Commercial Earth-observation companies sell what public programmes do not: very high spatial resolution — down to roughly 30 cm — and on-demand tasking of specific targets at specific times. Operators such as Maxar and Airbus fly agile sub-metre optical satellites; Planet images all land daily at 3 m; newer ventures field radar and thermal constellations. For building-level mapping and time-critical intelligence, this market is where imagery comes from.
What sub-metre resolution buys
At 30–50 cm, individual buildings, vehicles, road markings, pipeline scars and construction stages are directly interpretable. Feature extraction — footprints, roads, assets — becomes feasible at engineering usefulness, and photogrammetric processing of stereo collections yields elevation models and 3D city inputs.
The trade-offs are narrow swaths, licence-based pricing per square kilometre, and archives that are rich over cities but sparse over remote areas until tasked.
Archive versus tasking
Archive purchases retrieve existing scenes — fast and cheaper, ideal when any recent date serves. Tasking commissions a future acquisition with parameters (resolution, angle, window, cloud threshold) and priority tiers that determine how aggressively the operator pursues your shot.
Programmes with recurring needs negotiate subscriptions or area-monitoring contracts, which change the economics substantially compared with scene-by-scene buying.
Navigating a vendor-neutral buy
Requirements should drive sensor choice: mapping accuracy needs, spectral bands, stereo, revisit and budget rarely point to a single obvious vendor. Licensing deserves equal attention — who may use the imagery, in what products, for how long — since licences, not pixels, are what you actually purchase.
This is why procurement support exists as a service: matching requirements to constellations, negotiating multi-vendor pricing, and quality-checking deliveries against specification.