Dronedesk Review of 2024 - Another Stellar Year!

With 2024 wrapping up, it's the perfect time to look back at what we've accomplished together this year. In this issue, we'll highlight the key achievements, share new tools and insights, and give you a glimpse of what's ahead in 2025.

As we continue to build on our success in the UK, we're excited to expand our presence into the U.S. market—bringing Dronedesk's proven tools and resources to even more operators across the globe.

Table of contents

1. System Releases
2. User Activity
3. Customer Satisfaction
4. Community Initiatives
5. Drone Industry News and Jobs
6. Sustainability
7. Business Performance
8. Other Stuff
9. Looking Ahead to 2025

System Releases

Taking on board and acting upon users' feedback and ideas has been core to Dronedesk's success. This year we deployed over 80 new features, updates and fixes across 10 releases including:

• AI survey from completion to speed up your planning
• Firmware update alerts to help you keep your drones updated
• Loads of new configuration options giving you more control
• Dronelink integration for fully automated flight logging
• Shareable job packs to enable your clients to view your job pack online
• And much more besides…

A huge proportion of our new users come from personal recommendations. So, we've created an Affiliate Program to reward our clients who generously recommend us to their friends colleagues and associates.

User Activity

Our users have completed over 33,000 jobs for 6,000 clients in more than 50 countries across the world. They've logged over 500,000 flight minutes, ticked off almost 2,000,000 checklist items and assessed an impressive 575,000 risks.

The total time our users have saved as a result of using Dronedesk, instead of traditional websites, doc templates and spreadsheets, is a mind-boggling 28,000 hours!

Customer Satisfaction

Our latest customer satisfaction survey, which we ran in December, produced another set of amazing results.

We achieved an astonishing Net Promoter Score of 80 which ranks us amongst the very best SaaS applications. And...

• 95% of users rate Customer Support as Very Good,
• 95% rate System Reliability as Very Reliable or better,
• 97% rate User-friendliness as Very User-friendly or better and
• 97% rate their Overall Satisfaction with Dronedesk as Very Satisfied or higher.

And, consistent with previous surveys, users say they've saved an average of 51 minutes of planning time per job since switching to Dronedesk.

We're incredibly proud of these results. But, there are always things that can be improved so, we'll continue to work tirelessly to keep delivering new features and performance enhancements. Our users' latest feedback will be a critical input into what comes next.

Community Initiatives

We're proud to have provided complimentary access to 20 volunteer Search & Rescue organizations this year to help them deploy their drone taskings as quickly and safely as possible.

We also try and deliver helpful tools and information for the drone community and this year we've added an Air Risk Radar website, a FRZ-checker and an AAIB Analysis portal.

You can find more information and tools on our website.

Drone Industry News and Jobs

We've reviewed 21,113 drone-related news articles from across the world this year and shared 2,385 of them with our audience. We also shared info about 231 job opportunities.

Here are the top five read news articles of the year:

• Rolls-Royce Soars into Innovation: Pioneering Photovoltaic Drones with Groundbreaking Patent [1,857 clicks in Feb]
• Drone pilot jailed after risking “catastrophic” collision with aircraft [1,324 clicks in May]
• Case Against Drone Delivery: Amazon Should Halt Airborne Ambitions [1,125 clicks in Mar]
• Super Bowl 2024 drone show will upend standard for advertising [1,026 clicks in Feb]
• Watch footage from Glastonbury 2024 drone and fireworks show [906 clicks in Jun]

Sustainability

This year we switched to 100% renewable energy, joined the United Nations Race to Zero campaign and the SME Climate Hub. We've planted 412 trees in Tanzania this year bringing our total trees planted to 1,164. And, we're just about to take delivery of our first electric car! Find out more about the action we're taking.

Business Performance

As you may already know, Dronedesk is a proudly independent bootstrapped company; we have no investors, shareholders or partners. We've been profitable since day one and have a strategy of organic growth based on delivering outstanding value for money backed up with a laser focus on customer satisfaction.

As with our previous four years in business, we've had a solid year in terms of growth. Here's a few of the headlines:

• Monthly Repeat Revenue is up 46% year-on-year
• Active subscribers is up 17% year-on-year
• Our trial conversion rate is 67% - up around 20 percentage points from last year
• Our subscriber churn rate is just 4.2% - 1 percentage point better than last year

Other Stuff

We successfully renewed our Cyber Essentials certification demonstrating our ongoing and relentless drive for security and system integrity.

We also renewed our membership of the Federation of Small Business and the UK drone industry body ARPAS-UK who continue to do some great work around consultation responses and engagement with the DfT and the CAA. We were please to also renew our membership of COMIT2DRONES and were delighted to be accepted onto the RICS technical partner program.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As the world of drone operations continues to evolve, we’re committed to making your journey more efficient, innovative, and rewarding. Each step forward—from streamlined workflows to smarter tools—will be guided by what matters most to you.

We want to hear your voice. Get in touch to share your thoughts, request new features, or tell us about your Dronedesk experience. Your insights will shape the path ahead and help us deliver the solutions you need.

Whether you’re looking to scale your operations, improve efficiency, or simplify compliance, Dronedesk is here to help.

Thank you for being part of our community—we can’t wait to see what you achieve in 2025!