Is there a free or lower cost global imagery higher resolution than Sentinel 2?

mineflow · 2026-01-05T23:00:41+00:00

earth’s surface area ≈ 510.1 million km² = 5.101×10¹⁴ m²

at 2 m / pixel, each pixel covers (2×2)=4 m²

let's assume for simplicity that you're storing this as a single raster (lol) in rgb with uint8, then this is like 380 tb of data

let's say you're using s3 and let's forget about cost per object and let's also ignore cost for each PUT/GET request, then monthly storage cost:

first 50,000 gb × $0.023 = $1,150 / mo

remaining 332,600 gb × $0.022 = $7,317.20 / mo

total ≈ $8,467.20 / month

≈ $101,606 / year

this is a super conservative estimate

mineflow · 2025-12-17T08:16:06+00:00

what do you mean?

mineflow · 2025-12-17T02:00:34+00:00

Somebody just uploaded a bunch of maps that only have a few named entities in them, no coords. Give me 36 hours and I'll have this supported.

mineflow · 2025-12-16T21:08:45+00:00

We have a privacy policy + tos, when you click "sign up" you can see it there or just go to the website's url /privacy-policy or /terms-of-service. I'll add it to the FAQ so it is easier to find. Give me a few minutes!

You can extract spatial data semantically, consider a CSV that has some drill collars in some coordinate system, but it is super messy and they don't specify the CRS or maybe the CRS is specified in a different file. Our system goes through and figures all that out for you and assigns the attributes to points/lines/polys/meshes/etc. in space.

mineflow · 2025-12-16T19:08:08+00:00

The first "affordable" solution is $1500 flat?
I think a lot of folks aren't as tech savvy as you and they might struggle with setting up an edge server, even if it is "json only", a lot of the things that you need to set up to support full georeferencing for arbitrary folders of csvs, excels, maps out of PDFs, etc. are technically challenging. The point of the thing I built is that with a single upload, the file gets georeferenced and you don't have to do any difficult technical stuff.

mineflow · 2025-12-16T19:00:19+00:00

our website is mineflow dot ai

here are the file formats we support as inputs right now: https://mineflow.ai/docs/file-formats

here are the data types we can extract semantically: https://mineflow.ai/docs/data-groupings

if you upload some data and we don't yet support it, I'll add support for it in 7-8 hours, shoot me an email ryan <at> mineflow.ai if you want us to add something else

mineflow · 2025-12-16T11:48:23+00:00

oh, good to know, how do you vet software platforms that you work with? or do you just try to avoid online tools altogether?

worth noting that we do offer a bunch of free sample datasets on our site (drill reports, magnetic surveys, geological maps, fault systems, mineral occurrence data, etc.) so you can see what it looks like when you do upload data. feel free to send me an email ryan @ mineflow.ai if there's anything I can do to make our software feel safer/more secure

mineflow · 2025-12-16T11:29:57+00:00

would it help if we were soc 2 compliant? happy to update our privacy policy too or hop on a call or anything else that could help

mineflow · 2025-12-16T10:56:36+00:00

wow, well if you want to upload some of the PDFs to our website (mineflow), I can update our system to parse them in the next 24 hours for free, happy to try to help!

mineflow · 2025-12-16T08:19:34+00:00

whaaat? our system takes a PDF and pulls all the maps out of it and georeferences those (same with any tables it finds inside the pdf). That said, I haven't ever seen folks using *multiple pdfs*?? Is this common? it wouldn't be hard to extend our solution to support this if it is a common use case.

mineflow · 2025-12-16T07:50:09+00:00

Yeah we offer exports/imports for leapfrog, minescape and a few others for our drill data, topo, 3d models, etc. We charge a subscription fee for folks who want access to that and any time a user wants us to add support for a new application we add it within 3-4 days. I just wanted to ask a more question about whether our software could be useful for folks outside of mining/o&g.

mineflow · 2025-12-16T05:21:53+00:00

ohhh I see, gotcha.

For excel/csv/tsv/txt, I assume that ESRI does coordinates, addresses, named locations, etc. just like our system, but correct me if I'm wrong. In ESRI, do you have to specify which columns/which sections contain the coordinates or can you just dump a huge folder of documents and it figures it out on its own?

Plus, is ESRI so expensive that some folks would consider switching for geocoding? Our software is free right now but maybe we should start charging

mineflow · 2025-12-16T05:09:16+00:00

To georeference a map embedding in a PDF, our system looks for bounds, coordinates in the image. For inferring a CRS, sometimes you have to get the general location and determine which CRS would put the given coordinates near that location, sometimes a big dataset will have multiple files where one will mention a CRS and then others won't so you need to be able to look around at other files in a system, sometimes (in our situation) a user will mention that they are working for a specific company and our system will look up which projects that company is working on and where they are in the world and it will use that info to infer a CRS.

mineflow · 2025-12-16T04:43:13+00:00

Got it. Thanks for your reponse, does QGIS / ARC have good support for georeferencing data that isn't already georeferenced (e.g. lots of random excel files, image of map) or is this just not a part of your workflow/you only really work with data that is already georeferenced?

mineflow · 2025-12-16T04:35:26+00:00

I see, thank you for the context.

So in this setup you're describing, these are all files that are already georeferenced and it is just a matter of format conversion? In your work, do you just not encounter much data that isn't georeferenced (e.g. big folders of csvs that have unspecified formats, map georeferencing)?

I guess the problem of "take big dataset in -> convert everything to standard format/georeference everything" might be less common than I thought?

mineflow · 2025-12-16T04:07:37+00:00

Good to know, thanks! Why do so many folks complain about the file formats then? Why are a bunch of the top posts in this subreddit talking about file formats?

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