🎯 The business: a licensed drone pilot with a thermal and mapping payload, inspecting roofs, towers, solar farms and crops at home, and selling the analysis side of that work to foreign clients remotely: processing their drone data, producing their reports, training their pilots. The flying stays local; the expertise exports.
At home: solar operators, roofers, insurers, utilities, construction firms and farms, at day rates of $1,000 to $3,000 or per-asset pricing. Abroad: solar and agriculture companies in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa that fly their own drones and need thermal analysis, orthomosaic processing and defect reports, at $500 to $5,000 per project, plus pilot training packages delivered in person or online.
| FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate | $175 plus study |
| Enterprise drone with radiometric thermal camera | $6,000 to $15,000 |
| Mapping and thermal analysis software, annual | $1,500 to $4,000 |
| Drone liability insurance | $600 to $2,000 |
| LLC, website with sample reports in English and Spanish | $1,000 |
| All-in | ≈ $10,000 to $22,000 |
Pass the Part 107 exam and get a thermography certification. Produce three sample deliverables (a solar thermal report, a roof inspection, a construction progress map). Sell locally first; local work funds the business and produces the case studies. Then write to solar operators and agricultural companies abroad offering data processing and reporting from their own flights, which needs no aircraft to cross a border.
Two local paid days a week is about $150,000 a year solo. Remote processing for foreign clients adds revenue without travel: a $2,000 solar farm report is a day of analysis. Training packages at $5,000 to $15,000 a week, delivered on site abroad, are the premium export and a route to ongoing processing contracts.
Part 107 for every commercial flight in the U.S., airspace authorizations and Remote ID. Flying abroad means the destination’s drone law and usually a local license or partner; most countries do not honor the FAA certificate. Exporting drones themselves can involve export controls depending on the model; exporting data analysis and training generally does not, but screen clients against restricted lists and sanctioned countries. Insurance that covers foreign work if you travel.
Weather, crashes and misread thermal data at home. Abroad: a client whose drone data is unusable, a training trip to a country whose rules changed, payment delays across borders. The operators who last build a local base, sell analysis rather than flights abroad, and partner with a licensed local pilot in each foreign market.