The desktop tools put this behind a four-figure licence and a Windows workstation, and the cloud ones put it behind a beta you cannot export from. You already have the footage. This is what each of them costs today, what you get here instead, and where the output is genuinely not good enough.
The 3D reconstruction from images is in the box; the Gaussian splat output is a Flagship-licence feature. Third-party listings put Flagship between $2,800 and $4,400, and one reseller quotes $3,640 for a year or $10,450 permanent. Version 5.3.0 in July 2026 removed the old scale ceiling and added keyframe extraction from video. thefuture3d and reseller listings, as read 8 Sep 2026. DJI does not publish a single public price.
Splat output landed in the cloud product in October 2025 and in PIX4Dmatic in May 2026, in both cases on the Pro tier and above. The desktop path also wants Windows and an NVIDIA card with at least 10 GB of memory. PIX4Dmatic Pro is listed at $4,990 a year and the cloud Pro tier at $4,490, with the cheaper cloud tier at $1,290 not including splats. Pix4D published pricing and release notes, as read 8 Sep 2026.
Splats are a beta on the Aerial Pro tier, enabled on request, limited to a single flight of fewer than 1,000 images captured in the last 60 days. Their own help page says export is not available during the beta, which for an operator means the deliverable cannot leave the platform. The plan around it is listed at $4,188 a year. DroneDeploy help centre and pricing page, as read 8 Sep 2026.
Varjo's Teleport prices by capture rather than by seat, from $30, with an automated flight planner in front of it. It is the closest thing in the list to buying one scene at a time. Varjo Teleport pricing page, as read 8 Sep 2026.
Prices and tiers are as published or reported on 8 September 2026 and change. Feature sets differ in ways a price does not capture; this is a licence-cost comparison, not a product review.
Any drone that records video or stills. Overlapping passes at more than one height, slow enough not to smear, with the subject kept in frame. No capture app, no firmware requirement, no flight plan you have to buy.
Drop it on the convert page, which lists what it accepts and how long it takes. Processing runs on our GPUs, so there is no workstation in the loop and nothing to install.
You get a hosted scene on a URL, an iframe snippet for a site you control, and a flythrough video for the clients who will never open a 3D viewer.
Download the scene as a glTF with the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension, a PLY, or a mesh. The deliverable leaves with you rather than living inside somebody's beta.
This is the section we would want to read first, so it is not at the bottom.
It is a visual deliverable, not a survey product. Scenes are not georeferenced, they carry no coordinate reference system, and nothing here produces a bare-earth model. If a client needs measured accuracy, keep the photogrammetry pipeline you already trust and sell this beside it rather than instead of it.
That is not only true of us. An operator write-up in May 2026 lists the same complaints across the current crop of splat tools: deviation from photogrammetry of roughly 0.2 to 1.35 m, no CRS support, no bare-earth DEM, and georeferencing done by hand. Even DJI's own resellers frame the splat output as a visual product rather than a survey one. Aero Cartwright, 27 May 2026; DJI reseller material, as read 8 Sep 2026.
Quality follows the footage. Fast pans, motion blur and a subject shot from one side produce a thin or warped scene, and no amount of processing rescues coverage that was never flown. A scene that fails to build is not charged, but a scene that builds badly is a reflight.
Nothing is invented to fill a gap. A scene built from your footage is a reconstruction of what the camera saw, so a corner you did not fly is a corner that is not there. We do not offer generative staging, and the separate tool that builds an object from a prompt is never presented as a capture.
The case for adding this to a flight you are already selling is that the flight is the expensive part and it is already paid for. An operator write-up in May 2026 puts the bundled rate at about one and a half times the photogrammetry rate, with $0.30 an acre for an orthomosaic becoming $0.75 an acre when a walkthrough comes with it, on the grounds that the walkthrough adds well under an hour of processing to work already done. Aero Cartwright, 27 May 2026.
One note on vocabulary, because it costs people search traffic. The research calls this Gaussian splatting, DJI's software calls it 3DGS, and the people buying it ask for a 3D tour or a drone 3D model. They are the same output described by different audiences, and the buyer's words are the ones worth putting on your own site: a survey of the field in April 2026 could not find a single US firm advertising the technique under its technical name. thefuture3d, 4 Apr 2026.
A standard scene costs one credit, and credits come in packs:
Your first scene is free once your email is verified, a scene that fails to build is never charged, and there is no licence, no seat and no monthly minimum. The pricing page has the rest of it, including what a flown capture costs if you would rather not fly it yourself.
No. Anything that records video or stills works, and the flight matters more than the airframe: overlapping passes at more than one height, slow enough not to smear, with the subject kept in frame. There is no capture app to install and no firmware requirement.
No, and you should not sell it as though it were. What you get is a visual deliverable: a walkthrough a client can move around in, a flythrough video and files you can hand over. It is not georeferenced, it carries no coordinate reference system and it produces no bare-earth model, so if a client needs measured accuracy, keep the photogrammetry pipeline you already trust and put this beside it.
A hosted 3D scene on a link, an iframe snippet for a site you control, a flythrough video, and downloads: a glTF carrying the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension, a PLY, and a mesh. The files are yours to keep and to hand to a client.
Yes, and the arithmetic is the reason to. One operator write-up in May 2026 puts the bundled rate at about one and a half times the photogrammetry rate on the grounds that the walkthrough adds well under an hour of processing to work you were already doing. What you may do with a scene is set out in the license.
No. Processing runs on our GPUs, so the requirement is a browser and an upload. That is the main practical difference from the desktop tools, which want a workstation as well as a licence.
Yes. The technique has several names: the research calls it Gaussian splatting, DJI's software calls it 3DGS, and buyers ask for a 3D tour or a drone 3D model. They are the same output described by different audiences.