Spatial, spectral and temporal resolution for the operating satellite data providers, with the API endpoint, the published rate, the minimum order size, and the smallest cheque that actually buys data. Free and open missions come first, because for most work they remain the correct default. Where an operator publishes nothing, this page says so rather than filling the gap with a reseller's figure presented as the operator's.
Before price, the question is whether anyone images the wavelengths your retrieval needs. For shortwave infrared spectroscopy sold by the scene, the commercial answer is still no.
Minimum spend is zero on every row. Two changes since the last revision dominate this table. NISAR is no longer a forward-looking entry: public L-band data has been flowing since July 2026, which finally gives free L-band for soil moisture and inundation. And Landsat Next, now Landsat 10, was cut to a single observatory, taking the revisit from six days to eighteen — a change that quietly removes the cadence argument for waiting on it.
| Mission | Spatial | Spectral | Temporal | Minimum order | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentinel-2 A/B/C 2A extension committed only to 31 Dec 2026 | 10 / 20 / 60 m | 13 bands VNIR–SWIR | ~5 d | Free 1 tile; quota on transfer and processing units | |
| Sentinel-1 C/D 1A terminated 29 June 2026; 6-day pattern shifted one day | 5×20 m IW, 10 m pixel | C-band SAR, VV/VH | 6 d constellation | Free 1 granule | |
| Sentinel-3 A/B 3C launched 15 Sep 2026, in commissioning | 300 m / 500 m, 1 km TIR | 21 / 9 bands | ~1–2 d | Free 1 product | |
| Landsat 8 / 9 | 30 m MS, 15 m pan, 100 m TIR | 11 bands | 8 d combined | Free 1 scene | |
| Landsat 10 (ex-Next) Descoped to one observatory by mid-2026; launch 2031 | 10–20 m VSWIR, 60 m TIR | 26 bands (LandIS) | 18 d, WRS-3 | Not launched | |
| PACE OCI | ~1.2 km at scan centre | 340–895 nm at 2.5 nm steps, plus 7 SWIR bands | 2 d global | Free 1 granule | |
| NISAR Public L-band data since 20 July 2026 | ~10 m, mode dependent | L-band 25 cm, plus S-band | 12 d repeat, twice | Free 1 granule | |
| EMIT (ISS) Extended mission | 60 m | 285 bands, 380–2500 nm | Opportunistic, ISS orbit | Free 1 granule | |
| EnMAP | 30 m, 30 km swath | 224 bands, 420–2450 nm | 27 d nadir, 4 d at 30° off-nadir | Free 1 tile; tasking by registered proposal | |
| PRISMA End of life December 2026 | 30 m, 5 m pan | ~239 bands, 400–2500 nm | Tasked | Free 1 scene, 30×30 km | |
| DESIS (ISS) Archive only. No acquisitions after May 2024 | ~30 m | 235 bands binned, 402–1000 nm | Mission complete | Free via CSDA authorisation | |
| ECOSTRESS (ISS) | ~70 m | 5 TIR bands | Variable diurnal | Free 1 granule | |
| MODIS / VIIRS Terra MODIS ends Feb 2027, Aqua Sep 2027. VIIRS is the continuity path | 250 m – 1 km | 36 / 22 bands | Daily | Free 1 granule |
Four rows carry expiry dates worth putting in a calendar: PRISMA reaches end of life in December 2026, Sentinel-2A is committed only to 31 December 2026, Terra MODIS ends science operations in February 2027 and Aqua follows in September. DESIS is already finished and appears here as an archive, not a sensor you can task.
Zero minimum spend on commercial-grade sensors. This is the fastest way to benchmark a sensor against your own processing chain before any budget conversation, and the licences are permissive enough that derived products are publishable. Five of the six rows are CC BY 4.0, which means attribution and nothing more.
| Programme | Content | Licence | Minimum order | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Umbra Open Data | Single-look and multi-look spotlight. 250+ images, 20+ frequently updated time-series sites. Catalogue samples run down to 16 cm, below the 25 cm commercial floor. | CC BY 4.0 | Free no account required | |
| ICEYE Open Data | X-band SAR over catastrophe events, 2023 to 2026. GeoTIFF plus GIF and MP4 change animations. Products to ~16 cm. | CC BY 4.0 | Free no account required | |
| Capella Open Data | X-band SAR sample scenes with published image-quality analysis. Documentation last refreshed May 2025; treat as active but not growing. | CC BY 4.0 | Free | |
| Wyvern Open Data | 5.3 m, up to 31 VNIR bands. 100+ scenes across agriculture, mining, wildfire and coastal sites. Not a 200-band spectrometer. | CC BY 4.0 | Free no signup required | |
| Planet Tanager Open Data | 426 bands, 380–2500 nm at ~5 nm, 30 m GSD. 50+ scenes. Basic radiance: georeferenced but not orthoprojected, so expect to do that yourself. | CC BY 4.0 | Free | |
| SkyFi free sample data | Satellogic high-resolution optical to roughly 1 m across more than 30 million km². Area-based rather than scene-capped. | Platform terms | Free no signup required |
Four of the five operators here publish no rate card at all. Where a figure appears against them it comes from a reseller, and the row says which. Satellogic remains the only one that lists a per-square-kilometre price on its own site, and its archive minimum is one tile of up to 16 km² rather than the 25 km² that applies to tasking.
| Provider | Resolution | Spectral | Revisit | Published rate | Minimum order and spend | API and portals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vantor ex-Maxar since Oct 2025 | WV Legion 34 cm pan, 1.36 m MS, 10 km swath WV-3 31 cm pan, 1.24 m MS, 8 SWIR at 3.7 m | Pan + 8 MS (+8 SWIR on WV-3) | Up to 15 / day 6 Legion, 10 imaging satellites | Direct: quote only. Via SkyFi: 50 cm tasking from $300; Vivid basemaps from $9/km² at 50 cm, $12 at 30 cm HD, $15 at 30 cm Advanced and 15 cm HD | $300 25 km² tasking minimum at 30 or 50 cm; archive minimum is 1 km². No minimum spend or subscription on the platform. | |
| Airbus | Pléiades Neo 30 cm pan, 1.2 m MS Pléiades 50 cm SPOT 6/7 1.5 m | 6 bands (PNeo) | Intraday (PNeo) 2 satellites; Neo 5 and 6 lost on Vega-C, never replaced | Not published. Quote or prepaid credit contract | Not published PNeo and Pléiades: 25 km² archive, 100 km² new acquisition, 100 km² invoiced. SPOT: 100 km² archive, 500 km² new. Hard API floor of 5 km². Rate withheld, so minimum spend cannot be derived. | |
| Planet | Pelican Gen-1 50 cm class, 8 km swath SkySat 50 cm PlanetScope ~3 m | Dual pan + 6 MS (Pelican) 8 bands (SuperDove) | Daily (PS) Sub-daily (SkySat, Pelican) 10 Pelicans launched; Pelican-11 is the first Gen-2 demonstrator | Direct: annual contract with area-under-management quota, or self-service on Planet Insights from 0.01 km². Planet Select, operated by SkyFi: SkySat archive from $6/km², tasking from $12/km² | $150 Planet Select archive floor. Tasking floor $300 on a 7-day capture window. Direct contracts start at an annual commitment, not a per-scene price. | |
| BlackSky | Gen-3 at 35 cm | Pan + 3 MS | 7 / day 5 Gen-3 on orbit; 8 to 9 targeted by end 2026 | Direct: no rate card. Via EOSDA: archive from $550/scene, tasking $1,100 to $1,800 standard, $2,000 priority, $3,500 emergency. Via UP42: 9,000 credits/scene catalogue, 17,500 tasking | $550 Archive, one scene, ~18 km². Tasking floor $1,100. The EOSDA product page states a 10 km² tasking minimum; the current PDF rate list states ~25 km². | |
| Satellogic | 70 cm or 99 cm native, off-nadir dependent 50 or 70 cm SuperResolution ortho HSI at ~25–30 m, altitude dependent | 4 MS bands, plus a 32-band VNIR HSI camera 483–831 nm on every satellite | High frequency; no per-day figure currently published | $4 / km² archive $8 / km² area coverage $10 / km² standard tasking $23 / km² rush tasking +25% government sharing, +50% allies, +200% public release | $64 One archive tile of up to 16 km² × $4/km². Area coverage floor $400 at 50 km². Tasking floor $250 at 25 km². Via SkyFi the archive minimum drops to 5 km². |
A feasibility request returns either AUTOMATIC or MANUAL. For Pléiades Neo the reliable way to avoid human validation is to request a quotation, which wraps the feasibility step and can be fully automated; accepting the quotation creates the order. The endpoint is Pléiades Neo only and does not apply to the legacy systems.
Auto-acceptance is guaranteed when cloud cover is at least 10%, incidence angle at least 20° and the acquisition mode is mono. Rate limit is 60 requests a minute, and exceeding it earns a ten-minute ban.
Pléiades and SPOT are ordered at segment level; Pléiades Neo works in coverage items. They sit on different backends, legacy versus neo, so contract IDs and workspace lookups differ: SPOT and Pléiades resolve a delivery workspace from the contract, Pléiades Neo from the user record.
Because Airbus publishes no rate, the minimums tell you order granularity but not cheque size. Ask for the per-square-kilometre figure at the same time as the feasibility study, not after.
On the roadmap, none of it orderable yet. Vantor has announced Pulse at 40 cm with fifteen-minute revisit for 2027 and Vantage at 20 cm for 2029. Airbus expects the first Pléiades Neo Next, also 20 cm class, in early 2028. Planet flew the first Gen-2 Pelican technology demonstrator in July 2026, aiming at 30 cm. Treat all four as reasons not to sign a long contract at today’s resolution, not as capability you can buy.
Pixxel is the only operator in this segment with a published price schedule, and the schedule is where the surprises are. The hundred-square-kilometre minimum is charged on any tasking area of interest, which makes small targets expensive in a way the headline rate does not suggest.
| Provider | Resolution | Spectral | Revisit | Published rate | Minimum order and spend | API and portals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pixxel Firefly | 5.4 m GSD 38 km swath | 135 bands, 472–890 nm Up to 45 selectable per capture | <7 d within ±30° latitude, <4 d poleward 6 satellites operational | Tasking $8 / km² VNIR Archive from $6 / km², less 20% on imagery over a year old +15% for a 10% cloud ceiling Aurora Standard tier free; Professional $150 / seat / mo | $800 100 km² charged on any tasking AOI × $8/km², or $920 with the 10% cloud ceiling. Tasking AOI caps at 5,000 km². No archive minimum is documented. | |
| Wyvern Dragonette | 5.3 m | D-001: 28 bands, 503–799 nm D-002 onward: 32 bands, 445–870 nm | 1.6 d average at the equator 4 operational | Direct: quote only. Via UP42: listed, but per-collection credit figures are no longer published and price is quoted at order creation | Not published UP42 publishes area minimums without prices: archive charged as 400 km², tasking as 100 km². | |
| Planet Tanager Tanager-2 shipped Aug 2026, manifested on Transporter-18 | 30 m | 426 contiguous bands, 400–2500 nm at ~5 nm | Tasked 1 in orbit | Contract; sold mainly as methane detection products | Not published Annual contract, not per scene. The open data programme is the zero-cost evaluation path. | |
| Orbital Sidekick | ~8 m, 3 m pan | GHOSt: 400+ bands, 400–2500 nm; upgraded units 468 bands | Tasked 5 operational, roadmap to 14–20 | Quote | Not published Sold as monitoring subscriptions, not scenes. | |
| Kuva Space Added to NASA CSDA July 2026 | Hyperfield microsatellites | VNIR–SWIR imaging spectrometer | Tasked constellation building out | Quote | Not published Free to eligible US-funded researchers through CSDA. |
SAR is commonly priced per scene rather than per square kilometre, so the minimum order is one collection and the minimum spend is simply the scene price. That is true of Umbra and of the SkyFi storefronts; it is not true of Synspective through Airbus or of anything routed through UP42, both of which apply area minimums. For L-band, NISAR has changed the calculus: it is flying, the data are free, and ALOS-4 through Synspective or JAXA is now the paid alternative rather than the only route.
| Provider | Resolution | Spectral | Revisit | Published rate | Minimum order and spend | API and portals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ICEYE | 25 cm Dwell Precise as catalogue standard Gen4 to 16 cm at 1200 MHz, commercial since Sep 2025 | X | 76+ launched since 2018 production scaling to 100 / yr by 2027 | Direct: contract only. ICEYE US storefront on SkyFi is per scene | ~$450 One archive scene on the SkyFi SAR catalogue. Direct access is a multi-year contract. | |
| Umbra Publishes a full price list, unusually for this segment | 25 cm finest spotlight 25 / 35 / 50 cm and 1 m modes | X | 11 named satellites Umbra-11 launched Nov 2025 | Spotlight 5×5 km: $675 at 1 m through $3,250 at 25 cm Natural footprint $1,500–5,650 Dwell $4,750, +40% for SAR video Scan $1,250–4,000 | $675 One 1 m spotlight scene, tasked. A 25 cm scene is $3,250. The $450 archive figure quoted elsewhere is SkyFi's platform floor, not Umbra's own rate. | |
| Capella Space IonQ subsidiary since July 2025; still selling | Sub-0.5 m spotlight (Acadia), 25 cm offered | X | Operational count not published | Quote only | Not published Open data on AWS is the zero-cost evaluation path. | |
| Synspective | 25 cm azimuth, Staring Spotlight 4, 10×3 km scene | X, plus ALOS-4 L-band as reseller | 11 StriX launched, the 11th in Sep 2026 | Not published | Not published Quote or contract for every product. Distributed through SkyFi and, under a 2026 partnership, Airbus. | |
| Legacy operators Not re-verified in this pass | TerraSAR-X 25 cm azimuth COSMO-SkyMed 1 m PAZ, RADARSAT-2, ALOS-4 | X, C, L | Government-commercial | Quote | Not published Per scene, typically with a research tariff on application. |
Umbra is the exception that proves the segment rule: it publishes a full price list on its own site, so its row is the only one here where the operator and the number come from the same place. Note what that list reveals — the spread between a one-metre spotlight at $675 and a twenty-five-centimetre spotlight at $3,250 is nearly five times, for the same footprint. Resolution, not area, is the cost driver in SAR.
The most volatile segment on this page, and the one where the previous revision was most wrong. It is no longer true that nothing here is transactable: constellr sells through UP42 at a published credit rate, which makes thirty-metre commercial land surface temperature something you can simply buy. SatVu’s HotSat-2 went into commercial operation in June 2026, and OroraTech has gone from two satellites to fourteen. For evapotranspiration work, Landsat thermal plus ECOSTRESS remains the defensible free baseline.
| Provider | Resolution and accuracy | Status and revisit | Published rate | Minimum order and spend | URLs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| constellr The one thermal operator you can transact with at a published rate | 30 m native TIR, 10 m sharpened LSTzoom dual VNIR/TIR, 1.0–1.5 K absolute | 1.5 d, day and night SkyBee-1 and -2 in orbit | Via UP42: LSTprecision catalogue 54,700 credits/scene, tasking 303,600 credits/scene, 15×15 km Own site publishes no rate | ~€547 One catalogue scene on UP42. Tasking ~€3,036. Free via the ESA Announcement of Opportunity by accepted proposal, though self-service archive is not yet available. | |
| Hydrosat | 30 m VNIR, 70 m LWIR Osiris next generation at 25 m LWIR, 10 m VNIR, launching 2027 | Growing constellation VanZyl-1 and -2 | Not published | Not published Discovery Portal, launched 1 July 2026 over more than 500 million km², allows evaluation before purchase. Subscription or scene-based. | |
| SatVu HotSat-2 in commercial operation since 29 June 2026 | ~3.5 m MWIR, ~3.5×4.5 km scene 60-second thermal video | HotSat-2 operational; HotSat-3 to -6 contracted HotSat-1 operated Jun–Dec 2023 | Not published | Not published Price is checked in-platform before order. The earlier Early Access credit scheme is no longer advertised. | |
| OroraTech | ~200 m | High cadence 14 satellites in orbit; up to 96 payloads planned with Eutelsat | Not published | Not published Sold as wildfire alerting subscriptions, not scenes. |
Usually the cheapest way to pilot a sensor, because they replace an operator’s annual commitment with a single transaction. Keep two things apart: minimum spend, which is generally zero on these platforms, and minimum order area, which is set per sensor by the supplying operator. A platform with no minimum spend can still bill you for twenty-five square kilometres you did not want.
| Platform | Coverage | Pricing model | Minimum order and spend | URLs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SkyFi | 300+ satellite and aerial sources across 40+ partners: Vantor, Planet, ICEYE US, Umbra, Satellogic, Near Space Labs, Vexcel. | Optical from $5 / km² archive, $8 / km² tasking SAR $450 and $675 per scene 3D products from $7.50 / km² Basemaps from $9 / km² at 50 cm | ~$9 No subscription, contract or minimum spend for self-serve. Per-sensor area minimums run 1 km² for basemaps and Vantor archive, 5 km² for Satellogic archive, 25 km² for Vantor tasking, one scene for SAR. | |
| UP42 | Airbus, Planet, Pixxel, Capella, ICEYE, Umbra, Synspective, BlackSky, Wyvern, constellr. Owned by Neo Space Group since July 2025. | Credits. 100 credits = €1, valid 24 months, spent first-in-first-out. Processing algorithms priced by AOI extent. 5% bonus on purchases above 1,000,000 credits | ~€90 Lowest firmly listed single item is BlackSky catalogue at 9,000 credits/scene. Several collections have withdrawn published credit figures and now quote at order creation. Area minimums are set by the supplying operator, not UP42. | |
| SkyWatch | 700+ sources across 400+ providers: satellite, elevation, aerial and drone. Esri ArcGIS Pro add-in. Formerly EarthCache, now SkyWatch HUB. | Single normalised price list across all sensor types. Optical archive $2.50–25.00 / km², tasking $3.50–30.00 / km² Elevation from $8.75 / km², aerial $50–67 / km², drone $45 per 0.1 km² | Order area from 0.1 km² The lowest published minimum on this page by a wide margin, which makes the nominal floor a rounding error rather than a real entry point. Budget from the sensor rate, not the minimum. | |
| Sfera | Nine operators across optical, SAR, thermal, hyperspectral and RF: Capella, 21AT, SIIS, SatVu, Aistech, Wyvern, Unseenlabs. Plus a 12-site ground station network. | Archive 0.8 m $6 / km², 0.5 m $12, 0.3 m $16 Daily tasking $9–30 / km² Ground stations from €3 / min | $90 15 km² archive minimum × $6/km², which is how the platform markets itself. Tasking minimums run 50–100 km², with pilot orders from 10 km². SAR, thermal, hyperspectral and RF remain quote-only. | |
| EOSDA LandViewer | Satellogic, BlackSky, SpaceWill, SIIS, 21AT, GeoSat, with in-browser analysis. Added general tasking in January 2026. | Per scene and per km². 30–40 cm $24 tasking / $16 archive 50–60 cm $12 / $11 70–80 cm $12 / $4.50 1–1.5 m $10 / $1.70 | $550 One BlackSky Gen-3 archive scene. Tasking floor $1,100. The stated tasking minimum differs between the product page (10 km²) and the current PDF rate list (~25 km²). | |
| XRTech Group | Very-high-resolution optical reseller, volume-oriented. | 31–50 cm archive ~$13 / km² 31–50 cm tasking ~$20 / km² standard, $37 priority, $66 emergency | ~$325 25 km² archive minimum. Tasking floor ~$2,000 at a 100 km² minimum. The model is built to scale down per km² on volume. |
One caution on citing these rates. Several platforms have withdrawn published figures over the past year rather than raised them: UP42 no longer shows per-collection credit prices on several listings, and SkyFi’s tiered per-square-kilometre tables by resolution band are no longer on the site. Where a number here is a platform headline rather than a live tier, the row says so. Note also that SkyFi’s own FAQ and its basemap page disagree on the basemap floor, at $1/km² and $9/km² respectively; the higher figure is the one attached to a named product.
Every route on this page, sorted by the smallest cheque that buys usable data. Bars are scaled to $5,000, the top of the range. This is the table to keep open when someone asks whether a pilot fits inside discretionary funds.
| # | Route | Product | Minimum order | Minimum spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Public missions | Sentinel, Landsat, NISAR, PACE, EMIT, EnMAP, PRISMA, MODIS | One scene or granule | $0 |
| 02 | Open data programmes | Umbra and ICEYE 16 cm SAR, Wyvern 5.3 m, Tanager 426-band, Capella | None | $0 |
| 03 | Academic programmes | NASA CSDA, Planet E&R Basic, ESA TPM, constellr AO | Accepted proposal or eligibility check | $0 |
| 04 | SkyWatch archive | Normalised multi-provider optical | 0.1 km² | ~$0.25 |
| 05 | SkyFi basemap | Vantor Vivid mosaic at 50 cm | 1 km² | ~$9 |
| 06 | SkyFi archive | Satellogic optical to ~1 m | 5 km² | ~$25 |
| 07 | Satellogic direct | 70–99 cm archive, plus co-registered HSI | 1 tile, up to 16 km² | ~$64 |
| 08 | UP42 catalogue | BlackSky 35 cm optical scene | 9,000 credits | ~€90 |
| 09 | Sfera archive | 0.8 m optical | 15 km² | $90 |
| 10 | Planet Select archive | SkySat 50 cm, operated by SkyFi | $150 order minimum | $150 |
| 11 | Satellogic direct | 70–99 cm standard tasking | 25 km² | $250 |
| 12 | SkyFi tasking | 50 cm optical, Vantor or Planet | 25 km² | $300 |
| 13 | Planet Select tasking | SkySat 50 cm, 7-day window | $300 order minimum | $300 |
| 14 | XRTech archive | 31–50 cm optical | 25 km² | ~$325 |
| 15 | Satellogic direct | Standard area coverage | 50 km² | $400 |
| 16 | SkyFi SAR archive | ICEYE US or Umbra scene | One scene | $450 |
| 17 | constellr via UP42 | LSTprecision 30 m thermal, 15×15 km | One scene | ~€547 |
| 18 | EOSDA archive | BlackSky Gen-3 35 cm scene | One scene | $550 |
| 19 | Umbra tasking | 1 m spotlight, 5×5 km | One scene | $675 |
| 20 | SkyFi SAR tasking | 25 cm SAR scene | One scene | $675 |
| 21 | Pixxel tasking | 5.4 m, 135-band VNIR, 20% cloud ceiling | 100 km² | $800 |
| 22 | Pixxel tasking | Same, 10% cloud ceiling, +15% | 100 km² | $920 |
| 23 | EOSDA tasking | BlackSky Gen-3 35 cm | 10–25 km² | $1,100 |
| 24 | Umbra tasking | Natural footprint | One scene | $1,500 |
| 25 | XRTech tasking | 31–50 cm optical | 100 km² | ~$2,000 |
| 26 | constellr via UP42 | LSTprecision tasked | One scene | ~€3,036 |
| 27 | Umbra tasking | 25 cm spotlight, 5×5 km | One scene | $3,250 |
| 28 | Umbra tasking | Dwell, 5×5 km | One scene | $4,750 |
| 29 | Quote-only operators | Vantor direct, Airbus, Capella, ICEYE direct, Synspective, Hydrosat, SatVu, OroraTech, Orbital Sidekick, Planet Tanager | Airbus: 25 km² archive, 100 km² new acquisition. Others unpublished. | Unknown |
The part that usually matters most for a lab budget, and the part that has moved most since the last revision. Two corrections are worth a proposal rewrite. Planet’s free tier is three thousand square kilometres a month, not the hundred million a year that circulates in grant applications — that figure is a $35,000 campus licence. And most of the ESA Third Party Missions archive has been closed since June 2026 during a migration, with no reopening yet.
| Programme | What you get | Eligibility | Minimum order and spend | URLs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NASA CSDA | Twenty-five vendors, up from seventeen: Airbus, BlackSky, Capella, GeoOptics, GHGSat, Hydrosat, ICEYE, ImageSat, Kuva Space, MDA Space, Muon Space, Orbital Sidekick, OroraTech, Pixxel, Planet, PlanetiQ, Polar Geospatial Center, Satellogic, Satlantis, Spire, Teledyne Brown, Tomorrow.io, Umbra, Vantor, Wyvern. Multispectral, hyperspectral, SAR, thermal, greenhouse gas, precipitation radar, GNSS-RO and DEM. | Researchers funded by US federal, state, local, territorial or tribal government. Authorization-based under three EULA tiers: USG, USG Plus, Public. Publications carry the standard CSDA acknowledgment. | $0 No order minimum. Volume is bounded per vendor: Planet, for instance, allocates 5,000,000 km² per user. On-Ramp 2 in June 2026 added eight providers under a $476M ceiling running to November 2028. | |
| Planet Education & Research | Basic, the free tier: PlanetScope and RapidEye, with a 30-day delay on PlanetScope mosaics under a personal research licence. Research and Campus tiers are paid and add archive volume, and Campus adds SkySat archive. | Students, researchers, technical staff and faculty at accredited universities. Institutional email required. Nonprofit and government employees are not eligible. Accounts run one year and approval takes up to three weeks. | $0 at 3,000 km² / month This is the correction most likely to change a budget line. The widely quoted 100 million km² figure is the Campus tier at $35,000 a year; Research is $15,000 a year for 30 million km². The free tier is three orders of magnitude smaller. | |
| ESA Earthnet Third Party Missions | Pléiades Neo, WorldView and WorldView Legion, PlanetScope, SkySat, RapidEye, GEOSAT-2, COSMO-SkyMed, TerraSAR-X, ICEYE, constellr LST. | Residents of ESA Member and Cooperating States, plus Canada, though eligibility is set per collection rather than by a blanket rule. Project proposal required. | Largely suspended From 30 June 2026 a large set of ESA-archive collections closed during migration to a new dissemination service, with reopening expected in Q4 2026 and not yet delivered. Where open, evaluation for restrained collections runs about nine weeks, not two. Airbus order minimums still apply within an accepted quota. | |
| Copernicus Data Space | Full Sentinel archive plus Copernicus Contributing Missions, with STAC, openEO, OData and Sentinel Hub APIs. | Open to all. Commercial terms apply above quota, via CREODIAS subscriptions. | $0 10,000 Sentinel Hub processing units and 10,000 requests per month, at 300 of each per minute, plus bandwidth and transfer caps. | |
| Google Earth Engine | Multi-petabyte catalogue with server-side compute. | Free for academic research and teaching. Since 27 April 2026 noncommercial projects carry a monthly compute quota across three tiers: Community at 150 EECU-hours, Contributor at 1,000 with a billing account attached but no charge, and Partner at 100,000 by application. | $0 to the quota Exceeding it drops the project into restricted mode with reduced throughput rather than a hard cutoff. Quota resets monthly and does not roll over. Commercial plans start at $500 a month, with overage from $0.40 per EECU-hour. | |
| Microsoft Planetary Computer | STAC-indexed catalogue on Azure Blob Storage. | Open, no account required. The compute Hub was retired in June 2024 and the catalogue and API remain live. Planetary Computer Pro reached general availability in June 2026 for private geospatial data. | $0 Egress charges apply if you pull outside Azure at scale. | |
| Awesome GEE Community Catalog | Community-ingested collections, including the open hyperspectral and SAR programmes listed above. 4,378 assets across roughly 585 TB. | Open. Grassroots and unfunded. | $0 |
NASA CSDA, by contrast, has grown rather than shrunk: twenty-five vendors against seventeen, with eight added under the June 2026 On-Ramp 2 awards and a $476 million ceiling running to November 2028. The programme runs an update briefing in late September 2026, so this row will need checking again shortly.
The same levers recur across vendors, and they compound multiplicatively rather than adding. Budget from the combination, not the headline per-square-kilometre rate.
Published per-square-kilometre rates, and the minimum spends derived from them, are entry points for small self-serve orders and diverge sharply from negotiated volume contracts. Above a few thousand square kilometres a year, list price is not informative.
Vantor, Airbus, BlackSky, Capella, ICEYE, Synspective and every thermal operator except constellr publish no rate card. Figures attributed to them here come from resellers and marketplace listings, not the operators. Confirm anything budget-critical directly with the vendor before it enters a proposal.