Multiple questions for commercial data and fusion, process api and Planet comparison to decide on purchasing Sentinel plan

Hello!

First of all, I’m sorry if this is the wrong category to ask this or if I should ask each question separately, but support team told me these questions would be better answered here than with sales or support team.

Based on the docs, process API offers data fusion, meaning that if we also integrate Planet with your service, we will be able to use this feature to, for example, grab one Sentinel image and one Planet image to merge data and get NDVI or Moisture indexes. Am I correct? We are mainly interested in this because we need the Moisture index and for that we need the SWIR band which Planet doesn’t have, so our thinking was to combine the two of them to be able to obtain it.

Making the exact same request to the API still counts as 1 request and the proportional amount of processing units corresponding to that request correct? My question is, we need to store/cache whatever we need since making the same request would result in more usage of the plan since you don’t cache or let the same exact requests for free, am I right?

Under Commercial Third-Party Data section, in the Additional Information paragraph it says:

Data ingested in Sentinel Hub can be used for unlimited time period. Data hosting costs on Sentinel Hub are 0.03 € per GB each month. The first 12 months are free.

Does that mean that if we want Planet integration, we also need to pay for its data hosting or we can opt to use our own hosting?

What would you say is the main difference between Sentinel Hub and just using Planet? Based on what I see, the process API and straightforward computation options you provide vs getting Planet imagery and then processing it ourselves is the biggest advantage. Is that the right way to put it? Are there more? Is there any doc making this comparison to understand the value that Sentinel adds to the process rather than just using Planet?

Thank you!

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Let me try to answer your questions, one by one.

You can indeed compile a “fused layer”, which will be able to merge data from both sensors. However, you have to be aware, that sensors are not harmonised, so the indices might vary a bit.

That said, your plan does sound reasonable to me. I.e. if you combine the Planet data taken on the same date as Sentinel-2, you should be able to use the SWIR value from Sentinel and the rest from Planet.

Using Sentinel Hub APIs, each request counts as we do not cache the data on our side.

Therefore, if you want to spare the consumption, you should indeed to caching.

With Enterprise plans there are no monthly limits to the number of requests, only consumption of processing units. If you are using this for agriculture, e.g. limited to agriculture fields, you will be able to process quite a bit of data with Enterprise-S license.

If you are using Planet through Third Party Data API, these data have to be hosted on our side, due to license constraints by Planet.

You should also take into account that with Hectares under management you are paying annual subscription. If you stop paying it, you would need to stop using the data.

Note that costs of the storage will be very small compared to the cost of the commercial data.

You are right on the added value. If you use Planet data directly, you will have to do all the processing yourself (which will cost, in ICT and effort). With Sentinel Hub you get a ton of various processing capabilities.

Best,

Grega

Thanks a lot for all the answers! Super clear!

Best,

Matias

Hi @gmilcinski !

I have a pending question regarding Planet integration.

We are planning to buy a contract with Sentinel Hub but while we build a tech solution for our app, we were wondering if there’s a manual way for our agricultural engineer to use the EO Browser or another tool that would help him monitor some areas, get statistics and more, but combined with a Planet Integration.

I think that we would be able to use Planet’s products to do this manual process, but not sure if we can do it with Sentinel Hub. Can we have Planet data in some of your online web products so he can monitor manually with that?

Thanks!

For the moment, you have to use Request Builder to order the data, then you can explore it in EO Browser without the problem. We addressed this in the Webinar: