How to take a booking from your own client

Most paid drone work does not arrive through a website. It comes from someone who watched you fly, a friend of a past client, or an estate agent who needs one more listing shot before Friday. The flying is rarely the hard part of that work. The hard part is everything around it: settling a price, sending an invoice, waiting to be paid, and a customer who is understandably wary of paying a stranger up front.

My Offers is the part of Terasor built for that work. You write a job once at a set price. When a customer wants it, you make them a private link or show them a QR code, and they pay by card there and then. Their card is held rather than charged until they have the footage.

Terasor is early, and there is no queue of client work on the platform waiting for pilots yet. My Offers does not need one. The client is yours.

What an offer is

An offer is a job you do at a set price. You give it a title, say what the customer gets, set the price and currency, and say how quickly you deliver, anywhere from an hour to five days. You choose the kinds of work it covers, and you can add a gallery of up to five photos and two videos, either from your portfolio or uploaded fresh. Be specific about what the customer gets: that description is what the job is judged against if a customer reports a problem.

While your profile is public, each offer that is switched on gets its own page under your pilot page, at an address like terasor.com/pilots/your-name/your-offer, and it is listed on your profile. The page shows the offer, your gallery and a starting price. It does not take payment. A visitor who likes it asks you for a quote, and you agree the details with them from there.

Once an offer's description runs to at least 300 characters, its page can appear in search results. Shorter offers still work. They just stay out of search, so a one line offer does not sit in search results on its own.

You can publish offers before you have set up payouts. You need payouts set up to take payment for one.

Taking a booking

When a customer wants the job, open the offer in your dashboard and choose New booking. You can change the price for this customer and add a note for them, for example "front of the house and the garden, Thursday morning". Then choose how long the link lasts. It is two hours by default, which suits somebody standing in front of you, and you can stretch it to five days for a link you send by message.

You get a link and a QR code. The customer taps the link, or scans the code from your phone screen, and pays by card. Each link can be paid once. While one person is at the checkout, anyone else who tries the same link is turned away, and a link that has been used or has expired cannot be brought back from a photo of the code. Your dashboard shows when the link has been paid.

What the customer sees

The customer pays without making an account first. Terasor creates a free account from their email address so they can receive the footage and raise a problem if there is one, and their receipt tells them so. At checkout they tick a box asking for the job to start straight away.

Their card is held, not charged, while you do the job.

Delivering the job

The paid booking appears in your dashboard, under Quote requests for you. Fly it, then upload the footage there. When it has finished processing, the customer gets an email headed "Your footage is ready" with a private link. From that page they can watch a preview and:

• approve it, and the payment is taken;
• report a problem, with a reason, if the footage is not what the offer describes or cannot be used. The payment is taken and held by Terasor, and you are not paid until Terasor has looked into it.

If they do nothing, the payment is taken automatically 24 hours after you start uploading, or when the footage finishes processing if that is later. Once the footage is approved, by the customer or automatically, they can download the full quality file from the same link. It lasts 14 days and allows up to 10 downloads. A customer who pays and is never heard from again still gets their footage, and you still get paid.

What it costs

There is no monthly fee, nothing to publish an offer and nothing to make a booking link. When a customer pays, Terasor keeps 10% of the price and the card processing fee comes out of the other 90%. Before the payment is taken, your dashboard shows the least you will receive. Once it is taken, it shows the exact figure. The pricing page has a worked example.

The payout to your bank starts seven days after the payment is taken, and then takes the usual time for a bank transfer to arrive.

Payouts run through Stripe. They are open to pilots with a bank account and an address in the UK, the EU, Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Gibraltar, the US or Canada. Pilots elsewhere can still publish offers, and we are looking at how to reach more countries.

Flying legally

The offer form and the New booking screen carry the same reminder: you are responsible for flying legally wherever you do the job, including keeping the required distance from people. A job somebody asks for on the spot is still a flight in a public place, and the rules for your drone and your country apply as they would to any other job. Our drone laws pages set out the basics country by country.

Why run your own work through Terasor

• You are paid for work you have already agreed, without chasing an invoice. The customer's card is held before you take off.
• The customer gets a proper delivery page, with the footage, a clear way to approve it and a clear way to say something is wrong.
• Each paid booking is a completed job on your Terasor record, the same as work that came through the platform.
• If something goes wrong, there is a way to sort it out that does not depend on you and the customer agreeing on your own.

Where to start

Open My Offers in your dashboard, write your first offer, and make a booking link for the next person who asks what you charge.