bit of an unusual situation and not sure where else to ask. a mid-size construction company reached out to me after seeing some of my work on instagram and they want to bring me on as basically their in-house drone guy. doing site documentation, progress photos, some basic photogrammetry for their project managers. its not a full time position exactly, more like a contractor retainer, they want 2-3 days a week guaranteed.

they offered a day rate and i honestly dont know if its reasonable or if im underselling myself or if theyre lowballing me. the number they threw out was $450 a day. i have my 107, two years experience, own all my gear which is an air 3 and an older mavic 2 pro i keep as a backup.

is that a normal rate for this kind of arrangement? the consistency sounds really appealing compared to chasing one-off clients but i also dont want to lock myself into something and find out six months later i coulda been charging way more

$450 a day for a retainer arrangement where they're guaranteeing you 2-3 days a week is... not bad but not great either. depends on your area and cost of living obviously but the consistency factor has real value that people underestimate. hunting for clients is exhausting and eats up way more time than people think.

that said, a couple things id think about - are you providing deliverables same day or is there post processing time involved that eats into that rate. photogrammetry especially can take hours of processing time that $450 doesnt feel like it covers if youre also expected to produce polished outputs. also make sure you nail down who owns the data, construction companies sometimes get weird about that stuff and you want it in writing. and your gear insurance situation needs to be solid if youre doing regular commercial work, if something goes wrong on their site you want to be covered properly

honestly that rate sounds decent to me for guaranteed work but im probably not the best person to ask, i've only done event stuff and a bit of real estate so construction pipeline work is a diffrent world. one thing though - if they're using you for photogrammetry are they expecting you to also handle the software side, like processing in Pix4D or DroneDeploy or whatever? because thats a whole additional skill set and time commitment that should probably factor into what you charge them