The Blueprint · Part 2 of 4 · 10 min read
Your number: what you must charge to not lose money
Most new operators price the same way: look at what some guy in a Facebook group charges, shave a bit because you're new, and hope. That's not a price — it's a guess with a discount taped to it. Here's how to find the number under the number: the point where a job stops costing you money, so you can quote above it on purpose.
Every number in this series can be worked out in Rotor Rate — free, no signup.
A rate is not a price, and neither one is profit
Three different things get called 'my rate,' and mixing them up is how people fly a full year and end up flat. Your cost floor is what the job takes out of your pocket — batteries, fuel, software, the slice of your insurance and gear this job used up. Your price is what the client pays. Profit is the gap, minus the hours you didn't bill. The trap is that flying is the short part. A $350 real-estate shoot is 40 minutes on site and often two hours of driving, editing, uploading, and emailing. Price the job, not the flight.
Add up the boring costs first
Sit down once and list everything the business eats in a year, whether a client is watching or not. Gear wears out on a schedule — a drone you expect to replace in three years is costing you a third of its price every year, and batteries go faster than that. Software subscriptions, insurance, the website, the phone, cloud storage, recurrent training — it all shows up whether you fly or not. Divide that annual total by the number of jobs you realistically expect, and you've got the overhead each job has to carry before you've made a dime.
| Bucket | Examples | How to spread it |
|---|---|---|
| Aircraft & payload | Drone, spare batteries, props, cases | Purchase price ÷ expected years of use |
| Recurring overhead | Insurance, software, phone, website, storage | Annual total ÷ jobs per year |
| Per-job consumables | Fuel, tolls, parking, memory cards, delivery | Actual, per job |
| Your time | Flight, travel, editing, admin, driving to nowhere | Hourly target × realistic hours |
| Taxes | Self-employment + income tax | Set aside a percentage of every payment (Part 4) |
Work out the totals
- SBA — Calculate your startup costs — Separates one-time spend from recurring overhead
- SCORE — free break-even worksheet — Spreadsheet you can fill in tonight
- What your hour is worth locally (BLS wage data) — Pick the latest May OEWS tables, then search occupation 27-4021 Photographers
Drive time is a cost, and mileage is real money
The easiest way for a new operator to lose money is a cheap job an hour away. Fuel is the obvious part. The invisible part is wear, depreciation, and the two hours of your life the client didn't pay for. The IRS standard mileage rate exists precisely because driving costs more than gas — for 2026 it's $0.725 per business mile, which is both what you can deduct and a fair yardstick for what a round trip really costs. Either build travel into the quote as a flat trip fee, or set a radius where the price steps up. Log the miles either way — in Part 4 that log turns into a deduction.
Price the drive properly
- IRS — current standard mileage rate — Confirm the rate for your tax year
- Download the free mileage log template — Spreadsheet with the columns the IRS expects
- Measure the round trip — Door-to-door miles, both ways, before you quote
Now do it in the calculator instead of a napkin
Rotor Rate exists so this doesn't turn into a spreadsheet you maintain badly. Enter the job — service type, site, duration, deliverables — plus your gear, your overhead, and the drive, and you get two things a napkin can't give you: a defensible price with a market benchmark next to it, and your actual profit after everything above. Change one input and watch the margin move. That's the whole education. Run three jobs you're actually considering and you'll never quote blind again.
Your first ten minutes in the calculator
- 1
Pick the service line
Real-estate photo, mapping, inspection — presets carry sensible defaults you can override.
Open the calculator - 2
Enter the honest time
Include travel and editing, not just flight time. Optimism here is the main source of bad prices.
- 3
Add gear and overhead
So each job carries its share of the things you already pay for.
- 4
Add the drive
Round-trip miles; the mileage rate does the rest.
- 5
Read the profit line, not just the price
If profit is thin, raise the price or shrink the scope — those are the only two levers.
- 6
Check your number against the market
- Pricing guides by service — Typical ranges by job type
- Pricing guides by state — What operators near you charge
Hourly, flat, or per-unit — pick per job, not for life
Flat rates fit predictable work with clear deliverables — a house, a roof, a 20-acre site — and they reward you for getting fast. Hourly fits open-ended work where the scope can wander: film sets, long inspections, anything where the client says 'and while you're up there.' Per-unit pricing (per acre, per tower, per panel) is how commercial buyers like to compare vendors, and it scales cleanly. Most operators end up using all three. What matters is that whatever you quote, the floor under it is the same number you just calculated.
Set a floor and write it down
Last step, and it's the one that protects you in every negotiation for the next five years: pick the number below which you say no, and know why it's that number. Not a gut feeling — an arithmetic result. When a client pushes back, you're not defending your ego. You're reporting a fact: below this, the job costs me money. Operators with a written floor discount less, and when they do discount, they trade something for it — turnaround, deliverables, scheduling — instead of just shrinking the invoice.
Put the floor into practice
- Open the Rotor Rate calculator — Enter your costs and see the break-even price for a real job
- How to price drone services — The full framework for turning your floor into a quote
Before you move on to Part 3
- Annual overhead totalled and entered as recurring costs.
- Gear replacement horizon decided, so depreciation is priced in.
- A travel policy: flat trip fee or a radius where the price steps up.
- Three real jobs run through the calculator, profit line read each time.
- A written floor — the number below which you say no.
Sources & further reading
Rules change. These are the primary sources behind this part — check them against your own state and tax year before you act.
- IRS — Standard mileage rates — Official per-mile business rate by tax year.
- IRS Publication 334 — Tax Guide for Small Business — How business income and expenses are defined for a sole proprietor or single-member LLC.
- SBA — Calculate your startup costs — Framework for separating one-time costs from recurring overhead.
- SCORE — Financial projection and break-even templates — Free break-even worksheets from the SBA's resource partner.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Photographers wage data (SOC 27-4021) — Regional wage medians as a sanity check on what your hour is worth.