SkyFi was founded with the mission to make satellite imagery and geospatial data easy to access and use. The company can be generally categorized as a satellite data broker/marketplace. The company was started by founders who struggled to obtain satellite imagery for their own research and wanted to simplify the process.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, SkyFi partners with satellite and aerial service providers to deliver on-demand high-resolution imagery of any location, anywhere on Earth. Customers can order new imagery or access SkyFi’s extensive library of existing satellite images.
Key features of SkyFi:
- Access to on-demand high-resolution satellite imagery, with options for daytime, nighttime, SAR, multispectral, and video
- Ability to task satellites to capture new imagery of desired locations
- Imagery currently available at various resolutions up to 30cm, and Skyfi has a plans to offer <15 cm resolutions in the near future
- Transparent pricing starting at $20 per existing image and $175 per new image
- User-friendly web and mobile apps to search, preview, and order images
- An API is provided for programmatic access
SkyFi serves business users across industries such as real estate, construction, agriculture, energy, and insurance that leverage aerial imagery to cut costs, save time, and enhance operations. The platform is hoping to encourage consumer adoption by users such as researchers, adventurers, and memory-keepers.
Led by CEO Luke Fischer and a team of engineers, remote sensing experts, and business professionals, SkyFi plans to democratize access to Earth observation data. By streamlining licensing and bureaucratic processes, the company is working to make satellite imagery readily accessible to all users.
Easy to Use
The user interface for the website is exceptionally easy to use. Selecting the area to be imaged is straightforward. Pricing for the image type, and target area, is fully transparent. This allows for an optimized customer workflow allowing them to go from need identified, purchase complete, and image delivered within 24 hours for existing imagery. However, new image orders can take significantly longer than 24 hours.
Applications
The company’s website provides application use case examples. While it is very easy to order imagery, the commercial use cases require customers to have significant interpretation expertise. The consumer use cases are best characterized as wishful thinking.
Pricing and Licensing
While low prices are advertised, the actual pricing can escalate rapidly as illustrated in the image gallery above. Consequently, the pricing for new high-resolution image orders may push commercial purchase decisions into onerous internal purchasing processes; and certainly place it outside of the range of mainstream consumers.
Pricing for lower resolution images is moot, since lower resolution images are available for free from other online sources.
The company asserts to having very user-friendly licensing as shown below, however prospective customers would be wise to read the full license which has specific restrictions.
Technology
The company’s technology supports the seamless integration of multiple commercial data sources, with the ability to do on-demand ordering. This single access into multiple sources might appeal to defense, security and intelligence organizations. For example, US Department of Defense, NATO, and the EU have all expressed interest in facilitating easy access to, and cross organization sharing of, commercial and national/classified satellite resources.
Alternatives
SkyFi is one of several satellite data brokers/marketplaces. Alternative providers include:
Other alternatives are the satellite operators, including:
- Planet
- Spire
- Satelogic
- Hawkeye 360
- Airbus
- Blacksky
- SIIS
- 21AT
- Capella
- Maxar
- Others
