Key terms.

Organization, tenant, team, deployment

Hover models a customer as a four-level hierarchy. Each level exists for a different reason.

• Organization (org). The top level and the billing root. One org has one subscription and one plan tier shared across everything inside it. Whoever signs up first becomes the org's first Org Admin.
• Tenant. An isolation boundary inside an org: a division, a region, a client. Deployments belong to a tenant. An org starts with one default tenant; more tenants unlock on the higher tiers.
• Team. An access group inside a tenant. Teams are granted access to specific deployments, so you can reorganize your people without changing who owns which hardware.
• Deployment. One field unit you operate, typically one drone, though it can also be a sensor or a gateway (see Assets below). A deployment has its own credentials and its own live session. Deployments are owned by a tenant and shared to teams.

People and roles

Every member of an org holds a role. Roles decide who can do what.

• Org Admin. The most senior role. Owns billing, org settings, and domain claims, and can manage everything in the org. Created automatically for whoever signs the org up.
• Tenant Admin. Manages teams, deployments, and access grants within one tenant. Does not own billing.
• Team Admin. Manages membership within one team and can request more deployment access from a Tenant Admin.
• Operator. Operates the deployments their team can access: runs the field proxy and operator client, flies, and records. No member-management rights.
• Viewer. Read-only. Sees status and the public-viewer URL; runs no operations.

Plan tiers

Every org sits on one of four tiers. Higher tiers raise your caps (how many deployments, tenants, teams, and members you can have) and unlock features. Current limits and prices are on the pricing page.

• Pilot. Free. One deployment. The simplest way to try Hover end to end.
• Crew. Paid. More deployments, tenants, and seats for a growing team.
• Fleet. Paid. Adds the capability features: cloud recording, Sentry, detections, flight telemetry, and branded share URLs.
• Enterprise. Sales-led, annual. Custom caps and retention, for multi-agency and procurement-driven deployments.

New orgs also get a 14-day trial of the Fleet feature set, so you can try those features before deciding.

Sessions and flights

These two are easy to mix up, and the difference matters when you read your history.

• Session. One paired connection, with the proxy and the client both registered and exchanging traffic. A cellular drop that forces a re-pair starts a new session.
• Flight. The customer-facing unit of work. Hover coalesces sessions separated only by a brief connectivity gap into a single flight, so a flaky uplink does not inflate your flight count. Flights are what you see and filter in the dashboard's Flights view.

Proxy, client, and the relay

Hover's job is to carry a drone's video and control link from the field to the people who need it. Three pieces do that:

• Field proxy. Runs next to the drone, on the drone's local network. Picks up the drone's video (RTSP/RTP) and MAVLink and sends them out over whatever uplink you have.
• Cloud relay (data plane). The managed hub in the cloud. The proxy and the client both connect in and stay connected; the relay forwards bytes between them and adds the loss-recovery layer that keeps cellular links reliable.
• Operator client. Runs at the command post. Exposes the drone's video and MAVLink at 127.0.0.1, so any standard ground-control software connects as if the drone were on the same desk.

You run the proxy and client with the Hover CLI (hover proxy start and hover client start) or with the Hover Relay desktop app, a point-and-click version of the same two roles for operators who do not work in a terminal. See How it works.

Sharing: public viewer and recording viewer

• Public viewer. A browser URL for watching a live feed, with no Hover account and nothing to install. A 6-digit PIN you share separately keeps a forwarded link from being opened by accident.
• Recording viewer. The same PIN-gated model for a recorded flight: replay with a timeline, instead of a live stream. Both surfaces carry your org's branding.

Sentry and detections

• Sentry. One-button camera automation for a gimbal-equipped drone holding station. Hover cycles the gimbal through points of interest you capture and hands control back the moment you touch the sticks. A Fleet-tier feature.
• Detections. AI watching the live feed against a plain-language rule you write, surfacing matches as events on the timeline. A Fleet-tier feature, currently in private beta. Sampled frames are analyzed under zero data retention; Hover stores only the event and a small cropped thumbnail, never the video.

Assets and observations

Hover is expanding from drones to any field unit you can track on a map. The vocabulary for that:

• Asset. Any field unit Hover tracks. A drone is one kind; a LoRa-mesh sensor/beacon (such as an ocean drifter) is another, and the mesh's own gateway and repeater hardware appear as assets too, each on the map with its own position.
• Observation. A geo-located, time-stamped reading an asset emits: a drone's telemetry summary, or a drifter's GPS, temperature, and wave-height readings.

See How it works for the live path, and Security for what Hover does and does not keep.