Questions asked first.

Does it work over CGNAT and consumer cellular?

Yes. Hover's field proxy initiates a single outbound UDP connection 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 on its single control port, 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 admin page on the operator's laptop shows live latency-relevant 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 operator's admin page shows a live loss chart so they can read the link 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. Recording happens on the field side, to a labeled SD card on the proxy. The operator swaps the card and hands it to evidence the same way they'd hand off a body-worn-camera card. Recording is local-first by design: an uplink failure does not lose footage. There is no cloud-side video archive; we do not retain video on Hover's relay. If your evidence policy requires a cloud archive, that's something to bring up during discovery.

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?

Per drone, monthly. Pilot is free for one drone. Operator and Pro tiers scale per drone. Enterprise has a yearly floor and is sales-led — appropriate for multi-agency deployments 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?

Not today. Hover is operated as a managed service: provisioning is human-driven and intentionally so for the current customer scale. The admin pages on the operator and proxy machines are diagnostic surfaces, not programmatic integration points. A management portal and a third-party integration API are roadmap items, not shipped.

What happens to my data if we end the contract?

Field-side recordings are on your hardware and stay with you. The cloud relay does not hold customer video. Operational logs (connection events, retransmit counters, no payloads) are retained 30 days by default and deleted on contract 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?

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