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. A 20 ha field at 5 cm/px is processed to orthomosaic + NDVI in under 5 minutes on a Mac mini M4 — you can generate the maps in the truck, at the edge of the field, on the same day you fly. No upload, no queue, no per-hectare fees, and your images never leave your machine.
Pricing follows the same logic: 699 € + VAT per year per device for regular operators, with unlimited projects, 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 a supported DJI survey drone — Mavic 3 Multispectral, P4 Multispectral, P4 RTK, Mavic 3E, Matrice 4E / 4T, or in beta the Matrice 5TD and M300/M350 RTK with Zenmuse P1. Standard grid mission with 75–80% front and 65–75% side overlap; RTK recommended for the best positional accuracy.
2. Import images
Copy the SD card and drag the images into DroneField. The app reads geotags and band data automatically, skips zoom and thermal frames and merges several take-offs — see the image import documentation.
3. Process locally
One click runs alignment, bundle adjustment, DSM and orthomosaic, with a terrain mode for hilly fields and a high-resolution mode. A 20 ha field at 5 cm/px takes under 5 minutes on a Mac mini M4.
4. Analyze crop health
Switch between NDVI, NDRE, GNDVI, EVI and VARI from a multispectral flight, or the RGB indices VARI, VDVI, NGRDI and ExG from any RGB drone — no multispectral camera needed. Optional Luna AI analysis picks the index for the job and proposes zones and doses. Learn when to use which in our guide to understanding vegetation indices.
5. Mark boundaries and obstacles
Draw field boundaries — or let the on-device AI field boundary trace them from one click — and mark obstacles such as power lines, poles and trees directly on the fresh orthomosaic, so hazards are recorded from real current imagery, not an outdated basemap.
6. Generate the application map
Create a gridded application map from the index in one click, adjust the zones and enter rates. Export variable-rate application maps to DJI Agras, XAG or ABZ spray drones, Hardi VRA Shapefile, ISOXML V3/V4 or Shapefile.
7. Share the project
Send the ready package — boundaries, obstacles, prescription — to the spray pilot through project sharing, and share the results with the farmer through a web link that opens maps, prescription and AI report without installing anything. 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.