A typical field monitoring use case is to watch agricultural fields through the year to observe changes and check crop health. This article works through what that consumes.

Which applies to you

Accounts on Planet Agriculture, one of the current packages, are metered in monitoring credits. Accounts bought before that change are on the Area Under Management model, where the area itself is metered in square kilometres and platform actions are metered in processing units, until they migrate.

If your plan uses monitoring credits

The same workflow consumes credits rather than processing units. What draws credits in this scenario:

• Ordering imagery — metered on the total area you order. Under Planet Agriculture, imagery inside the included two-year archive window and new capture during your contract consumes no credits.
• Data activation — charged per input item, with a 24-hour grace period, so repeated work on the same item within a day is not charged again.
• Clip and the other ordering tools — charged per input item each time they run.
• Egress — charged per GB when data is downloaded or sent to third-party cloud storage. Data kept in platform data collections incurs no egress charge.

Basic actions, including activation, clipping and egress, are not charged on Reserved plans. Current credit rates for each action are published in the platform documentation — check there rather than working from the processing unit figures below, which do not convert directly.

If your plan uses processing units

This worked example applies to plans on the Area Under Management model.

Example

*PlanetScope Scene is a single image captured by a PlanetScope satellite. For more information, refer to the PlanetScope documentation.

**For this use case, two assets are provided for each observation:

• PlanetScope 8-band atmospherically corrected surface reflectance product (ortho_analytic_8b_sr), and
• Sentinel-2

Two tools are used for both assets:

• Clip: Used to define and process specific areas of interest. Consumes 1 PU
• Harmonize: Ensures data consistency across multiple satellite sources like PlanetScope and Sentinel-2. Consumes 2 PU

PU consumption breakdown

1. Asset consumption

To observe the fields through the year you acquire assets for the whole year. With two assets per day across 292 days, at 20 PU per activation to access one asset:

2. Tools consumption

Tools total: 2,920 PU + 5,840 PU = 8,760 PU/year

3. Summary of total PU consumption for the year

Platform plans have monthly limits, so it is useful to convert the yearly figure to a monthly average:

• Monthly average: ~1,710 PU
• Cost estimate: ~$17 per year, or ~$1.42 per month, based on the PU rate for the annual Enterprise-L Platform access plan

4. Egress cost

Data download (egress) costs vary by data size: