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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

What do you charge per kilometer, and what does the competition charge?

Everything really depends on the payload, the sensors that are used. The more expensive the payload, the higher the price. For instance, helicopters: $30-$40 for visual inspection and pictures but it gets up to $70-$100 with regular LiDARs When we reach industrial scale deployment we aim to be at the same cost as competition, with no carbon footprint (which has value for our clients) and better data quality.

Can you get cheaper?

On the surface this looks like a box ticking exercise, low cost wins. Is that not correct?

What does better quality data actually do for the customer?

No actually utilities have more and more needs concerning data quality and data type. Before the needed to make visual inspections only. Now they have to conduct multispectral inspections involving lidar, infrared, leak detection. All of this complexity data collection and they now need an efficient solution that can do all of these at once.

To what end do they need lidar/infrared data? Like, what are they actually trying to do? Meet regulatory compliance?

And what does "more efficient" mean in this context?

I guess in some sense I'm saying that shouldn't the explanation for this be something like: "owners of gas pipelines need to meet regulations imposed by Federal Agency X. They are currently spending $y dollars on it. Using our product they can be compliant and only spend (y-large number)."

or: "owners of gas piplines are at risk of multi-billion dollar fines and lawsuits. Right now they can't properly measure where they are leaking gas. Our solution lets them find the problem spots and only costs $y per year for them to mitigate their large risk"

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