How to Price and Quote Multi-Site Drone Jobs (The Route-Efficiency Playbook)

A property manager sends you seven retail roofs across two counties and asks for "one price." Quote each one like a standalone trip and there's a chance that you lose the bid. Knock 20% off the whole thing to win it and you work three days for two days' pay.

There's a third answer: price every site at its full fair rate, then hand back (aka 'discount') all or some of the money the route actually saves (i.e. your efficiency becomes a negotiating tool).

What you'll walk away with

• Why flat volume discounts quietly eat your margin
• How to split a pile of addresses into same-day loops and separate shoot days
• The per-site checks that keep a seven-stop job from blowing up on day two
• A route-efficiency credit you can defend line by line
• How to send one estimate and one invoice without confusing the client's calendar

The bulk-quote trap

Multi-site requests come in two flavors.

The first is quoting each address as if you drove there from home and back. Seven sites, seven round trips, seven mobilization fees. The number is honest, but it's not what you're going to do.

The second is the reflex discount. The client says "there's seven of them," you say "20% off," and you've just donated a day. Don't do that; there's a smarter way. A volume discount picked out of the air has no relationship to what batching the work actually saves you. Sometimes it's generous. Sometimes it's less than you saved and you left money behind. Either way you can't explain it, and a number you can't explain is a number the client will push on.

What actually changes when you batch sites is drive time and mobilization — not flight time, not processing, not the deliverable. Ten roofs still take ten roofs' worth of flying and editing. So the discount should come out of the drive, and nowhere else.

Step one: cluster before you quote

Before a price exists, sort the addresses into driving clusters. Hee hee.. I put this little nugget into the calculator and wow, it's so cool!

Drop every pin on a map. Look for groups that sit inside 20 or 30 minutes of each other. Those are your day-loops. Sites that sit an hour and a half off on their own either get their own day or get paired with the next-closest thing.

Then reality-check the count per day. A half-hour roof scan is not a half-hour job — it's drive, park, set up, brief the site contact, fly, pack, and drive. Four of those with connector legs is a full day. Six is a day that ends in the dark, and the last two get sloppy.

Batches also have to respect daylight and the weather window. Two clear days beat three marginal ones. If the cluster spreads far enough that you're staging out of a hotel, the lodging-versus-commuting math is its own decision — that's Hub-and-Spoke: When Multi-Day Staging Beats Driving Home .

Step two: treat every pin as its own mission

This is where multi-site jobs can go wrong. One airspace check on the first address does not cover the other six.

Per site, before the estimate goes out:

• Airspace. Each address gets its own look. One roof sits in Class G, the next one is under a Class D shelf and needs a LAANC authorization (that's the FAA's automated airspace approval system), which usually comes back in under a minute (FAA UAS Data Exchange). Sites inside controlled airspace with a zero-foot grid ceiling need a manual FAA authorization instead, and that takes weeks — you want to know that before you commit to a Thursday.
• Weather, per day. A seven-site job spanning two weeks has two forecasts, not one. Only the days inside the forecast horizon get a real answer; the rest get a contingency line in the estimate.
• Access and contacts. Gate codes, property manager phone numbers, tenant notification, whether the lot is full at 9am. One locked gate stalls the whole loop behind it.
• Restrictions. Temporary flight restrictions and stadium or event conflicts are date-specific, so they get checked against the assigned day, not against today.

Write the answers down against each address. On shoot day you're driving, not researching.

Step three: price the sites, then credit the route

Now the math. Two numbers, kept separate.

1. Site cost — flight time, setup, processing, deliverables, and equipment for each location, priced exactly the way you'd price it as a standalone job. This number does not get discounted for volume.
2. Route cost — the actual miles and drive hours for the batched itinerary: home to the first site, the connector legs, last site home. Not seven round trips.

The credit is the gap between what standalone trips would have cost in drive and what the batched route actually costs.

• Standalone drive cost = sum of each site's round-trip miles × your cost per mile, plus each trip's drive hours × your hourly rate
• Batched drive cost = the routed itinerary's miles × cost per mile, plus its drive hours × your hourly rate
• Route-efficiency credit = standalone drive cost − batched drive cost

For mileage, the 2026 IRS standard business mileage rate is $0.725 per mile — usable as a cost stand-in if you haven't built your own per-mile number yet.

Say seven roofs would run 640 miles as separate trips and 190 miles as two batched days. That's 450 miles avoided, about $326 at the standard rate, plus roughly seven hours of windshield time you're not eating. Credit some portion of it and the client sees a real discount with a real reason under it. Your flight and processing rate never moved.

Cap it. The credit comes out of avoided drive, so it can't exceed avoided drive. That's the whole guardrail.

Step four: one estimate, one invoice, separate shoot days

The paperwork should be simple for the client and specific for you.

• One estimate listing every address with its assigned date, one aggregated on-site line, travel for the routed itinerary, and the route-efficiency credit as its own line called what it is: a discount.
• One invoice at the end, matching the estimate, so accounts payable processes one document.
• Separate calendar events — one per shoot day, with that day's addresses and contacts on it. A single all-day block spanning two weeks helps nobody.
• A weather contingency clause naming what happens if a day gets scrubbed: reschedule at no charge, or a stated remobilization fee if the client cancels inside 24 hours.

Then keep the rationale internal. The client sees "Discount." They don't need your per-mile cost basis, and volunteering it invites a negotiation about your fuel receipts. Keep your costs yours and let the client believe they are getting a great deal from you.. that's a win-win and keeps clients coming back.

Pitfalls

• Discounting flight time. Seven roofs is seven roofs of flying. The batch saves driving, not airtime.
• Quoting before the site list is final. Sites get added after the price is agreed. Put the per-site rate in the estimate so additions have an obvious number.
• Assuming one airspace answer covers all sites. It doesn't, and finding out on site costs you the day.
• Packing the days too tight. The last site of an overstuffed day is the one that gets reflown.
• Skipping the mileage log on multi-day work. Every leg, including the connectors, is deductible. See The Mileage Deduction .

How Rotor Rate handles it

Add every address to a single mission and Rotor Rate orders the stops into the shortest workable route, assigns them across shoot days, and rolls travel time, miles, and on-site hours into one set of numbers. Each site keeps its own airspace check, weather look, and date.

The route-efficiency credit is calculated from the miles and hours the batching actually avoids and capped there, so the discount on the client's estimate is defensible line by line while your fair rate stays intact. The estimate, the PDF, the emailed quote, and the invoice all carry the same site list and the same total, and each shoot day gets its own calendar invite.

The free services pricing calculator covers single-site jobs end to end. A paid Rotor Rate plan adds multi-site routing, per-site research, the efficiency credit, and the estimate-to-invoice handoff.

Sources & further reading

• FAA UAS Data Exchange (LAANC) — how near-real-time airspace authorizations work
• FAA Part 107 Airspace Authorizations — when a manual authorization is required instead
• IRS Standard Mileage Rates — official annual business rate
• IRS Publication 463 — Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses — travel deduction rules for multi-day work
• Rotor Rate guides: Hub-and-Spoke Staging · Linking Drone Missions Into Chains · Drive Time, Mileage, and Margin

Price the sites. Route the drive. Give back only what the route saved, and say so on the estimate.