The hardware number, the number that appears on no vendor quote, where the money actually comes from, and what you still own if the funding stops.
Short answer, so you have a number before you read another word. A teacher who wants to learn the technology first can start at $300. A small group or after school club starts around $2,720. A single full class period of fifteen to twenty five students runs $4,040 to $5,600 for everything needed to run the year. Those figures are for a Hopper program, they do not include shipping, and we reserve the right to increase our prices over time.
That is the hardware and curriculum number. It is not the whole budget, and the part that gets left out is the part that decides whether the program works. Here is the full picture.
One thing to say up front, because it applies to every number below. Whatever you buy, the teacher learns it first.
How a school allocates its money is the school's call, not ours. What we can tell you is what separates the programs that work from the ones that stall, and it is not the size of the purchase.
Whatever you land on, the sequence is the same. The hardware arrives, and the teacher spends real time with it before a single student is involved. Build one. Take it apart. Break something and fix it. Fly missions. Work through the coding until it does what you meant it to do. Then bring in the students, or start with one student or a teaching aide while the rest of the class comes later.
Nothing is wasted by waiting. The drones do not expire on a shelf, and your platform year is doing useful work the whole time because you are the one using it.
If you do not have the budget yet and you want to start anyway, start with yourself for $300. A Hopper alone buys the build, the components, the app, the troubleshooting, and the coding. Add the Explorer Kit for $195 and you get a second set of components, more room to break things without consequence, and a year of Build Fly Code platform access included. That is $495 for the aircraft, the spares, and the entire curriculum.
That formative period is not a trial and it is not a nice to have. It is the prerequisite, and it is the most underestimated line in any school drone budget.
Nobody itemizes teacher hours.
Building a drone, replacing a motor, diagnosing why one will not arm, running a mission, reading telemetry, working through a coding sequence that does not do what it should. Those are learnable skills and none of them are hard. But they take repetition, and the repetition has to happen at the educator level first.
This is technology education. New knowledge has to form in the teacher before it can transfer to the student and form again there.
The failure this prevents is specific. A teacher who assumed they could wing it, or that the students would figure it out together, ends up improvising in front of a class. You cannot teach what you have not learned. The hours are not a head start. They are what makes the purchase worth anything.
Budget them honestly. Summer, a prep period, a stipend, release time, whatever your district uses. Then protect them.
Bundle names are not class sizes. Here is how the arithmetic works, because the ratio is what lets you build your own number.
Plan two to four students per Hopper. Every bundle is sized so that some drones fly, some sit in the hangar as spares, and one belongs to the teacher for demonstration.
If you are working out which of those fits five sections a week, or a class that meets twice a week, or two teachers sharing one cart, ask Grace. She is the AI assistant on every page of our site and she is genuinely good at this specific problem. Give her your class size, how many sections, and how often they meet, and she will size it. She knows the hardware, the curriculum, and the platform, and she is available at any hour without scheduling a call.
We have seen every route work.
The honest summary is that the money is out there at federal, state, local, and private levels, but somebody has to go find it and write the ask. That somebody is you.
It is a smaller job than it sounds. Most of these applications run a few pages, and you already know every answer they want: how many students, which pathway, what the students will learn, what it costs. Set aside a couple of hours, write it once, and you have something you can reuse for the next cycle and the next funder.
We run a grants intake on our site where we ask a set of questions and then do the research for you. We have done many of these. Some of those schools now have the money.
When a school passes on us, we rarely get a reason. What we do know is that once money is allocated it stays allocated, so in most cases the school bought from another company. The budget did not disappear.
But there is one procurement fact worth knowing before you write the ask, because it disqualifies purchases after the number has already been approved.
Federal money cannot buy noncompliant foreign drones. Section 889 restricts specific companies and their products from federal procurement, and the American Security Drone Act extends that to federal grant dollars, which includes Perkins. State rules are tightening in the same direction. A request built around foreign hardware can pass every pedagogical review in the building and still get stopped at procurement.
Confirm compliance before you build the budget, not after. We go through the primary sources in detail in the three right questions to ask every drone education company.
A first year number is not a program budget. Here is what recurring looks like.
For a twelve drone program, years two and three run about $995 each. That is $500 for platform renewal and roughly $495 for a spare parts kit. There are no per team or per event competition fees and no separate curriculum subscription on top of the platform.
Beyond that, the variable is whatever you choose to add to the hangar: more drones as the program grows, additional components, a second activity set if you add a section.
Nothing in the hardware expires. You are renewing access to curriculum and restocking consumables, not rebuying the program.
If you are comparing this against other vendors, the three year shape of the number is the comparison that matters, and we walk through how to ask for it in what to look for in a programmable drone for high school students.
This is the line most first year budgets guess at, so here is what we know and what we do not.
Historically the consumables were mainly propellers and motors. Batteries hold up well. Since Firmware 2.0 shipped with substantially better flight control stability, we are replacing propellers, motors, and prop guards dramatically less often than we ever have. That is not a projection. We can see it.
What we cannot give you yet is a rate. The new flight control has not been in the field long enough for us to hand you a per student per semester number, and we would rather say that than invent one.
So the practical guidance is this. Stock the hangar deeper than the bundle ships. Our power and propulsion kits and spare parts kits are cheap relative to a class period lost to grounded drones. And if you ever run out of budget for prop guards or propellers and other plastic parts, print your own.
Worth noting where our incentive sits. Better firmware means less parts revenue for us, and we are fine with that.
Our hardware and software are manufactured in the United States and available on demand with roughly a two week lead time from purchase order.
The activity sets take longer. They are the one component we do not make domestically, and lead times run several weeks beyond the rest.
That sounds like a scheduling problem and it is not, because of where the activity sets sit in the curriculum. They account for about half the platform content and none of it is at the beginning. Students start with Build, Fly, and Code essentials, which carry the opening stretch of the program on hardware you already have. There is a path through the early program that is just as strong and leaves the activity set work for later. A September start does not depend on the long lead item arriving first.
One detail that matters for your timeline risk. Every Hopper is assembled, tested, and flown in San Diego, then disassembled and shipped. The unit your students build has already proven it flies. If a build does not work in class, that is a build to troubleshoot, which is the lesson.
That is also why Hopper ships unassembled. Build is the first verb in Build Fly Code. It is a design decision, not a cost cut.
Every budget conversation ends with someone asking what happens if this does not get funded again. It is a fair question and the answer is short.
Nothing on the aircraft stops working. The flight control and telemetry apps stay free, and the lifetime warranty on core electronics does not lapse with the subscription.
What you lose is platform access, which means you write your own curriculum. That is more achievable now than it has ever been. Your other exposure is spares: go easier on the parts, be careful with motors and batteries, print your own plastic parts.
That is the entire downside. The hardware does not stop working when the subscription lapses, and we keep developing it either way. It gets better and smarter regardless of what your budget did this year.
Ask any vendor you are considering the same question and compare the answers.
Then buy one drone and become the expert.
Not as a consolation. A teacher who has built a Hopper, broken it, fixed it, flown it, coded it, and troubleshot the app has something that does not depreciate, does not sit on an inventory sheet, and does not disappear when a grant cycle ends. It is also the thing that makes every later purchase work.
Break that barrier first. The fear of standing in front of a class with unfamiliar technology is the real obstacle in this category, and it goes away with hours, not with dollars.
That is how this company was founded and it is how it still works.
We are as high touch as you want us to be. We want to hear from you and we are here to support you. We serve the educator on the education technology side while serving technology education itself, and those are two different jobs that we take equally seriously.
If you are building a number to take to a principal, a CTE director, or a grant application, we will help you build it. Ask Grace to size your program. Ask us for temporary platform access and read the actual curriculum. Use our grants intake and let us do the funding research.
Then talk to a cofounder. Not a rep. We are available and happy to connect.
You never start over. Hopper is the drone you buy once, and it keeps getting better.
Rob Harvey
CEO and Cofounder, FTW Robotics
rob@ftw-robotics.ai
San Diego, California
Planning a program? Start a Program collects every guide in one place, plus free grant research for your school.
Hopper Firmware 2.0 is here. A brand new sensor fusion and flight stability algorithm delivers decisively better flight.
Hopper holds position better, responds more precisely, and handles rough landings without drama. Crash detection was rebuilt, so a normal landing no longer leaves the drone unable to take off again.
Every Hopper gets it. Free. It loads onto drones already in the field through the FTW Fly app in a few minutes. Nothing to buy, nothing to ship back, no new hardware.
That is possible because FTW owns its entire flight control and telemetry stack. American built, wholly owned, zero outside dependency. When the software gets better, the drones already in your classroom get better with it.
Watch the walkthrough, then open FTW Fly and update yours.