so ive been doing real estate aerials for about 8 months now and honestly I still have no idea if my pricing makes any sense. right now im charging $150 for a basic exterior package, maybe 8-10 edited stills, and sometimes I throw in a short orbit video clip if the property is nice enough. agents seem happy but I keep hearing people online say they charge way more and I dont know if im just in a cheaper market or actually leaving money on the table.

the thing is I dont want to raise prices and lose the 3-4 agents who actually book me consistently. they refer me to other agents too so its like I dont want to rock the boat. but then I had a conversation with another pilot at a meetup last month and he was charging $275 minimum just for stills, no video, and said he had more work than he could handle. same metro area as me roughly.

is there some way to figure out what the actual going rate is in your market without just guessing? or do you just raise prices slowly and see what happens

yeah $150 for a full edited package is pretty low, not gonna lie. ive been doing this for about 4 years and the way I figured out pricing in my area was just calling around pretending to be an agent looking for drone photos. felt a little weird but you get real numbers fast. most of the legit operators in my city were between $200-350 depending on square footage and whether video was included.

the slow raise thing actually works though. I went from $175 to $225 over about 6 months by just bumping new clients and grandfathering my regulars for a while. then eventually the regulars either came up to market rate or dropped off, and honestly the ones who dropped off were usually the most annoying clients anyway so it kind of worked out. the agents who value your work will stick around. the ones who only booked you because you were cheap probably werent great clients to begin with.

im kind of in the same boat as you and dont have a great answer but one thing that helped me a little was packaging stuff differently. like instead of just raising my base price I added a "premium" package with the video clip included and priced that higher, so my basic stills package looked like the affordable option. some agents just pick the middle tier anyway. not sure if thats sustainable long term but it got me a few more dollars per job without the awkward conversation about raising rates