The three ways to pay for ocean data
Most monitoring budgets are not limited by the science, but by the platform that carries it. The same sensors cost very different amounts to keep at sea depending on whether they ride a ship, a mooring or an autonomous vehicle.
Research vessel
£25k-£50k per day. Full capability and a crew on deck, but you pay for every day at sea, plus transit and weather days, and data stops when the ship leaves station.
Moored buoy
£100k-£1M+ installed. A long time series at one fixed point, once the buoy, mooring, deployment vessel, permits and maintenance are counted. It cannot be moved.
Autonomous USV
From £40k per unit. Continuous data for months, relocatable on command, deployed by one person from shore. Or take it as data-as-a-service with no capital cost.
How the cost actually breaks down
A ship charter day rate already includes crew, fuel, mobilisation and the vessel itself, so persistent coverage means paying that rate for weeks. A moored buoy front-loads the cost: the buoy is the small part, and the anchor, mooring hardware, deployment vessel, seabed permits and maintenance visits dominate the lifetime bill. A Scout USV removes most of those line items. It is solar-electric, so there is no fuel; one person launches it from a slipway, beach or boat, so there is no support vessel just to reach the site; and it stays on station for 6+ months, so a single deployment covers a whole season.
Buy, lease or data-as-a-service
There are three ways to put Scout to work, and the cheapest depends on how often you collect data. Buy a Scout from £40,000 per unit if you will run many missions a year and want to operate in-house. Ask us about lease and charter options if you need a platform for a single season without owning it. Or take fully managed data-as-a-service: no hardware, no crew and no capital cost, with quality-controlled data delivered straight to your own cloud, priced per mission or by subscription.
Compare the methods in detail
See the head-to-head cost of a research vessel charter and a moored buoy, the full picture of ocean data collection methods, or new to the terms, the ocean robotics glossary.