so ive been doing monthly progress shots for a mid-size commercial construction site, about 8 acres, and my current workflow is kind of a mess. been using dronedeploy for the automated flight plans which honestly works fine, but then the client wants deliverables that dronedeploy's basic tier doesnt really handle well and i keep exporting to other tools which adds like 2 hours to every project.

thinking about switching to pix4d or at least adding it into the workflow but the licensing cost is kind of brutal if youre not doing this full time. does anyone actually use pix4dmapper for construction specifically or is it overkill for just orthomosaic and elevation model outputs. the site manager keeps asking for volume calculations on the stockpiles too which is where i feel like dronedeploy's free tier just falls apart.

using a mavic 3 enterprise btw, 80% overlap on everything, flying at about 120m. models look decent but i feel like im leaving accuracy on the table somewhere.

been on pix4d for about three years now doing exactly this kind of work and yeah the cost stings but once youre doing regular site work it pays for itself pretty fast. the stockpile volume stuff is way better in pix4d in my experience, you can define the base surface manually which matters a lot when your pile is sitting on uneven ground. dronedeploy's volume calc always felt like a black box to me, like i never totally trusted what it was spitting out.

one thing though - if your client just needs a nice map and some basic measurements dronedeploy is honestly fine and easier to hand off a shareable link. pix4d's annotation and sharing stuff has gotten better but its still more of a processing tool than a client presentation tool if that makes sense. i actually use both depending on what the deliverable is, which i know sounds annoying but it works.

have you looked at metashape at all? way cheaper than pix4d and the output quality is comparable or better in some cases. theres a bit of a learning curve but for volume calcs and orthos its solid. just throwing it out there since everyone always jumps straight to pix4d vs dronedeploy and kind of ignores it