So ive been doing mapping work for a couple local farms for about a year now, mostly just orthomosaics and basic elevation models, nothing crazy. Started out with DroneDeploy because it was easy to get into and the automatic processing was nice when i was still figuring things out. But ive been getting more requests for actual deliverables that clients want to open in GIS software and some of the output quality has been bugging me.

Started trialing Pix4Dmapper last month and honestly the control you get over the processing parameters is kind of overwhelming at first but the outputs do seem noticeably sharper, especially on the point clouds. Problem is the subscription cost is just brutal if youre not doing this full time. Like i cant justify $350/month when some months i only do two or three jobs.

Anyone else gone through this same decision? Wondering if i should just stick with DroneDeploy and learn to work within its limitations or if theres a middle ground im not seeing. Also curious if anyone has tried the Pix4D annual plan vs monthly ? does it work out to much less.

Went through almost the exact same thing about two years ago. Ended up landing on Pix4D annual because the per-month cost drops a fair bit and it forces you to actually commit to the work which honestly helped me take it more seriously as a revenue stream. The difference in output quality for point clouds is real, not imagined ? especially if your clients are doing any kind of volumetric calculations or contour work in something like QGIS or Civil 3D.

That said if its just orthos for crop health monitoring and they're viewing it in DroneDeploy's own portal then honestly the platform lock-in isnt the worst thing. Depends what your clients actually need to do with the data. Some of mine just want pretty pictures with an NDVI overlay and for that DroneDeploy is totally fine.

have you looked at WebODM at all? its open source and the outputs are surprisingly decent, i run it on a local machine so theres no subscription and you can tweak the processing options pretty granularly. not as polished as either of those two obviously but for the price its hard to argue with. just takes some setup time upfront.