Connecting DataDelivery™ to DroneCRM

DroneCRM and DataDelivery™

We built DroneCRM for the office side of a drone business: quotes, booking, airspace and weather checks, client email and invoices. It doesn't process imagery, and we have no plans to make it.

That part is what DataDelivery is for. NDS Processing turns your photos into georeferenced orthomosaics and 3D point clouds, and your client looks at them in a browser: the orthomosaic on a map, the point cloud in a 3D viewer, and any photos, video and 360° panoramas from the flight. They can measure, leave notes and put two flight dates side by side. NDS has a longer write-up on client portals for drone data.

How it works

1. The owner connects your DataDelivery account in Settings, under Getting paid, by signing in on NDS's page. A free DataDelivery pilot account is fine. You can paste an API key instead if you'd rather.
2. In the same place, set what you charge per DataDelivery job. It has to be at least $25, since that's NDS's charge, and the form shows you the split.
3. Add DataDelivery™ hosting to the quote or invoice for the job.
4. When the client pays, we create the job in your DataDelivery account with the address, the outline you drew, the flight time, the pilot and your notes.
5. Photos and video you add to the job in DroneCRM are sent to DataDelivery. If NDS turns a file down, the job tells you which one and why.
6. Open files on the job brings up DataDelivery's files view right there. You can upload, sort, annotate, measure, download or start a processing run.
7. Once the files are done, the client's delivery link lands on the job and on the client's page, and the job moves to Delivered. Tower drafts the email to the client for you to look over and send.

Sharing, reports, map layers and your branding are still set up in DataDelivery itself. NDS covers their end on their DroneCRM integration page.

What it costs

NDS charges $25 for each DataDelivery job you sell through DroneCRM. You decide what the client pays and keep the difference. If they pay online, the $25 is taken out of that payment and the rest goes to your Stripe account. If they pay by check, we add the $25 to your next DroneCRM bill. We don't take a cut on top.

Each of those jobs comes with 50 GB of storage, and you don't need a DataDelivery subscription for them. If you already have a paid DataDelivery plan that covers the job, there's no $25 at all. NDS decides what your plan covers, and anything it doesn't goes through at $25.

Here's a made-up example. Bluebonnet Aerial flies a 14-acre build site for Brushy Creek Builders once a month and charges $45 for DataDelivery hosting each time. NDS gets $25, and Bluebonnet keeps $20 on top of what it charges for the flight.

Who it's for

• Construction progress. A builder who wants their site flown every month can follow along in a construction progress portal instead of digging through a shared folder. Book the repeats in DroneCRM and add hosting to each one.
• Stockpiles. Quote by the acre from the outline, then get stockpile volume estimates from the elevation model in DataDelivery.
• Mapping without your own processing software. NDS Processing builds the map and point cloud for you. Our page for mapping and construction has more on quoting those jobs.
• Delivery under your own name. DataDelivery's Basic plan and up puts your branding on the portal, and Premium adds your own domain. NDS explains it on its white-label drone portal page.

Worth knowing

• You don't have to use it. Any job in DroneCRM can take a delivery link from Dropbox, Google Drive or wherever you keep your files.
• DroneCRM never does the processing itself. That all happens at NDS.
• NDS is clear that its measurements and volumes are estimates, not surveyed quantities, so don't sell them as a survey.
• The delivery link we get back is on DataDelivery's own address, even if you've set up a custom domain there.

Still working out how to get data to clients? NDS's guide on how to deliver drone data to clients is a good place to start.