BarnardHQ · 2026-05-05

How to Scope and Price a Drone Subcontract Without Leaving Money on the Table

The email shows up on a Tuesday afternoon. A production company in Portland needs aerial footage for a commercial shoot in the Willamette Valley. They have a budget. They want your rate. They need a reply by end of day.

If you quote too high, you lose it to the next operator. If you quote too low, you spend two days on a job that earns you $180 after fuel and wear. Either way, you lose — and the loss compounds because you've now established a pricing precedent with that client.

Subcontracting is where a lot of Part 107 operators quietly bleed money. Not from bad flying. From bad paperwork, fuzzy scopes, and quoting on vibes instead of structure.

Here's how I approach it.

---

The Scope Problem Is Always the Money Problem

Before you can price a subcontract, you need a written scope. Not a verbal brief. Not a text thread. A written scope that specifies what you are delivering, in what format, under what conditions, by what date.

This sounds obvious until you're standing in a muddy field in Junction City at 7 AM and the client says "we also need stills" and you quoted video only.

Every subcontract scope should answer five questions before a dollar amount gets assigned:

1. What is the deliverable?

Raw footage, edited video, orthomosaic map, thermal report, inspection photo set with annotations — these are all different products that require different time and different software. "Drone footage" is not a deliverable. Forty-five minutes of 5.4K H.265 color-graded LOG footage exported in DaVinci Resolve as a 1080p ProRes file is a deliverable. Specify format, resolution, color profile, and delivery method.

2. How many locations and how much area?

A single residential rooftop inspection outside Eugene takes roughly 35 minutes of flight time on the M30T. A 12-acre commercial property with four buildings and a parking structure takes two and a half hours. The platform doesn't care — it charges the same per battery cycle either way. The difference is your time, your batteries, your post-processing.

If the client says "just a quick flyover" and you don't ask acreage, building count, and required altitude, you're guessing. Guess wrong twice and you've funded someone else's business.

3. What are the airspace and access constraints?

Flight operations near KEUG (Mahlon Sweet Field, Eugene) require LAANC authorization, which is free and fast — but it's a step that adds time and limits your operational altitude. A job that looks identical on paper to a rural property shoot can require 45 minutes of pre-mission planning and a ceiling of 100 feet AGL instead of 400.

Private property access is a separate line item in your head. If you're landing on a client's site, that's one thing. If you're launching from a public park across a highway to cover an adjacent commercial lot, that's a different conversation, possibly involving a park permit, and definitely involving more pre-mission time.

4. What are the weather contingencies?

In the Pacific Northwest, this question answers itself. Late spring in the Willamette Valley means 54°F and overcast at 85% humidity is a perfectly normal Tuesday morning. The M30T flies in it fine. Most consumer-grade gear doesn't.

But "weather hold" needs to be in your contract language. If the shoot reschedules because the director wants golden hour and you showed up for a 6 AM call that got cancelled at 5:45 AM, you should be billing a half-day rate at minimum. If you don't have a cancellation clause in your subcontract, that call cost you three battery charges and two hours of sleep for zero revenue.

5. Who owns the footage?

This is the clause that most operators skip and later regret. If you shoot raw footage and hand it to a production company, and they use 45 seconds of your thermal sequence in a national broadcast campaign — did your contract cover that use? Or did you just sell unlimited rights for $400?

Default to licensing language, not ownership transfer, unless the client specifically needs full buyout and your price reflects it.

---

Building a Rate Structure That Doesn't Require Renegotiation Every Time

I've seen operators quote a flat "day rate" without defining what a day means. Eight hours of flight? Eight hours of being on-site? Eight hours from departure from Eugene to return? These are not the same number.

Here's the structure I use:

Base Rate Components

**Flight time rate.** This is your per-hour operational charge — drone in the air, operator on the sticks. For commercial subcontract work in Oregon, rates vary from $150/hour on the low end (consumer-platform operators trying to win work) to $350+/hour for specialized platforms (thermal, mapping, inspection). If you're flying an M30T with thermal and delivering annotated outputs, you're not competing with the guy in the same market who flies a Mini and shoots JPEGs.

**Travel and mobilization.** I charge from Eugene. If the job is in Springfield, that's fifteen minutes and doesn't factor. If the job is in Southern Oregon or the Coast Range — two hours each way, remote terrain, possible generator deployment — that's not a favor. It's a line item. $0.67/mile is the current IRS standard; use that as a floor or build a flat mobilization fee into jobs outside a 30-mile radius.

**Post-processing time.** This is the invisible labor that blows most drone quotes. Editing 45 minutes of 5.4K footage, building an orthomosaic in DroneDeploy or Pix4D, writing an annotated inspection report — none of that happens in the air. For inspection work, I typically budget 1.5x to 2x flight time for post-processing. For cinematic work, 2x to 3x depending on deliverable complexity. Quote this as a separate line or build it into a project rate — just don't swallow it.

**Equipment and consumables.** Batteries degrade. Props get replaced. Insurance premiums exist. If you're flying a $10,000 platform and billing $150/hour without factoring in replacement cost, you're renting yourself out at a loss. Figure your platform replacement cost, divide by expected service life in hours, and make sure your rate covers it.

Project Rate vs. Day Rate vs. Deliverable Rate

For short, well-defined jobs — a rooftop inspection, a marketing flyover of a single commercial property — I prefer a **deliverable rate**: here's the job, here's what I produce, here's the price regardless of how long it takes me to execute.

For multi-day shoots or open-ended production support, a **day rate with clearly defined hours** (typically 6 or 8 flight hours, with overtime defined) protects you from scope creep.

For inspection or mapping work billed through a general contractor, sometimes a **per-acre or per-structure** rate makes scope conversation simpler: $X per structure, Y structures, contract total is Z.

Pick the billing structure that removes ambiguity, not the one that sounds most professional.

---

The Subcontract Document Itself

You are not a vendor on a handshake. You are a subcontractor. The document matters.

At minimum, your subcontract agreement needs:

You don't need a lawyer to draft this. You need a template you use every time, reviewed once by an attorney, with project-specific variables filled in per job.

---

What "Leaving Money on the Table" Actually Looks Like

It's not usually one big mistake. It's a pattern of small ones: quoting from memory instead of a rate sheet, skipping the deposit because the client seemed trustworthy, not billing post-processing separately because it felt awkward to explain, doing a second half-day of reshoots for free because the first day had clouds.

That pattern, repeated across ten subcontracts, is the difference between a drone operation that builds toward something and one that stays busy without growing.

The practical step: build a one-page scope template and a one-page rate sheet. Actual numbers, actual deliverable options, actual cancellation terms. Use them on every subcontract without exception. Revise them when you see where they fall short — not before the job, after it.

That's the discipline. Everything else is just flying.

← Back to all posts