been doing residential and light commercial roof inspections for about 8 months now, mostly storm damage claims. got my 107 sorted and ive got a mavic 3 enterprise which does fine for most jobs but im running into a consistent problem with what i hand off to the adjusters.

some of them want orthomosaic maps, some want raw footage, some want a pdf report with annotated photos and honestly im spending more time on the deliverable side than the actual flying. using drone deploy right now for the mapping stuff but the cost is starting to hurt and i dont know if every residential job actually needs a full ortho or if thats overkill.

also had a situation last week where the adjuster disputed one of my damage callouts because the image wasnt sharp enough - it was a cracked ridge cap maybe 40ft up and i thought the photo was fine but apparently not. do i need to be flying closer, is this a focal length thing, or do i just need to crank the manual settings more carefully on overcast days.

feels like im still figuring out the business side of this faster than the technical side which is kind of backwards from where i thought id be at this point.

the deliverable inconsistency from adjusters is just the reality of this market right now, its genuinely all over the place and it probably wont standardize for a while. what i did was just build two or three tiers - basic annotated photo report, full ortho with measurements, and a video walkaround - and let the client pick upfront. sounds obvious but it stopped me from gold plating every job and also set expectations before i showed up.

for the image sharpness issue on overcast days, youre probably dealing with the drone compensating with a slower shutter and getting motion blur, even small amounts kill the crispness on detail shots. lock your shutter at 1/1000 minimum for static hover shots and bump ISO if you have to, noise is easier to work with than blur. also fly closer, the mavic 3e sensor is good but physics is physics and 40ft of air on an overcast day isnt doing you any favors. if the adjuster needs to see ridge cap cracking specifically, get to like 15ft directly above or a slight angle and take a burst.

drone deploy costs are kind of brutal for low margin residential work tbh. have you looked at webodm? open source, you run it locally or on a cheap VPS and the outputs are honestly comparable for flat roofs. learning curve is there but its not terrible. for anything that needs proper measurements and area calculations it does the job. i switched from a paid platform about a year ago and havent looked back for the inspection side of things, still use the paid stuff for the bigger commercial jobs where the client is paying for that polish.