so ive been flying for about two years now mostly just for fun, got my part 107 last spring and honestly i think im ready to start taking on some paid work. a few people in my area have already asked me about real estate shots and one guy wants footage of his construction site every couple weeks which sounds like steady money.

but i have no idea how to actually set this up as a business. do i need an LLC right away or can i just start invoicing people as a sole proprietor? and the insurance thing is confusing me ? i see hull and liability thrown around everywhere but i dont know what i actually need before i take a single paying job. also pricing. i have zero idea what to charge. i dont want to lowball and undercut other pilots but i also dont want to scare off my first clients.

any advice from people who went through this would be really helpful, even just knowing what order to do things in would be a start

congrats on taking the leap, it's honestly not as complicated as it feels right now. the order i'd do it in is ? get liability insurance first, before anything else. like before you take a single dollar. Skywatch and Verifly both do pay-per-day policies which is fine when youre starting out, but if you're going to have regular clients like that construction gig you mentioned you'll want an annual policy pretty quick, usually around 1-1.5 million in liability coverage is what most commercial clients expect to see on a COI.

LLC vs sole prop depends on your state and how much risk you want to carry personally. a lot of people start as sole prop just to get moving and then form an LLC once the money is actually coming in. the liability protection matters more once you have real assets to protect. for pricing, real estate around here goes anywhere from $150 for a basic package to $400+ if youre doing twilight shots and video, construction progress is usually billed monthly or per visit and you can charge more because its ongoing. dont be afraid to charge what your time is worth, the clients lowballing you aren't worth having anyway

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this for what its worth but i spent like a whole weekend going down this rabbit hole a few months ago. one thing that helped me was just looking up what other drone operators in my city were charging ? a lot of them have pricing pages on their websites. not to copy them exactly but just to get a feel for the range. also for the legal stuff i found a couple youtube channels run by actual drone business owners that were way more useful than anything i found googling it, the generic small business advice doesnt really account for the FAA side of things