Why Spray Operators Are Leaving Cloud Mapping Platforms
Cloud-based drone mapping follows the same painful pattern: fly the survey, drive somewhere with fast internet, upload 20–40 GB of imagery, wait hours for processing, then pay a subscription priced per hectare or per month whether you fly or not. For an ag operator who needs to decide today whether a field gets sprayed tomorrow, that loop is too slow and too expensive.
DroneField runs entirely on your own computer. Processing 1,800 P4 Multispectral images takes roughly 18 seconds — you can generate the orthomosaic and NDVI map in the truck, at the edge of the field, before the drone batteries have cooled down. No upload, no queue, no per-hectare fees, and your field data never leaves your machine.
Pricing follows the same logic: an annual subscription for regular operators, or a one-off project license if you only need to process a single survey. You are never locked into paying for months you don't fly.
How Drone Field Mapping Works in DroneField
1. Fly the survey
Map the field with any supported drone — DJI Mavic 3 Multispectral, P4 Multispectral, P4 RTK, Mavic 3E, or any DJI RGB drone. Standard grid mission with overlap; RTK recommended for survey-grade accuracy.
2. Import images
Copy the SD card and drag the images into DroneField. The app reads geotags and band data automatically — see the image import documentation.
3. Process locally
One click builds the orthomosaic, DSM, and 3D sparse point cloud. A 1,800-image multispectral survey processes in about 18 seconds on a normal laptop.
4. Analyze crop health
Switch between NDVI, NDRE, GNDVI, EVI, and VARI vegetation indices instantly — all computed from the same flight. Learn when to use which in our guide to understanding vegetation indices.
5. Mark boundaries and obstacles
Draw field boundaries and mark obstacles — power lines, poles, trees — directly on the fresh orthomosaic, so hazards are recorded from real current imagery, not an outdated basemap.
6. Generate the application map
Classify index zones and assign rates. Export variable-rate application maps to DJI Agras, XAG, Hardi, ISOXML, or Shapefile.
7. Share the project
Send the ready flight plan — boundaries, obstacles, prescription — to the spray pilot through project sharing, and share visual results with the farmer through the farmer portal. See how spray operators use it end to end.
Built by People Who Spray Fields for a Living
DroneField is developed by a team that operates spray drones commercially. That shows up in details generic mapping platforms miss: obstacle marking that feeds directly into spray flight plans, export formats matched to the terminals of DJI Agras, XAG and ABZ Innovation machines, and a workflow where the monitoring pilot and the spray pilot can be two different people on two different machines.
It also shows in what the software refuses to make complicated. You don't need GIS training to go from raw images to a prescription map — the pipeline is opinionated because it mirrors how the work is actually done in season. For everything the app can do beyond mapping, see all features, or compare it directly against the tools you may already know: Compare with Pix4DFields and DroneDeploy.
For multispectral-specific workflows — band alignment, index selection, camera choice — see the dedicated multispectral mapping page.