!

What I'd like is to have this image then be uploaded in Google Maps' satelite layer for everyone's benefit. Or OpenStreetMap for that matter.

As sibling said, copyright won't let you do that. But there is lots of imagery already available that can be used more freely [0], though usually not in high resolution - enough for some cases, not enough for others.

[0] https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/ (still check usage conditions)

Copyright isn't supposed to apply to non-artistic images. Is the jurisdiction USA, do you know of caselaw that's relevant here? Thanks.

I picked an area. The preview low-res image seems to indicate that they are happy to sell me pictures of clouds!

That's just the part of the equation when using electro-optical imagery. You're paying to task a satellite, not necessarily a clear picture. To me this will be an interesting test for SkyFi. Casual customers just expect to see the ground when they "buy an image" and giving them clouds will put them off from using the service further.

You can select maximum cloud cover in the resulting image, over a month long imaging window. They predict cloud cover to task satellites. It's kind of the dual problem to "get me and image on this date"

I understand that for new images but for existing images I expect them to stack multiple images into a cloud-free image, just like Google Maps does. Otherwise, at least calculate the cloud cover and discount me the money proportionally.

>at least calculate the cloud cover and discount me the money proportionally.

That makes sense if you can figure out how to get food to duplicate their satellites.

This is a great point.

We are not going to charge anything (will refund) if we cannot deliver an ordered new image that does not satisfy the minimum cloud cover requirements. There are options for selecting the threshold when tasking.

For existing/archive images the cloud cover is indicated in the image description. However, if the information is hard to see or not helpful, let us know, please.

Disclaimer - I am affiliated with SkyFi. I am the company’s CTO.

Do you have access to cloud masks? I'd like to see that. If I'm looking for a small area I'll take 80% coverage if what I want to see is clear.

Speaking small areas, let me draw the exact area I want to buy. Intersect that with the footprints, and let me select from that. I'll pay for the minimum area, that's fine. But forcing the 5km2 means I get options that don't actually cover my AOI.

Really depends on the use cases but I understand. You can adjust cloud settings in the advanced tab, by default its 20%. You could go down to 0%. We won't charge you if the clouds are above what you specify.

When we get more supply there will be more options. Just getting started here.

I had the same problem, even when filtering for low cloud cover.

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.

Even governments use this technology to calculate how high stockpiles of certain minerals or resources are based on shadows and time of day

Yes, though at this point I'd say this is old news and table stakes, so I expect everyone to be using this type of data already. As an example, Orbital Insights began tracking 250k parking lots across 96 retail chains at least all the way back to 2017. Same for things like monitoring gas silo levels via satellite imagery, etc. If you read it on the blog of one of the many sat image providers I would assume there to be no more competitive advantage to be had, unless you can read additional information from that data that other traders might have missed.

Was it Jacob Goldstein’s interview with Planet?

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/whats-your-problem/seeing-da...

It’s true and part of our origin story

What is the usecase for common man ? I cannot think of anything, so asking to understand how one will use it.

Thanks and awesome website

It makes some kinds of research easier. Imagine you were a blogger or youtuber making a piece on Ukraine, this would allow you to check how previously mothballed Russian tank stockpiles look like this month, or get reasonably up-to-date images on flood events. Anything where recency is more valuable than super high resolution.

Some fun personal projects using AI? [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8sZ6dLrhDs

Make a detailed OpenStreetMap of your favorite village? Need to check licensing though, OSM has some very strict rules on data rights.

Is this just a reseller for Maxar imagery?

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...).

no, not just a reseller. resellers are just a sales channel and don't negotiate on process or price on behalf of the customer. we do

Is there any restriction around military bases or can I buy one pointed at Area 51, or Russian military bases, or certain conflict areas in Ukraine?

If not, I was thinking this type of services could be a boon to moderately-funded OSINT organisations as it would make you able to get fresh satellite imagery very easy and accessible.

There's been heavy use of these kinds of services for exactly this purpose. See [1] for example. Typically airbases, mass graves, bridges; things we know won't move or change too fast.

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-repo...

First image I got was of Area 51 and Russian troop build ups last Feb

care to share? :)

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.

Good news / bad news ...

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.

Thank you for using the product and leaving your feedback.

We are working on getting rid of the “cutesy” cursor.

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.

I read elsewhere in the thread that the license allows basically anything, provided that you aren't making money and that you give credit. The latter is the hard part. Would a source=... tag on the object be enough? Or does anyone using that part of the OSM map need to be made aware that this contains data based on skyfi? There are no methods currently for doing the latter.

IANAL, but an avid mapper with OpenStretMap. Contributors are listed at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors (via https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright). A written document by skyfi allowing the use of their images for tracing would be necessary.

Far from every application does that, nor would it be practical. As skifi won't be the contributor (I would, for example), it also wouldn't show up there. There is no mechanism to make attribution work if anyone who sees the derived material needs to be made aware of the source rather than just setting a source tag.

“you’re purchasing a license to a digital image.” Lame.

i mean - very few photographers sell their copyright. a lot depends on the terms of the license though.

A reasonable expectation might be that at least for new imagery this is “work for hire”.

They already collected the data and are just giving you a part of their independent work under license.

I actually agree with you and we fight for as much freedom with operators as possible. Since the industry grew up on large government contractors they have only moved so much but we continue to fight for hassle free contracts with all our providers. Great things to come.

Also I have used this company to monitor things like road and other infrastructure construction. Images most of the planet daily.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs

its a great resource. more options the better with varying resolutions and sensor types

I need this, as in, today.

I am ready to make an immediate purchase. I want to give them my money.

But all I see is "launch skyfi" ... and, of course, I don't want to "launch" anything. I want to enter simple information into a web form and hit a submit button.

I do not need an app install or a telephone. All I need is a web browser.

Is it actually impossible to purchase one of these images from their actual website ?

I felt the same way but clicked "Launch skyfi" anyways. It takes you to a login form in the browser. Bad name for a link.

I clicked the button, on my phone, and got page that said it's best viewed in the app, and a link to the app store, with no other option

  SkyFi is an easy-to-use mobile or desktop app that allows you to get satellite imagery of any place in the world at any given time. SkyFi is creating a marketplace for businesses and consumers alike to capture earth observation data to make better informed business decisions, capture life’s most precious memories, and more. The SkyFi App, thanks to its satellite partners, allows customers to either order a New Image, where a satellite in-orbit is ordered to capture an Area of Interest for a date in the future, or select an Existing Image from our database of hundreds of previously-captured images. The best part? This can all be done from your phone, tablet, or computer.

This is completely unwanted, I agree with the person at the top of the thread.

To be fair, the mobile app is pretty nice. A bit unnecessary, but other than ‘sign in with apple’ it works pretty well.

Thank you for the positive feedback about the mobile app.

We are working on the Apple SSO.

Disclaimer - I am affiliated with SkyFi. I am the company’s CTO.

You can ask your phone's browser for the desktop site, which works, though it is clearly not optimized for mobile

That button just opens a web app in your browser though. Did you not try it?

No, I didn't.

I also didn't try the "culture" link in their page footer ... since I had the same interest in their culture as I had in "launching" anything.

OK, onward ...

On mobile it redirects you to the app-store apps.

Yikes. That's my fault for assuming consistent behavior then. Apologies to the parent comment.

You can do exactly that from this link: https://app.skyfi.com/welcome

Had to switch browsers on desktop for it not to show: "SkyFi on mobile is best viewed on our app."

We have to have an interface that pulls in options. But good feedback and would like to know specifics of how you’d intend to purchase

The thing you are "launching" is just a web page on desktop. Don't let a silly complaint about marketing terminology stand in your way.

(and if you're on mobile, I'd recommend just not doing it on mobile. It's a complicated enough UX problem that I suspect it would be miserable and limited on a phone.)

Hey,

Thanks for the feedback. Highly appreciated.

You can absolutely use nothing but a browser on any large-screen device. The web experience is currently not optimized for small screens.

For a smoother mobile experience we have dedicated mobile apps.

Hope this helps a bit.

Disclaimer - I am affiliated with SkyFi. I am the company’s CTO.

The mobile page just says app. It needs to add 'or view this site on desktop'. I assumed this was a dumb site built mobile-app-only because I happened to first read about it while reading news on my phone.

I appreciate you coming into the trenches and participating in this discussion.

Are the images orthorectified? I imagine they have some kind of georectification at least, but correction for ground , mountains etc is kind of important for measurements for distances and area and for tracing etc

This is a great question.

Yes. Our images are orthorectified.

Hello!

I couldn't find this information on the website, what DEM do you use for othorectification?

Second question: the area I'm interested in has notoriously bad DEMs (including Tandem-x), is it possible to download images that are not orthocorrected?

I saw this on Twitter last night and bought two pictures. They were from the existing images feature at the highest resolution.

The images totally sucked. They were blurry, and the experience was completely confusing since the sort of preview type map making image where you move the square around was very clear and sharp, and then the one I ordered was totally unusable for anything.

What were you trying to use it for? Happy to give a full refund if you didn't get what you wanted. Email or chat with our customer support and give them the details.

I saw this linked somewhere yesterday and bought an existing image of my neighborhood from late last year. Resolution is 0.75 meter. I'd describe it as notably worse than what's on Google Maps (which might be aerial survey), but several years more recent.

I have no particular use for it other than curiosity, from that perspective it was worth $20.

really depends on the use case and for some reasons Google Earth is just fine

For all their talk about "high resolution" there is nothing in the FAQ (or anywhere else I've found) to what that means. How many pixels do you get per square meter on the ground? That's the only meaningful measure, and it's lacking.

Am I missing something?

You are missing something. Resolution is the feature size on the ground that can be resolved. So (to simpiify) if it's 0.5m resolution, and I have some much smaller, but bright reflector on the ground, you will see it blurred out to look 0.5m wide. It could be a couple pixels wide, it could be a thousand if you want to up sample it, the point is you won't see small stuff. This is why pixels are not mentioned

I too was wondering about the resolution. Found it in the FAQ:

> Our current spatial resolutions range from 50cm to 3m for our optical sensors and 5m for our hyperspectral sensor. SkyFi will be frequently updating and adding higher resolutions.

https://www.skyfi.com/faqs

Very cool. Always interested in these hi-res photos for agricultural field monitoring. A little pricey though.

ETA: 5 sq km seems big for a minimum. Multispectral availability is super cool tho!

Cool, I was wondering if this would be useful for farmers. Could you share more info on how multispectral images would be used?

Well with SAR you can get moisture content of soil which can help with crop yields. Right now third parties do this for ag work but our goal is to have integrated analytics cause really a farmer doesn't care about the imagery he or she cares about crop yields...that's what we are solving for.

Interesting, thanks!

Take a look at www.arlula.com that marketplace offers 1 kilometer minimum orders with many of their suppliers. It seems like this space is getting quite competitive.

I wonder how long until you can buy the ability to aim a satellite using your phone and take just the picture — with the exact resolution — that you want. Not if but when....

the resolution is hard limited by satellite size, and there's no reason to aim when you can just deploy enough to cover everything.

kind of true but it's also orbit positioning VLEO can have much better image quality than LEO if comparing apples to apples. There is a cost and that cost is atmospheric friction and energy use which can degrade the satellite faster

Is there a technical limitation that allows a maximum resolution of 50cm? Or could you potentially go to 25 or 10 just by dialing up the zoom level on the satalites?

The technical limitation from space is at around 10cm. Current commercial offerings go down to 30cm, but there are companies like Albedo that are aiming at having satellites in very-low earth orbit, resulting in 10cm imagery. Their imagery is expected to be on the SkyFi platform, once their satellites are in orbit.

(Note that I am affiliated with SkyFi - I work as an in-house Earth Observation Specialist)

How does it compare to https://spymesat.com/ which has been around since 9+ years?

I've long wondered why we couldn't start collecting pure drone footage for this kind of data. Literally decentralize the collection of overhead imagery.

https://openaerialmap.org/ exists!

Wait, how can I start sending my drone footage to them? This is cool?

We have a couple drone partners...I'm a big drone fan (ran the experiment while at Uber Elevate) and want to have every drone hobbyist be able to upload their data and get paid (probably a small chunk but size based) as long as it can be geo rectified

It’s on our roadmap. Imagery and data from all sources

*SkyFi Employee here! Would love feedback!*

Someone requested a price filter so that a SkyFi user could say "I want a picture of Austin, Texas under $30" and all related Existing Images would appear.

Thoughts on this feature?

Down the road, we could implement alerts/push notifications of "Images under $XX for X AOI", which I think would really gain traction across infrastructure, agriculture, etc. use cases.

Issues:

1. "resolution (available in medium, high, or very high)" <- so, they're not willing to tell me what the resolution is? Is it a secret?

2. I don't like it that there's an app for doing stuff. I don't want their app. I just want to (maybe) buy an image.

3. Why is there a 25 Km^2 minimum? That's huge. Can they really not capture smaller areas? I may want to get a satellite image of my home town or village (not city).

Ad.1 it is very hard to give exact number because it’s based on many variables but still you have fairly good explanation of what you can get in each category Ad.2 how would you do it differently? Like with power of thought? :D Ad.3 imagine someone sent big camera into space… would you hire excavator to dig 30cm hole in your backyard? :)

Super poor choice of images on this website, most of them are beautiful but do nothing to help understand the level of detail provided.

I want you to count how many trucks arrive at the local cement factory every day for a month so that we can make an informed offer.

Question: what service is better than Google Earth for aerial images for individuals to use?

Something with a resolution of 1 foot or better.

I use to use https://zoom.earth/ which was ok, but their high res image support ends this month.

Note: I’m willing to pay but don’t need a corp contract from someone like DigitalGlobe. It’s just for my on land.

I bought a drone. It does the work fantastically, and I can send it up every f-ing day.

Drones are great, hard to scale and provide value to the masses that don't have drones though

If having a 6 month to years old image is fine for your use case then Google Earth is fine. There are many use cases where near real time is preferred and/or other sensors are preferred. We don't expect every consumer to have a near real tine satellite imagery need.

Custom mouse cursor, how 90s.

in fact, there was a 90s website that sold high resolution satellite imagery prints, called Pictopia

On macOS Safari, it causes the mouse to disappear when you transition from the browser window to another screen. I can't help but wonder how much money they spent creating that nuisance.

It was a design choice we made obviously. Probably gonna go back

Just used the iPhone app to purchase an image. Pretty easy experience. Sign in with Apple, pay with Apple Pay was slick. Just one defect when toggling to medium resolution and back to check price difference changed capture area from 25km^2 to some large area but not back which was not intuitive. My image will be ready inside two weeks which seems reasonable.

I’m really excited for this. I thought this was what the company Planet (planet.com) was going to be, but when I actually tried to buy images from them it went through a complicated sales process I couldn’t easily complete. I felt like I clearly wasn’t the target customer. I love websites with an “add to cart” button instead of a “contact sales” button :)

It would be really cool if I could upload a short python snippet/map-reduce job to run a piece of code over the entire globe. Could be super useful for e.g. counting all of the solar farms in the world.

I despise “contact sales” and why I essentially outlawed it at the company.

Luke is a former colleague of mine, and I got pretty excited when I saw his new company. I got a chance to try out their beta, and it was a pretty smooth experience! I was most surprised by how affordable it was to buy a small portion of an existing photo. They made prints of Oshkosh AirVenture too.. pretty incredible.

The photo's, (at least the ones I've checked) are just standard Google Earth stuff from up to 5 years ago as far as I can tell. I checked several places that I have Google Earth photos saved and this is the case.

Not much of a deal when you can get it for "free" on Google Earth

They're using it as a base layer so you can see the area you're ordering. You can also buy images that haven't been captured yet.

And there's a big difference between actual imagery and a screenshot from Google. For technical analysis as well a recency.

Why would anyone in Australia bother?

https://qldglobe.information.qld.gov.au/

10cm resolution for free. A vast repository of historical imagery for free. I'm sure other states have similar.

Because the latest data there is few years old vs getting completely fresh data on-demand?

I was not able to find a way to see (prior to purchase) the age of the stock image (is that info on the site?). Also if you order a new image how do you know it will be taken when no clouds (or is that just obvious they only take when not obstructed (and by how much)?

For each existing photo there is a date in which photo was taken, this is clearly visible in app and web, for second part of question: you have an input what amount of clouds you accept, if there is more clouds photo is most likely not even captured

There is a market for ordering drone footage from random plebs arround the world.

Given the drones range is 7km radius and images can be so perfectly stitched.

I don't see that much appeal to small area via satelite.

We got the feedback on the cursor. Changing it back as I type, lol. Message received :)

> Please make sure that provider and SkyFi attribution is clearly visible on all shared images.

Can you crop the images?

> nor can you sell products you create that contain the images themselves.

Can you sell a commercial report containing the images?

Can the images be published in an journal?

Wait, does that mean the image has watermarks on it? I was just contemplating ordering one of a property we have to make a poster. Having a watermark rules that out

Watermark will not be on image.

With no responses to my questions after a couple of days, I guess the answer to all of them is "No".

When I request new imagery my expectation is to have the copyright of the resulting image. Whilst I would have the need for high-resolution satellite images, I am not interested in acquiring licenses of any of them.

Hmm, I just bought an existing image of my local area at 75cm resolution, but that is not high-res enough to be interesting.

At least it only cost me $20. If I’d paid the full price for a fresh image I’d have been very disappointed.

Thank you for testing our product! Your feedback is much appreciated.

We are working on making 50 cm and 30 cm available in the very near future and 10 cm a little bit down to road via our partners at Albedo.

Disclaimer - I am affiliated with SkyFi. I am the company’s CTO.

How recent are the images for non-US? Next to my house there's a condo development since last year, and all I see (in the preview?) is green empty land.

That's not the imagery. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34470086

What is the license I get? “Download”, well sure, but what can I do with it? Put it in an app? On a poster I sell? Ads?

48 hours from new image capture to being able to download it. didn't see info on the time between requesting a new image and how soon it can be captured

We aim to be faster. It’ll increase with more supply

Does not work on ipad. Directs to install mobile app, but that only works in iphone emulation mode. “Request desktop website” doesn’t help either.

Thank you for your feedback. Highly appreciated. This is on our roadmap.

Disclaimer - I am affiliated with SkyFi. I am the company’s CTO.

Except imagery of Israel, right? For some reason we give them a special pass to not be subject to the same scrutiny and concerns as other places, huh?

I suppose it's to prevent helping Palestinian freedom fighters to test the Iron Dome.

Some of SkyFi's funding comes from Israeli venture capitalists so it's not surprising that this was presumably a condition attached to receiving all those $$$.

What would be an ideal viewer to open these huge satellite images? I'm assuming everyone that comes with Windows will just hang

Windows photo viewer should be fine so long as you have enough RAM.

SkyFi Earth Observation Specialist here - the program most suited for viewing imagery like this, is specialised geospatial information system (GIS) software. There is a quite nice open source software called QGIS. However, beware - it is not the most user friendly experience, and we are working on creating a video tutorial, to help first time users visualise the data and start doing analysis.

Crazy expensive for my area and for some reason I have to have a 250km image, which is $250, I'd love to buy but no thanks.

Has anyone been able to select their highest resolution option to buy? Looks like its not available for unregistered users at least.

Not turned on yet expected in late February as we go thru Quality control.

Do the multispectral images cover (part of) the infrared range? That might allow to detect heat loss through the roof

SkyFi Earth Observation guy here - the multispectral images do cover parts of the near-infrared ranges, but not the thermal infrared, so heat loss is not possible with the current data. We are eagerly awaiting more satellites being launched, some of which will be carrying thermal infrared sensors, with spatial resolutions suitable for observing heat loss through the roof. The wavelengths covered by the current multispectral offering is from 450nm to 1040nm. In comparison, the wavelength of thermal emissions from a house, of say 30 degrees celsius, is around 9700nm.

Absolutely brutal for the SkyFi team trying to have a relaxing Saturday afternoon - keep up the good work, you nuts.

Is it just me or is the "very high res" sample less detailled than the preview on the map ?

How long does it take? Just want to check if there are cops around before taking out a drone...

This is timely. We are launching a project that needs satellite input. This helps us cost it!

Why would i buy this and not just screenshot google maps which is way higher resolution?

Google Maps in many urban areas is actually aerial imagery. Satellite imagery serves a different use case - often for difficult to access areas where aerial photography is not viable or permitted.

It depends on your use case. I used this to take a picture of my backyard before and after landscaping. Kind of a toy use case.. but I’ve heard of more serious examples in agriculture and construction.

How is this different from planet labs? planet labs actually makes their own satellites.

Ummm what are they doing with the info that they know who is buying these images!?!?!?

And yes, I do realise that I'm just looking at the preview, still...

The fact they charge differently for existing vs new images tells me that they will probably let you know which applies before purchase...

And if that's the case, I think there could be a market for a monitoring/alerting system to detect if anyone else orders imagery of your factory/port.

Wouldn’t this be regulated like encryption if the resolution is too fine?

Every country is different. NOAA regulates this for US based sensors for the commercial sector. More regulation is coming eventually just like every other emerging industry

What are people using these images for? Just curious.

we could talk all day about use cases...trading, agriculture, real estate, insurance, curiosity, reporting, etc etc etc

Oh what has the world come to. This is amazing.

does anyone with expertise know how this resolution compares to Google Maps or other "free" providers?

They have resolution samples here https://app.skyfi.com/sample-preview .

Resolution will be worse.

Age ought to be better unless you got very lucky that a plane just flew over and the footage was uploaded very fast afterwards.

The "high resolution" 50cm option wasn't even available in my area of the UK. Lame.

This is our first entry to the market, agree it's not ideal you can't get it but working on amping up supply as quick as we can.

Some preview images are of very low resolution, anywhere I can find an example of the result of a high resolution one?

Also, what is the main target audience of this service?

This is a horrendous privacy violation. Being able to purchase high resolution, newly-created images of arbitrary locations is way over the line of an acceptable offering. This will be used to stalk and harass individuals. There's no mention on their website of how they plan to prevent this type of intrusive surveillance either.

Loads of people complain about the NSA's bulk data collection for the purposes of national security, but we barely see any opposition to bulk aerial surveillance imaging such as this, despite it being even more of a privacy breach due lack of safeguards around who can obtain and exploit such data.

That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't complain about services that launch even more of such ships.

This offering is a stalker's delight. The only thing that would make it worse is if they paid people to turn up to a specified location and take photos, like some sort of Uber for creeps.

At minimum, they should have a form where you can opt out of having your home included in this sold imagery. Better would be to notify all property owners and dwellers within a photographed region that the imagery has been purchased, with an option to opt-out. Best of all would be if everyone being photographed had to opt-in before a sale could be made. That would be a company taking privacy seriously rather than trying to profit from breaching it in bulk.

We also have private investigators walking by the front of your house. This is no different.

You've always been able to hire a pilot to take photos from a small plane, for much of the populated earth.

This isn't any different. Just cheaper and easier.

Nobody has any expectation of privacy from the sky, any more than they do from a public street.

Also, I'm not sure taking a single photo at some arbitrary time over the next few days is particularly useful or cost-effective for "stalking".

That was problematic too. Making such surveillance imagery even more easily obtainable is even worse, especially considering the power of gathering multiple sets of data and correlating the findings. It doesn't have to be a single photo, a stalker could purchase multiple photos of multiple locations of interest on a regular basis.

In terms of potential harm, it's like the difference between a handgun and nuclear bomb.

I don't really see how this is such a serious problem. Again, there isn't a right to privacy from the air.

And if someone wants to stalk you, it's far more cost-effective to hire someone to follow you physically. This doesn't change that. And just to be clear, I'm obviously not condoning stalking. Just saying this is a pretty bad tool for it.

So I don't see anything "nuclear" about this whatsoever.

(Also to be clear, the highest resolution available is half-meter. All you can do is basically figure out whether a car is present somewhere and its approximate color maybe. It's hard to establish the presence of a human at all, and you certainly can't tell who they are or read a license plate or anything even close to that.)

Hello,SkyFI founder and majority share holder. Satellite imagery as a stalking tool is more science fiction/ fantasy for a number of reasons.

1. Resolution just isn't sharp enough and never will be to discern individual persons identity.

2. Latency, it takes time to upload an order the order. Satellite has to pass iber a groundstation to receive command,then be in pistion to take photo then pass iver ground station to download. Then go to post processing, QC then delivery. While latency may improve ot would ne uneconomic and practically useless due to 1. 3. Clouds. Unfotunately clouds appear and would make persistent surveillance even if you had the resolution(you don't) unlikely.

It's much easier and cheaper and infinitely more effective to use tags,ad tech on mobile phones and plain on PI for that type of stalking.

I hope this clarifies your concerns

Others have pointed out that this is already possible. This offering seems to be more targeted at small scale or personal use, which I think is the least concerning.

Google street view already exists as well, and I can, for not much more than this service costs, go pretty much anywhere within a few thousand km and look at something.

What we should be concerned about is large scale corporate uses of this data, which have been going on for years. For example, insurance companies or municipalities using satellite images to see if you make any changes to your property. Or license plate scanners for that matter.

Without dwelling on it, governments and companies want to apply our new ability to record everything always to a system of laws that were written when you couldn't. Laws and rules are flexible in how and when they are enforced for a reason, and any benefit from new surveillance accrues only to the government or company.

I don't think you deserve the downvotes. I think it is obvious that just like this (or its future iterations: higher resolutions, shorter delivery times) could enable many valid and useful applications, it can also be used in many undesirable ways. At some moment that will have to be addressed

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