ok so a small construction company reached out wanting monthly progress shots of a site they're building out, like documentation of the whole project over probably 8 months. its not glamorous work but its consistent which is exactly what i wanted when i started doing this commercially. problem is i quoted them kind of off the top of my head and now im wondering if i way undercut myself.

i said $200 a visit, theyre about 25 minutes from me, and each shoot is probably an hour of flying then i'd say another hour and a half to two hours of editing and delivering the files. i have my part 107, im insured, got my LLC set up last year. the job itself sounds straightforward, no complex airspace or anything. am i way off or is that reasonable for this kind of thing? i dont want to go back and change the number but also i feel like i calculated it wrong

honestly $200 for construction documentation isn't terrible for starting out but yeah you're probably a little light once you factor everything in. drive time alone is eating into your margin and construction sites can surprise you ? wind, dust on the lens, having to reshoot angles because of equipment placement, it adds up. i do similar work and i charge $275-300 minimum for anything under 2 hours on site, and that doesn't include significant editing. if its just delivering raw plus maybe a few organized folders of stills i can live with the lower end but if theyre expecting polished deliverables every month then you need to revisit that number before month two.

also make sure your contract spells out exactly what you're delivering, file format, turnaround time, how many revision requests are included, all of that. construction clients especially have a tendency to start adding on requests once they see what you can do.

whats your insurance situation for going onto an active construction site? some of those places require higher liability limits than a standard drone policy covers, like $1M or $2M per occurrence. might be worth confirming with them before you show up the first time, i had a client spring that on me and it was a whole thing