How much do drones cost?

A drone is any aircraft without a pilot on board, and under that word coexist toys, flying cameras, disposable munitions and surveillance planes the size of a business jet. The price difference between the extremes spans five orders of magnitude, so the question only has an answer by category.

A consumer quadcopter like the DJI Mini starts at around 300 euros; models with an advanced camera reach 2,000-3,000 euros. Professional drones for surveying, industrial inspection or agriculture, with multispectral sensors or LiDAR, range between 5,000 and 40,000 euros. In this segment most of the price is in the camera and software, not the aircraft.

The war in Ukraine has popularized the FPV attack drone: a racing quadcopter fitted with an explosive charge that costs between 400 and 500 euros and is manufactured by the hundreds of thousands. One step above are long-range drones like the Shahed-136, of Iranian design and copied in Russia as the Geran-2, whose cost is estimated between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars; its logic is to be cheaper than the missile that shoots it down (2025 figure).

A Turkish Bayraktar TB2 costs around 5 million dollars per unit, though it is sold in systems of several drones with control stations that run around 60-70 million. The American MQ-9 Reaper costs around 30 million per aircraft and more than 50 for a complete system according to the Air Force, and large high-altitude surveillance drones, such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk or the naval MQ-4C Triton, exceed 100 million each, more than a fighter jet costs.