DroneBase - Santa Monica, California

Timothy Bumgardner

Not a good company to work for as a pilot and from what I have heard from clients it is difficult dealing with drone base as a paying customer as well. Lack of communication is horrible. They take days to respond and leave pilots in the dark with no information. Pay for pilots is extremely low. They work poorly with clients and have pilots schedule first and then contact the person on site instead of reaching out to them first and scheduling a time that works for both the pilot and the on site contact. Just a dysfunctional company overall. Look up local drone pilots in your area and work with them or use another online service but stay away from drone base/ Zeitview.

Ryan Bliss

I wish I could leave a positive review about Drone Base, but unfortunately they have proven to be incompetent in every instance in which I have had the unfortunate experience of working with/for them. They hired me to fly a wind turbine inspection mission in 2020 with one of their direct employee pilots. Upon arriving at the job site the DB pilot had the wrong equipment for the mission and upon preflight inspection he didn’t realize that he had the wrong equipment until he launched the drone and it was incapable of capturing the data required for the mission. Once he realized this error he had to ship the equipment back to Drone Base and they were unable to send him the correct equipment until the last day of the mission (10 days later!). In the meantime I flew the entire mission with my own equipment while the DB pilot observed. In addition to this, Drone Base’s director of operations for renewables, Ryan Gaunt, refused to reimburse me for my travel expenses on days that we couldn’t fly due to high winds, which was NOT what we had agreed to for this mission. This was VERY unprofessional because I was doing them a favor by accepting this mission because they had no one else to fly it and I had to drive 18 hours EACH WAY to this wind farm. Since then I’ve flown 2 additional missions for DB, which in hindsight were poor decisions on my part, and they were equally negative experiences. They just don’t know what they’re doing. And now that it’s tax season they are the only company that is incapable of delivering a 1099 to me. Please do yourself a favor and call ANYONE else for drone missions. Call Skye Link or Measure. They are both incredibly professional, experienced and ethical drone service providers and you will be very happy with your experience working with them.

Elevated Media Company

FYI DroneBase did me wrong!
Wednesday night 8pm I get 2 new mission requests. I accepted both considering they were somewhat close to my house and I had the next day off work anyway. Thursday morning I go to the first house in 0° Indiana weather. First shoot goes great so I head to the second house straight off the address from the app. After collecting the images I head home to upload my work. I log onto my email and I have the typical Mission accepted please reply email. But on the one the address is different than the house the app sent me too. So I emailed them asking which house I needed to shoot and they replied back with the address in the email not on the app. So I fire an email right back stating that I already shot the house the app sent me to and I expect to be paid for my time and resources considering It’s not my fault they had the wrong information. They state that unfortunately they won’t be able to pay me for shooting the wrong house when it was their mistake! After multiple phone calls trying to reach someone and even more 20+ emails they tell me they will pay me 30$. I told him that was completely unacceptable in that they needed to own up and make it right. They ended up canceling my missions and are now ignoring me. I told them I am a very persistent person and will do everything in my power to make sure everyone of their pilots and clients knows how they handled this situation! I gave them every option to make things right and they let $30 ruin a working relationship. Given the chance they will do the same to you!

Parker Harrington

Let me try to respond to some of the other reviews of DroneBase here on Google.

First off, it seems DroneBase is being reviewed from both a prospective client side and a "pilot side" for people "working for" DroneBase. I can't speak to how aggressive they are with their marketing and this review is solely related to working for them.

There are two types of "missions" that they offer. The "Pano" missions are "shoot first" and then they try to sell. These can be done at your leisure and there is nothing requiring anyone to do it. I have only done one of those and it was immediately sold and I was paid.

The "Client Missions" have a guaranteed pay out which you know ahead of time before accepting the job. It might pay $125, it might pay $250 or whatever. If the time to get to job and shot list is too much to warrant the job: Skip it! But if you complete it and upload the required shots, DroneBase typically pays you, via direct deposit, within a couple of hours. I am not sure about the complaints of slow payments. In some cases, I have been paid within MINUTES of uploading. I have been working with DroneBase for not that long and earnings have been enough to keep me working for them. See my DroneBase dashboard below. Over $10,000 in earnings and another job of $250 scheduled tomorrow.

On top of that, communication and professionalism with their team has always been top notch.

Todd Dye

The customer service and quality of the video was terrible. The drone pilot let me know one evening at 5:00 he would be there at 11:00 the next morning. He let me know via email so by the time I saw the email I only had a few hours to get there. When I got there the drone pilot did not show up. He had rescheduled via email again but because I was moving things on my schedule and traveling to the location I did not get the notice of things being rescheduled. When the drone pilot finally came out I was surprised at the low quality of the video. I had him take a 360 of a rural area where the leaves on the trees with full fall colors of orange, yellow and red. These bright colors were very dull in the finished product. I emailed the owner of the company and asked if we could talk about my experience. It has been six weeks and I have not heard from him. If you are looking for professionalism and quality I did not find those things with this company.

David Clark

Chris Clay and his team at DroneBase did a great job collecting topography for my firm over an 80-acre project area. The job was estimated, executed and delivered within a two-week span. Their team was very responsive to our follow-up questions and checks to their data were extremely accurate.

Ric LaFollette

I'm with you , Ryan. At first my stuff was looked at rather quickly, but now, in my case it has been over five weeks. I was excited at first to use drone base. So much so I thought of going full time with it. But it appears that is no longer an option currently. I understand they have a huge backlog as I have gotten that response a couple times, so maybe they should hire more people? It sucks to be so excited about something turn to a potential disappointment. I was so excited to fly and plan discover new places. I still will do that of course, but making the money would have been all the sweeter. I guess upload directly to Getty directly from now on.

getoverit drones

Took a mission at my local airport. Drone Base took care of all the waivers and paper work to fly in class D airspace. The mission went off without any problems. The only reason I am holding back 1 star is the ridiculously low pay out for the mission.