When was the photo behind your last roof report actually taken?
You paid for a measurement. What you got was a picture — shot from an airplane miles in the sky, maybe a year ago, that nobody walked out to check. You bet your margin on it. Ask the question nobody selling those reports wants to answer: how high was the plane, how old is the picture, and who actually checked it?
Three questions. Every roof report you’ve ever bought dodges all three. This page answers them.
A real roof, measured from 100 feet up. Grab it. Spin it. This is the model your estimate comes from.
How high was the plane?
Picture the airplane that shot your last report. It wasn’t at a thousand feet. The biggest providers in the country say it plainly in their own words — their planes fly to “balance resolution with efficiency.” Translation: as high as they can get away with, because higher means fewer flights and more roofs per pass.
The altitude the leading aerial provider publishes for its own camera planes. That's the picture your measurement is traced from — shot from up to three miles in the sky.
From that high, a single pixel in the photo covers about three inches of your roof. The “cutting-edge” tier gets you down to two inches a pixel. Pay for premium and the very best they offer is three-quarters of an inch — per pixel.
You wouldn’t measure a countertop from across the street. They measured the roof from the stratosphere and called it a report. Now stand on the roof. Three inches is the gap between a clean valley and a callback. It’s the difference between a step-flashing line that fits and one that doesn’t. Somebody traced your ridge, your valleys, and your step lines off a blur where one dot of color is three inches wide — and then sold you the number like it came off a tape.
“You can’t trace a valley you can’t see. So they don’t trace it. They guess it.”
The roof you’re measuring — almost invisible from up top.
How old is the picture?
Here’s the part nobody says out loud at the counter. That plane doesn’t come back next week. Most metros get re-flown one to three times a year. The satellite stuff is worse — the incumbents warn, in their own words, that imagery “can range from one-to-three years old.”
How stale the photo behind a 'current' report can be — straight from the providers' own warnings. The roof changed. The picture didn't.
The industry already has the receipt on what that costs. In one of its own published case studies, a report came back short 34 squares — because the picture it was traced from was years old and never caught a large addition that had gone up since the plane last flew. Thirty-four squares of roof, invisible, because the camera was looking at the past.
That’s not an edge case. That’s the physics of buying a measurement from a photo: by the time you order it, you’re ordering the past.
“Nine squares low on a 12/12 tear-off.” Steep roofs, tree canopy, anything the plane couldn’t see straight down — that’s where the number quietly falls apart.
And who actually checked it?
This is the one that should bother you most. Nobody. No human ever stood at that roof, looked at the photo, and signed their name to the number. An algorithm traced a year-old, three-inch-per-pixel picture, a report printed, and you got billed. That’s the whole chain of custody.
So the entire trade learned to cover for it. Pad the order. Add ten, fifteen percent waste factor to every job, every time, because “it’s better to estimate too high than too low.” That padding isn’t craftsmanship. It’s a tax you pay on a number you never trusted — bought back as wasted bundles in your dumpster and margin you’ll never see.
You’re not paying for a measurement. You’re paying for a guess, plus a tip to cover the guess.
Three questions. How high was the plane. How old is the picture. Who checked it. Every roof report you’ve ever bought fails at least one of them. We built a measurement that answers all three.
Meet Kestrel.
Kestrel is a measurement company. Not a Bench product — its own company, with its own people, doing one thing: measuring roofs from up close and standing behind the number with a human signature.
Bench holds the exclusive contract to put Kestrel measurements inside the Bench operating system. You can’t get a Kestrel measurement wired into your estimate and material order anywhere else.
Kestrel was built for roofers first — roofs are the hardest thing to measure accurately from the sky, and where the old way fails worst. It expands to other contractor trades as the work demands it.
How high?
100 feet, not 15,000.
Your crew flies the drone in a tight orbit right over the roof — about a hundred feet up instead of three miles.
How old?
Today.
The roof gets measured the day your crew flies it. No re-fly schedule. No archive. The picture is the roof as it stands right now.
Who checked it?
A person did.
Every Kestrel measurement is checked by human eyes and signed off before it becomes a number you can bid on.
Four steps from "we’re on it" to "material’s ordered."
Your crew orbits the roof.
No special pilot, no extra truck roll. Your install crew puts a drone up about a hundred feet over the house and flies a slow orbit — at least sixteen photos at twenty megapixels apiece.
The photos become a 3D model.
Those photos stitch into a dense 3D point cloud — an exact digital twin of that specific roof, every plane, ridge, valley, and penetration, captured today. (The model rotating at the top of this page was built exactly this way.)
A human checks the number.
This is the step the airplane reports skip. A person reviews the model and the measurement and signs off. No number leaves Kestrel until a human has looked at it and put their name on it.
Estimate and material order, ready inside Bench.
The verified measurement flows straight into your estimate and your material order, right inside your Bench workspace. No retyping the squares. No padding the order to cover a number you didn’t trust — because now you trust it.
Why the close-up changes everything
At a hundred feet, a twenty-megapixel drone resolves your roof at roughly one centimeter per pixel. The airplane gave you five to seven and a half centimeters per pixel — at best. Even the leading aerial provider admits drones capture detail under an inch per pixel. Same roof. A picture five to seven times sharper. Shot today, by your own crew, and checked by a human before you bid it.
One hundred feet instead of a mile and a half.
A mile-plus up
- Altitude
- 5,000–15,000 ft
- Pixel size
- ~2–3 inches of roof per dot
- Photo age
- months to years old
- Verified by
- a desk, tracing a smudge
- Hidden tax
- 10–15% padding on every order
100 feet up
- Altitude
- ~100 ft, right over the job
- Pixel size
- about 1 cm per dot — sub-inch
- Photo age
- shot today, by your own crew
- Verified by
- human eyes on every measurement
- Hidden tax
- none — you measure the real roof
Same roof. One hundred feet instead of a mile and a half. That’s not a better algorithm. That’s better physics.
We'll let the numbers stand on their own.
What a 20MP drone resolves at ~100 ft. The airplane: 5–7.5 cm per pixel, on a good day.
How far independent testing found drone-photogrammetry measurements landed from real ground truth — measured on the ground, by hand, against the model.
Share of Kestrel measurements checked and signed off by a human before you can bid on them.
The age of the picture your number comes from. Not a re-fly schedule. The day your crew flew it.
From 12,000 feet
A year-old photo, blurred edges, a missing addition, padded to protect you.
From 100 feet
Today’s flight, a 3D model, a human signature, ordered for the roof that’s actually there.
A picture shot from a hundred feet, today, by your own crew. A 3D model of that exact roof. A human signature on the number. That’s not a sharper version of the old report — it’s the opposite of it.
Measurements run on credits.
Buy a monthly bucket of credits and spend them as you measure — unused credits roll over. One bucket, no per-report invoices.
Pick your bucket
Five sizes, $50 to $1,200 a month. Refills on your billing date.
Spend as you measure
A credit is a dollar. A drone-captured, Bench-verified roof is 15 credits — $15. That's the whole bill.
Keep what’s left
What you don’t spend rolls over. No cap. Measure hard in May, coast in January.
What credits buy today
Flown by you. Verified by us.
Your crew captures the roof; Kestrel’s own people finish the measurement and sign off every number before it reaches you. The math never lands on your desk.
- Your crew flies the drone; the photos become the 3D model
- Kestrel’s live team finishes the measurement and signs off
- Verified estimate + material order land in your Bench workspace
Self-verified, for fewer credits.
Soon your own office staff will be able to verify measurements in-house — fewer credits per roof. Same credit bucket, a cheaper way to measure. Buy a bucket now and it’ll be ready when self-verify lands.
Bucket sizes
Start
$50 / mo
50 credits
Build
$150 / mo
160 credits
+6.7% bonus
Grow
$300 / mo
330 credits
+10% bonus
Pro
$600 / mo
690 credits
+15% bonus
Fleet
$1,200 / mo
1,440 credits
+20% bonus
$50 buys 50 credits. Bigger buckets throw in bonus ones, so each credit costs less than a dollar.
The fine print, plainly
- Run dry mid-month?
- Nothing extra bills. Log in and adjust your bucket any time.
- Sized it wrong?
- We keep track. Overshoot or undershoot two months in a row, and we’ll suggest a better fit.
- Don’t spend them all?
- No use-it-or-lose-it. Credits don’t expire while your bucket’s active.
- If you cancel?
- Credits stay spendable for 90 days, then expire.
A human puts eyes on every number before you bid it. Nobody in this category does that — and it’s credits, not a separate invoice.
Stop bidding off a year-old picture.
You’ve measured every roof you’ve ever quoted off a photo shot from miles up, that nobody checked, going stale before it printed. There’s a better way, and your crew already owns the drone. Put a human-checked number behind every bid — starting with the next one.
Measurements run on credits — a drone-captured, Bench-verified roof is 15 credits. Buy a monthly bucket; unused credits roll over.