Data & Imagery
Sentinel-2 and Landsat cover most monitoring work at no cost. Here's when commercial imagery from Airbus, Planet, or Vantor (formerly Maxar) earns its price, what it costs in 2026, and the licensing trap to avoid.
Every GIS team eventually asks: should we pay for high-resolution imagery? The honest answer is “sometimes”. Free data handles most monitoring. Commercial imagery is for the moments when you need to see detail, or when you can’t wait for the next clear pass.
| Source | Resolution | How often | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentinel-2 (ESA) | 10 m (visible, NIR) | About every 5 days | Vegetation indices, land cover, change detection over hectares |
| Landsat 8/9 (NASA/USGS) | 30 m | About every 8 days combined | Long time series back to the 1980s, thermal bands |
| Sentinel-1 (ESA) | Radar | Regular revisits | Seeing through clouds, flooding, some clearing detection |
In Indonesia, clouds are the real limit, not resolution. Combining Sentinel-2 with Sentinel-1 radar usually gets you a usable signal each month, even in the wet season.
Free imagery is enough when you’re tracking change over areas of a few hectares or more, building monthly or seasonal reports, or need a long history.
Prices vary by provider, licence, and area. These ranges come from reseller price lists and market guides, so treat them as indicative:
| Product | Typical price | Typical minimum order |
|---|---|---|
| Archive 30 cm | about $17–26 per km² | 25 km² |
| Archive 50 cm | about $8–18 per km² | 25 km² |
| WorldView-3 30 cm archive | up to about $45 per km² | 25 km² |
| Pléiades Neo 30 cm archive | about $22.50 per km² | 25 km² |
| New tasking (30–50 cm) | 50–100% more than archive | 50–100 km² |
| PlanetScope monitoring (3 m, near-daily) | subscriptions from about $2,700 per year | per area under management |
A worked example. A 5,000 ha concession is 50 km². One archive Pléiades Neo scene at about $22.50 per km² costs roughly $1,125 for a single date. Monthly 30 cm coverage of the same area would run past $13,000 a year. That’s why most teams use free data to monitor and buy high-resolution scenes only where something needs a closer look.
Standard commercial licences usually cover the organization that bought the image. If a service buys imagery under its own licence and shows it to many customers, that can breach the licence. Sharing imagery with clients, or building it into a product, typically needs a reseller or value-added licence.
Before you buy, check who the licensee is, whether you can share derived products (maps, statistics), and whether clients can see the raw image.
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