Meet SkyGig — Every drone job's true margin

Business

SkyGig

Every drone job's true margin

What SkyGig does

You billed 250 dollars for the real-estate shoot. Then you drove 70 miles, flew two batteries, edited for three hours, and the drone, the insurance, and the recurrent training all quietly took their cut. Was the job actually worth it? SkyGig answers that question in one screen.

SkyGig is the job ledger built for solo drone pilots — the Part 107 operators flying real-estate shoots, roof inspections, mapping runs, and events on the side of another life. Enter a job in about thirty seconds: client, type, what you charged, miles driven, flight time, editing time, any hard costs. SkyGig immediately shows the real margin — revenue minus mileage at your rate, minus expenses, minus the amortized cost of every flight hour — and the effective hourly rate you truly earned once travel and editing are counted.

The heart of the app is the floor-rate engine. Tell it what your aircraft cost, what you pay in insurance, training, and software each year, and how many hours you realistically fly for money. SkyGig computes your true cost per flight hour and the minimum rate below which you are paying to fly. That single number is the difference between a side business and an expensive hobby — and almost nobody flying today knows theirs.

Everything lives on your phone. There is no account, no cloud, and no monthly fee — and no cap of three jobs a month. Client history shows who actually pays well, the season dashboard totals income, miles, hours, and margin, and when tax time comes, one export produces a clean Schedule C-ready summary of the year.

Whether you fly five jobs a month or fifty, SkyGig keeps score the way a business should: honestly, privately, and per job.

• Thirty-second job entry with revenue, miles, flight and editing time • True per-job margin and effective hourly rate • Floor-rate engine: amortized cost per flight hour and your minimum viable rate • Client history with lifetime revenue and payment status • Quote and invoice PDFs generated from any job • Season dashboard totaling income, mileage, hours, and margin • Schedule C-ready year export — fully offline, no account, no subscription

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• Job Ledger — Thirty-second job entry — client, type, revenue, miles driven, flight minutes, editing minutes, hard costs — into a month-grouped ledger where every row shows its status and computed margin.
• Margin Engine — Every job gets a waterfall breakdown: revenue minus mileage at your rate, minus expenses, minus amortized flight-hour cost, equals true margin — plus the effective hourly rate across flight, travel, and editing time.
• Floor-Rate Engine — Enter aircraft cost, insurance, training, software, and realistic annual billable hours once; SkyGig computes your true cost per flight hour and the minimum quote below which you are paying to fly.
• Clients — Client book with lifetime revenue, average margin, job history, and outstanding balances — so you know who actually pays well and who costs you money.
• Quotes & Invoices — Turn any job into a clean quote or invoice PDF with your business details, line items, mileage, and payment terms; track issued, due, and paid states.
• Season Dashboard & Tax Export — Year-to-date income, mileage, flight hours, and blended margin at a glance, plus a Schedule C-ready CSV and PDF export of the whole year for your preparer.

Why we built it

Solo drone pilots juggle job details, flight time, mileage, editing hours, and invoices across messy spreadsheets and notebooks, and routinely underprice because they never compute their true cost per flight hour — equipment amortization, insurance, recurrent training — while the dedicated incumbent (Dronedesk) is a c…

What makes it different

Dronedesk is a cloud subscription (9 GBP/mo capped at three jobs a month) oriented to airspace and ops planning, not a solo pilot's P&L DroneInvoice is a free commission marketplace with zero cost, mileage, or margin tracking; QuickBooks Self-Employed and Wave are generic bookkeeping with no concept of a flight hour,…

Who it's for

Operations leaders and small teams who want a tool in their workflow without buying another platform.

In one line: Every drone job's true margin

Try it

See the Every drone job's true margin for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use SkyGig, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.