Questions asked first.

Does it work over CGNAT and consumer cellular?

Yes. Hover's field proxy makes only outbound connections to the relay; nothing inbound is required. CGNAT, double-NAT, hotel WiFi, hotspot, Starlink: if the proxy can make outbound traffic to the public internet, the relay carries the rest. No firewall rules to coordinate with the carrier. No port forwards.

What drones does it work with?

Anything that exposes RTSP video and MAVLink on its local network. That covers most professional drones used in public-safety operations today, including Parrot, Skydio, Autel, and custom builds based on PX4 or ArduPilot. Hover does not modify drone firmware. If you have a candidate drone and you're not sure, send us its product spec and we'll tell you within a day.

What about latency? How "live" is live?

Sub-second is typical on stable terrestrial paths: hotspot in a city, Starlink with line of sight, fixed broadband at a command post. Latency depends on your field network, and we don't guarantee a specific number because we don't control your uplink. The Hover Relay app (and hover logs) shows live link counters so you can see what the path is actually doing.

What about packet loss? What's the operator going to see when the link is bad?

The relay carries a loss-recovery layer in both directions. Single-packet drops on a healthy cellular link are recovered transparently and do not produce visible artifacts. Sustained high loss (5%+) on a saturated uplink will eventually show up as pixelation regardless of any recovery layer. That's a UDP-video reality. The Hover Relay app shows live link health so the operator can read the state at a glance, and the relay's logs preserve the same data for after-action review.

Can multiple people watch the feed at once?

Yes. The operator client at the command post is the primary surface. The optional public viewer gives you a browser URL the incident commander can hand to a partner agency or a public-information officer; they don't install anything. Concurrent viewers on the public-viewer side are not metered today.

Does it record? What's the chain of custody?

Yes. The canonical recording is field-side, to a labeled SD card on the proxy: local-first by design, so an uplink failure doesn't lose footage. The operator swaps the card and hands it to evidence the same way they'd hand off a body-worn-camera card. On Fleet and above you can also opt a deployment into cloud recording: the flight is muxed to cloud storage so it's browsable and shareable from the dashboard, auto-deletes on a tier-based schedule (Pilot 7 days, Crew 30 days, Fleet 1 year, Enterprise custom), and is deletable sooner. The relay itself forwards video and never retains it; cloud recording is a separate, opt-in copy, and the SD card stays canonical. See Security.

What does compliance look like?

Hover has not been audited or certified against CJIS, SOC 2, FedRAMP, or HIPAA as of today. The platform is built with the practices those frameworks expect (per-session secrets, HMAC integrity, AWS-hosted compute, no warehousing of customer data) but does not carry a third-party attestation. If your procurement requires one, raise it during discovery. We will give you a straight answer about whether the framework is on a credible path or whether Hover is the wrong fit for that procurement. See the Security page for what we do today.

How does pricing actually work?

A flat monthly fee per tier, not metered per drone. Each tier raises your caps (deployments, members, tenants, teams) and unlocks features. Pilot is free with one deployment; Crew and Fleet add more; Enterprise is sales-led with an annual floor, for multi-agency and procurement-driven contracts. The pricing page has current rates. There are no per-viewer charges on the public viewer; bandwidth above ordinary-course usage may be billed separately, with notice.

Is there a self-service portal? An API? An SDK?

Yes to the portal: dash.hoverfeed.com is where you sign up, create and manage deployments, invite members, and handle billing, with no sales call required. There is no public API or SDK today; programmatic integration isn't an offered surface yet. (The Hover CLI drives the field proxy and operator client, but it's a runtime tool, not a management API.)

What happens to my data if we end the contract?

Field-side SD recordings are on your hardware and stay with you. The relay holds no customer video; if you enabled cloud recording, those copies are deleted. Session and usage events are retained only about a week; the flight-index metadata follows your tier's retention; account records are removed on termination. Specifics live in the master services agreement.

Can my agency host its own relay?

Self-hosting is not the product Hover sells today. Hover is operated as a managed service, and the cloud relay is part of what you're buying. If a procurement requires on-prem hosting, that's a conversation to have early; it's a different shape of engagement than the standard contract, and we will be honest about whether it's a fit.

Who actually operates this?

Hover is responsible for the cloud-side infrastructure, monitoring, and continued development of the platform, and is the contracting party on the master services agreement.