Summary

• Planet is introducing transparent pricing and self-service purchasing for small customers to make it easier to get started and experiment with Planet Insights Platform.
• Today, Planet offers self-serve access to three products: Area Under Management for daily PlanetScope imagery, Single Order Tasking for high-resolution SkySat, and Planet Insights Platform data processing for public satellite imagery. We will continue to expand the list of products available via self-serve over the coming months as appropriate for small customers..

Explore what’s available at planet.com/pricing or sign up for a trial to get started.

Making it easier for you to work with Planet

In Planet’s charter for our second decade, we stated that our North Star is to build an Earth observation data platform that powers action. Last year, we launched it: Planet Insights Platform — a cloud-native Earth observation platform that enables you to access reliable satellite data and analytics and integrate them into any workflow.

While Planet Insights Platform allows users to extract useful information from Planet imagery more easily than ever before, one element was missing: a transparent, self-service purchasing experience. We’ve heard this from you, our users and partners, and we’re excited to announce that Planet Insights Platform now has public pricing and supports direct purchasing.

We believe that this new option for working with Planet will allow you to start small and experiment without large, up-front commitments. When you are ready to scale, our experts are here to support you.

In this blog, you’ll see the three initial public pricing options that you can purchase directly:

1. PlanetScope Area Under Management
2. Processing units for public imagery
3. Single Order Tasking

Daily PlanetScope with Area Under Management

Area Under Management is the first PlanetScope product we are offering through self-service. Area Under Management gives you access to every PlanetScope image in our archive for the duration of your contract over fixed areas of interest.

Here’s how it works: You define your areas of interest, from as small as 0.01 square kilometers, and time of interest leveraging our deep PlanetScope archive for years of near-daily imagery. Then, you can deliver data to your own cloud storage or store it on Planet Insights Platform and use our analysis and data processing tools to create insights.

When you purchase Area Under Management through our self-service platform, two currency units come into play: area quota and processing units.

• Area quota is the total area, in square kilometers, where you have ordered imagery. For example, ordering imagery of a farm that is 100 hectares (1 square kilometer) would consume 1 square kilometer of quota. You can order as much imagery as you like over that specific area, and the total quota used will always be 1 square kilometer.
• Processing units are a measurement of how much compute is used to complete an operation on Planet Insights Platform. Let’s say you order three years of archive data for an agriculture field with Area Under Management. Processing units will be spent when you order the data to produce and deliver each daily image and when you analyze the images (for example, to calculate zonal statistics on crop indices). This article provides an in-depth explanation of processing units, including which features consume them.

Both area quotas and processing units are combined in packages that cover up to 300 square kilometers. You simply select the right-sized package for the area you are interested in. And if additional processing units or area quota are needed — perhaps for a use case that relies on significant data processing — you can purchase them at any time, allowing you to only pay for the usage you need.

Public imagery with Planet Insights Platform

In addition to Area Under Management, we are also offering self-service access to analysis tools for publicly-available imagery. We believe that publicly-funded missions are critical to advancing Earth observation technology and use cases. In fact, Planet uses public imagery sources extensively, including Sentinel and Landsat, to build Planetary Variables, harmonize Planet Basemaps, and more.

We are offering access to these public imagery sources through Planet Insights Platform so that you can use the dataset that works best for your use cases — whether that’s Sentinel or other missions — in conjunction with commercial PlanetScope data. By using Planet Insights Platform serverless APIs to access imagery, you can avoid rehosting public imagery in your own cloud, stop processing imagery locally, and focus on creating insights from imagery.

In addition, because this imagery is available to the public at no fee, the only cost of using Planet Insights Platform is related to processing. You can view pricing for processing units required to analyze public data on our pricing page. The number of processing units for your workflow will vary depending on the area size, time extent, and other request parameters.

High-resolution imagery with Single Order Tasking

A final way we provide self-service purchasing is our new Single Order Tasking service, powered by our partners at SkyFi. Planet’s high-resolution tasking offers a closer look at an area of interest, and with Single Order Tasking, you can now purchase individual satellite tasks when you need them — without any annual or up-front commitment.

Evolution of our PlanetScope pricing

As Planet makes these new self-purchasing options available, our pricing model is evolving accordingly. Those of you who have been using Planet products for a while may notice that the prices for Area Under Management have been updated to provide greater flexibility for smaller customers, particularly those who only need data during specific parts of the year.

To accommodate this, we have split the price into two parts:

• The data license that gives you the ability to access daily PlanetScope data from the world’s largest constellation of Earth observation satellites.
• Processing units that cover your use of Planet Insights Platform for data ordering, processing, and egress.

The split allows you to optimize the use (and price) of the data for your specific use case. Please note that this change is only applied to small customers that use the self-service purchasing option. For our larger customers, your existing contract is not changing based on this pricing model.

What’s next

This is just the beginning of transparent pricing and self-service purchasing with Planet. We know that user needs for PlanetScope vary significantly. So, in the coming months, we plan to add the following options — so you can purchase exactly what you need.

• Area Under Management tiers for different imagery locations around the world. Prices for these tiers will be set to align to the local region.
• PlanetScope Access and On-demand Ordering for use cases that require fewer images from deep in the archive or if areas of interest change frequently, such as for natural disaster response. This can also be applicable for when you need imagery over very broad areas with less of a need for a long time series, like for forest monitoring.
• PlanetScope Basemaps for analysis-ready mosaics of PlanetScope data across broad areas.

Watch for these updates to our pricing information in the coming months. We will also publish a blog explaining and comparing each PlanetScope product — so stay tuned to learn more.

Get started with Planet Insights Platform

In our charter for Planet’s second decade, we posed the questions, “If you had access to an Earth data platform, providing a stream of timely, global information, what applications would you build? What issue do you want to solve and what action would you take?”

Today, it’s easier than ever to get started with daily Earth data and analytics on Planet Insights Platform and to build your Earth observation-powered application or solution. Are you ready? Go to pricing to explore plans or create a trial account to get started.