You’ve made it so far! This article is going to focus on drone business software and app setups that you will need to succeed. I’ll start off with the basics that will help you run your business and then move on to the drone related apps that I’ve used or highly recommend. It may seem like there are a lot of non-drone related pieces and that’s pretty accurate. This is because running a successful drone business requires a lot more than just drone business software.
Disclaimer: Okay guys, here’s my disclaimer. This article has affiliate links in it but using them costs you nothing. I only recommend products and services that I truly believe in and I have found to be the best drone business software for my businesses. If I’ve provided you with any value in this blog, this is a great (free) way for you to show your support. If you have any questions, here’s a link to my full disclosure.
Administrative Services
Bluehost – Web Hosting
If you’re looking to start a drone business, you will need a website. Our website, along with our Google My Business page, bring in nearly all of our leads for my drone services company, so your website should be a priority. Bluehost is the service that I use on my website and readers of my blog get a discount on Bluehost services, by using my affilliate link. You can get started hosting your website for $3.95 a month and this even comes with the purchase of your domain name and an SSL certificate. Woot!
I’m not a web design guy and I do not know how to code, but I’ve been able to get started here in part because Bluehost makes it really easy to install WordPress on your domain once you’ve purchased a plan. It is basically a one click install and you are ready to begin creating your website. Bluehost also makes it really easy to add G-Suite (which I talked about above) to your domain.
Lastly, if you ever need to upgrade your plan, because you create another website or your traffic increases, your Bluehost account can easily upgrade as you expand. Sign up for your Bluehost account here.
G Suite – E-mail and Storage
This one is pretty obvious, but G Suite has a ton of applications beyond just e-mail and basic storage that a lot of people really don’t know about or use to their fullest potential. The first 14 days are free, but I can’t imagine you’d want to stop using it after the free trial. Here’s the link to sign up.
Additionally, if you shoot me a quick e-mail, I can provide you with a promo code that’s good for 20% off of your service for the first year. Woot! Here’s a link to my e-mail address.
E-mail from your domain
The most obvious feature here is the easy access and use of e-mail that is connected to your domain. Don’t use your g-mail or hotmail address to communicate with clients. Just don’t. Send and receive e-mails from your domain name. It’s pretty easy to set up and this small change adds a level of professionalism that is worth the small monthly cost. Aside from that G-Mail tends to be pretty easy to search, you can use it with basically any e-mail client and you now have the ability to snooze e-mails, which I’ve found is really nice when I want to follow up with someone that never responds.
Google Drive
The Basic plan includes 30 GB of storage. And while you can quickly chew through this if you’re adding video and pictures (trust me here), the Business plan comes with unlimited storage. One caveat to the “unlimited” plan is that if you have fewer than 5 users on your G Suite account, you only get 1 TB per user. Even if it’s just you at first though, a terabyte should last you a little while, especially if you use Google Drive along with an external hard drive.
If you’d rather not have the recurring fee (which honestly is pretty inexpensive for what you get), or you don’t have 5 users to get truly unlimited on Google’s Business plan, you could always just go for a portable external hard drive like this Toshiba and transfer only files you need to share onto Google Drive. Or for less than $100 bucks, you could go with the Western Digital My Passport. This is what we use with my drone services company. Very portable and easy to use.
To be clear though, we use G Suite Business and then keep a portable hard drive for backups while we are on the road.
And if you’d rather have the speed and reliability of a solid state hard drive, you can get a 1 TB Western Digital My Passport Go for closer to $200 as well.
Even if you do get the unlimited Google Drive, like I said before, it’s been my experience that we need to keep numerous copies of all of our footage when we’re on the road. The worst case scenario is losing footage because you didn’t back up. Google Drive is great, but uploading our footage takes a lot of time (and data) and isn’t something we can easily do on the road.
Another place I’ve found that Google Drive exceeded my expectations is by allowing us to change the permissions on files and folders. One thing that I use frequently is the ability give a client viewing access to final videos and photographs while not allowing those files to be downloaded. I don’t always do this with clients (especially once we’ve got a good track record). But we had a client from Canada recently and our only contact was via phone and e-mail. When we finished the projects for him, I gave him access to view so that he could take a look at our work before we considered it done. This way, the client has the opportunity to provide feedback and you don’t have to worry about them downloading everything and not paying. Once they pay, you can just change the permissions on the files and you’re good. This feature has been a great solution for my drone services company.
Another reason to subscribe to a cloud storage service is just ease of use. We’ve frequently worked with other drone operators and/or photographers in other parts of the country, and we just have a folder on our Google Drive that we give our contractors access to. When they’re finished with their work, they just drop it into the folder and we’re good. This limits their access to this one folder and allows you the ability to easily find their work. You can also set up Chrome to provide notifications of updates to your Drive so that you know about any new uploads immediately.
Google Docs
This one isn’t nearly as useful for our business as the e-mail and storage, but it’s still really nice. We use this less for client facing reasons and more for tax preparation at the end of the year. It really helps my business partner and I coordinate with each other about mileage and expenses. I can’t tell you what a life saver it is to have access to a spreadsheet that both of us can update at the same time. And when you use it together with a mileage tracker (Like MileIQ below) it saves you a ton of time.
Google Maps
I know, I know, this isn’t technically part of the G Suite, but I couldn’t talk about Google’s services without mentioning one feature in Google Maps. My drone services company had a job not too long ago where we were taking pictures of ground stations and cell towers for a large internet service provider. Some of these sites were straight up in the boonies, others were in the middle of small cities. But we would get these sites in batches, which allowed us to throw all of the addresses into Google Maps and plan a route. What was cool though, was my business partner and I could both work on the route together and then plan our trip, which sometimes took us a few days (the trip, not the planning). Once we had the pins and route saved and shared, we were then easily able to pull it up on google maps and check off each one as we went. To me, the value was saving and organizing the map, not the map itself. Here is a great article on using Google’s My Maps to plan a trip. The article probably goes into more details than you’ll need for our purposes here, but it’s a great article.
Wave Apps – Accounting and Invoicing
With WaveApps, you definitely can’t beat the price. Free. On top of that though, the service is packed with pretty much every feature you could want. There are three reasons I include Freshbooks as an alternative below, but for everything else, I highly recommend Waveapps. We’ve used it at my drone services company for a few years now and I only have a few small complaints about it. I’ll cover my issues with it along with the features we love.
Connects with your bank
First, WaveApps links up to your bank account. We’ve had some issues where our bank stops WaveApps from connecting, but it is usually fixed by a refresh. Once you’re logged in (it also allows single sign-on through your Google account), you can see a dashboard with your company’s cashflow, a peek at the status of your recent invoices as well as profit and loss info. Because of all this, I rarely login to our bank’s website unless I need to cut a check or look into a specific transaction.
Custom invoicing with online payments
You are also able to create invoices and estimates from the dashboard. We set up our invoice a few years ago with our company info and logo and have used the same professional invoice since then without issue. You can create an invoice from the front page, add a customer (or create a new one), and send it out.
The other thing I love about WaveApps is the ability to accept online payments. This is how they are able to make the basic features of the accounting software free. When a client makes an online payment, WaveApps takes 2.9% of the payment plus .30 cents per transaction. This isn’t nothing, especially when you bill a client for a decent sized project. But honestly, using the online payment system has been highly worth it in my opinion because we get paid so much faster.
We recently had a client that we completed two separate projects for. On the first one, they paid by check, which is fine, but can take some time. And it did. We got paid in about 12 days. On the second one, they realized we offered online payment and we got paid the same day. Recognizing that we weren’t hurting for the money and didn’t absolutely need it that day, you may consider this a wasted 2.9% transaction fee. And maybe it was. But I like having the option and it stopped me from having to worry about chasing down the money. The good news is, it’s your choice and you certainly don’t have to activate if you don’t want to. It’s also there if you want it.
Other than the bank connection issue we’ve had, the only other problem I had was connecting the invoice payment to the invoice but I’m assuming this was my lack of understanding of accounting and not a software issue.
Mobile Access
WaveApps does offer mobile access, but I’ve not really used it too much. I’ve seen other people complain that it is broken up into two apps, Invoice by Wave and Receipts by Wave, both of which are available on iPhone and Android. From my experience, while I’m not sure why the services are broken down into two apps, they both seem to work pretty well and integrate with with website. If you must have access to your accounting software through an app, I don’t think this will hold you back.
Freshbooks – Accounting and Invoicing
There are three places where I think Freshbooks might be a better option for you, and I’ll cover them all below.
Mobile Access
Like I mentioned above, WaveApps has their mobile apps broken up by features. Freshbooks does not and this provides for a much smoother user interface. Everything is all in one place. The app even allows you to chat with clients and keeps a log of it in line with invoicing, payments, etc.
E-Commerce
If you plan on selling any sort of e-commerce product on your website, WaveApps sort of lacks in this area as well. Freshbooks has a suite of in-house integrations that would allow you to connect their software with your website’s e-commerce software if you’d like to. With WaveApps, there are no built in integrations and while you can connect it with other services, you have to do so through third party connecting services like Zapier. If you offer some sort of online product or service, Freshbooks wins here.
Time Tracking
Finally, if you do any work on an hourly basis, Freshbooks has a built in time tracking feature. You can set custom hourly rates and connect the timer to a specific project. You can also access the time tracking feature from the app, and you even have the ability to review your team’s time as well.
While you could just get a separate, free app for time tracking, the amount of time and energy you will spend syncing up your hours with each project is easily saved by the convenience of having it all in the Freshbooks app. If you do hourly work (even if its just editing footage), Freshbooks will be the better option for you.
Final Cut Pro X – Video Editing
I use Final Cut Pro X for all over my video editing. For a while, I used Adobe Premiere, but Premiere seemed a lot less intuitive and I got tired of paying the subscription fee for a program I didn’t like. To me, Final Cut Pro X is so much easier to use. I won’t go into details on the features and there are plenty of tutorials out there that can help you learn it.
If you don’t want to get into the editing side of things (which I totally understand), you can always use a services like Fiverr, which allows you to hire a freelancer to do the work for you. If you go this route, just make sure you take a good look at the contractor’s previous work before you hire them. This helps weed out some of the not so great work and really, once you find a great contractor to work with, you can just keep feeding them work as long as you have it. We’ve had a lot of success in hiring video editing professionals on Fiver and it’s not as expensive as you might think.
MileIQ – Mileage Tracking
Just given the nature of drone work, you’re going to need a mileage tracker. I scoured the earth for a free mileage tracker and the best I could come up with were a bunch of apps that gave you a set number of “free” automatically tracked trips each month. Trust me, the “free” amount is just never enough because the app literally tracks every trip you take. They even track my runs, which obviously I can’t count as a business expense. So, I decided it was worth the annual subscription price and I haven’t been disappointed so far.
MileIQ allows you to set up a profile, which includes any number of cars (including setting a primary vehicle). Additionally, you can add Named Locations, which helps cut down on tracking trips that you make often for business. While this feature doesn’t auto categorize a drive for you, it can often make it easier to remember. I’ve got a frequent drive I make for business but when the address of the location shows up, I typically have no idea what it is for. This sounds dumb, but seeing a map and my drive out of context sometimes just doesn’t register for me. By seeing your custom location name, it can help job your memory though.
What’s even cooler though is that after you’ve classified a drive the same way a few times, MileIQ gives you the option to automatically categorize that specific drive. Remember my frequent drive I just mentioned? I never have to categorize that again. MileIQ just knows that drive is a business drive. That’s pretty sweet and helps save me time logging the same trip over and over again. This also works for frequent personal trips, so you can weed them out of your trip logging. Using this feature, you can really cut down on the number of trips that you actually need to log, saving you even more time.
If you’re like me though and you have multiple side businesses, you may need to categorize your drives under a couple of different businesses. MileIQ also allows you to add custom business purposes, so that you can know which drives were for which business purpose. This is the first year I’ve actually signed up for a paid version of a mileage tracking app, but I can tell you that I already know it’s worth it. I also found myself wondering if the cost of the app was tax deductible. Either way, here’s a link to sign up for a MileIQ account.
Todoist – Task Management
Some people might categorize my use of a service like Todoist as excessive. I use Todoist in every part of my life. House tasks that need done? Todoist. Work deadline? Todoist. Edit a drone job. Todoist. You get the idea. It’s all in there.
For me, the conclusion I’ve come to is that if I don’t write it down and have a way to follow up with it, whatever “it” is just never gets done. I have a whole system that I’ve put together to make sure things don’t just fall off my radar. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with all the details. Suffice it to say that it really works for me. It has a few features that I think are super helpful and I’ll cover those below.
Projects and Sub-Projects
Todoist allows you to categorize tasks under separate projects, which can all be nested. This could include a project for your drone services business and a sub-project for each client project you are currently working on. Each project can be color coded so that you know better what it is for. How you organize your projects is totally up to you.
Deadlines and Reminders
You can add a deadline (both time and date) as well as a reminder for each task. If I have a huge project, sometimes I’ll add a task that has the ultimate deadline and then create a sub-task inside of it so that I stay on track leading up to that deadline. I tend to try and plan my week before it even begins, but again, how you use these features is totally up to you. The last thing I really like about this feature is that the app lets you type the deadline in plain english. You don’t have to worry about putting “May 5, 2019 at 10:00 pm.” Instead, I could just type “tomorrow at 5 pm” or “every monday at 7 am.” This makes creating tasks way less of a headache.
Views and Filters
Todoist come set up with a few of what I’ll call “views,” which show you what your day and week look like. But you can also create custom filters and add them as favorites so that these new “views” show up at the top of your sidebar. For me, I’ve created a filter that shows just my tasks for tomorrow and another that puts all of my “goal” related tasks at the top as well. Use these features in whatever way fits your organizational style.
Honestly, you may have no interest in using any task manager and that’s fine. I just thought I’d include my favorite because of the effect that it has had on my work life.
1Password – Password Manager
Remembering passwords is terrible. Ugh. Am I right?
I have been a user of 1Password since WAY before I had any real side businesses. I remember installing it and thinking that my life had changed forever. This may seem like an exaggeration to you, but if you spend half as much time as I do on your computer, you quickly realize how much time and mental energy you spend remembering passwords. Or maybe you write them down on a piece of paper. Yikes! Sounds like a scary and terrible solution. Imagine changing the password each time you do a password reset on any of your 1 million accounts. Good luck.
Yes, 1 Password costs money. Yes, it is highly worth it. If you’re not a fan of the subscription model (another thing to pay for every month?!?), just buy a license to the app for your computer and phone. I think it costs less than $100 and gives you the same features as the subscription.
Make sure you install the browser extension because doing this will automatically capture your information each time you try to log in on a website. Once it does this the first time, there is no more needing to remember the password! Woot! Just open the extension and click “Autofill.” This fills in your info and you can login without ever pulling out your trusty (or not so trusty) password paper.
With 1Password, you can even categorize passwords based on their use. Have a bunch of personal stuff? Keep a “Personal” vault. Have drone related accounts? Create a vault specifically for your drone stuff. You can sync your vaults across devices using iCloud, Dropbox, or even a WLAN (which is easier to use than you might think).
Lastly, it lets you use a password generator to create new passwords. We’ve all done the standard password thing and used variations of the same one in different places. But this is a terrible idea and now you don’t have to think about it. You can customize the length of the passwords it creates and make it include symbols and capital letters. You can even make sure it avoids letters and numbers that look alike (think 0 and O or o.)
Seriously, this one is a life saver. Even if you never create a drone business. Sign up for 1Password here.
Drone Business Software
Now on to the drone business software! What’s you’ve probably been waiting for. And, if we’re all being honest, the fun part as well.
SkyWatch.ai – Drone Insurance
I used to recommend Verifly, which is a great piece of drone business software for drone insurance, but they only offer liability drone insurance at the time of this writing. And while Sky Watch also allows you to get liability insurance, you can get covered with hull insurance (including all your gear) with their monthly plan. Woot! Even if you’re just looking to get immediate liability insurance, this will usually cost you about $10 for an hour of flight time.
There are a few things that are great about this. First, my drone services company was previously paying about $1,200 a year to cover two drones, one camera and a few batteries (this included liability insurance). One thing you’ll notice in the drone business (or at least the drone photography business) is that you tend to be busier in the warmer months. For us, people don’t tend to want pictures of their properties in the dead of winter. They never look appealing, no matter how good of a photographer you are. With Sky Watch, the monthly plan lets you cover your gear from damage, but doesn’t require a huge yearly premium. If you’re in a slow month or are just getting started, you can get covered for less. We’ve got a whole guide on drone insurance, which dives into the specifics.
Just to give you an idea on cost, for a one month policy on my Inspire 1 Pro and the X5 camera, the policy was going to be $85. And that includes liability insurance as well.
Another really cool feature that Sky Watch offers is that it allows you to share your flight information with the app. Based on a number of factors, the app then calculates a safety rating for you. This safety rating allows you to get up to a 50% discount just because you are a safe pilot. This is huge. So the $85 premium I just mentioned will likely go down over time. Using this feature requires at least 5 flights, but my understanding is that Sky Watch will use an algorithm to determine whether you fly safely. This probably includes telemetric data on flight, maybe indications of abrupt movements, speed and where you actually flew.
Sky Watch also allows you to control the drone flight from within the app. Or if you’re a user of Drone Deploy, Sky Watch is offered as an app on their marketplace as well. All around a great service that I highly recommend.
Kittyhawk – Airspace approval and fleet administration
When you need to get airspace approval using the LAANC system, you definitely have a bunch of drone business software options to choose from. And the list actually just keeps expanding because the FAA continues to approve providers. As far as LAANC apps go, these include Airmap, Altitude Angel and Kittyhawk. I’m just going to focus on Kittyhawk here because it provides the largest suite of features, which cuts down on other pieces of drone business software that you may need to use. These features include a lot of really great options that make it a great all-in-one app for things other than getting LAANC approval.
From the front page of Kittyhawk, you can see a map of your current position, which includes whether you are in controlled airspace and whether the grid you are standing in will allow for automatic LAANC approval to fly. But it also provides you with the current weather (wind, visibility, cloud cover, time of sunset, KP index, GPS signal, etc.), and what they call a flight deck. The flight deck allows you to control every aspect of your flight. Pre flight planning, airspace authorizations, other active drone traffic, etc.
What I actually consider to be the best feature of this app is that you are able to control all of this, not just from the app on your phone, but from their website as well. You are able to create your own pre-flight checklists, plans missions, schedule authorizations into the future and tie it all together beforehand. This might sounds like too much for a person just starting out, but it is a great way to make sure you are compliant from the very start. You are also able to set up a maintenance routine and do risk assessments for each flight. And while Kittyhawk does not necessarily talk to SkyWatch’s system, all of these things seem like the type of information that SkyWatch would be interested in knowing if they are going to provide you discounts on insurance.
While other LAANC approval apps provide this one feature, Kittyhawk has managed to bring a ton of value in one app. I would highly recommend starting out with Kittyhawk from the beginning, because once you start to grow as a business, it becomes harder to put good systems in place. If you were ever to grow beyond just one pilot, Kittyhawk would allow you to create, plan and manage multiple missions for multiple pilots with multiple drones very easily. I can’t recommend this app highly enough.
Litchi – Autonomous Flight App
This last piece of drone business software assumes that you are working with a DJI drone because Litchi only works with specific DJI drones. That said, you can definitely just use the DJI Go app for drone flight. But Litchi adds in a few awesome automation features that make it worth purchasing.
First, while you can add waypoints in the DJI app, Litchi lets you add waypoints and then customize the curved flight path to create smoother video between waypoints. In addition to this, you can create multiple points of interest along your route and transition your focus from one point to another while the waypoints flight is being executed. This can be a hard thing to accomplish on your own and allowing the drone to fly a path on its own while also changing the point of interest can be a fantastic way to add some more complicated shots to your repertoire.
You can also do things like tracking a moving subject and then enabling an orbit around the subject as it moves. Another complicated move that adds some depth to your work.
Finally, Litchi allows you so save waypoints with specifics like a point of interest, altitude, etc., which would allow you to recreate the same shot over and over. If you do any sort of construction progress work or simply want to take a time lapse, this feature is SUPER helpful.