Cheap drones
A cheap drone is worth buying when the thing being cut is the camera, the case or the brand, and is not worth buying when the thing being cut is the flight control system, the battery or the radio link. Price on a drone is not a single dial. It is four or five separate decisions taken by whoever built it, and a low price always means at least one of them went the cheap way. The whole question is which one, and that is answerable from a specification page before you spend anything.
Where this class sits
Typical take-off weights for this class, on the same scale used on every class page, so the twelve can be read against one another. The only figure here with legal force is the 250 gram line.
What it costs to get flying
Rough bands for generic items, not quotations, and no particular machine is priced here. What the sum is for is the shape of the spend: the aircraft is usually the smaller half of it once the second battery, the charger and the bag are counted.
What a cheap drone actually is
A cheap drone is any multirotor sold below roughly a hundred and fifty pounds, which in practice means a machine that has given up either satellite positioning, or a mechanical camera mount, or both. It is not a design category. It is a price band that cuts across several real classes, and the honest description of what is inside it changes depending on how far down the band you go.
The figure that matters most in this band is around 150 pounds, because that is roughly where satellite position hold stops being reliably present. Below it, a buyer is often giving it up. Everything written about affordable and budget drones is really a discussion about which side of that point a particular machine sits on. What a drone actually is covers the wider family and the classes this band cuts through.
What separates cheap drones from the rest
Cheap drones are defined by a price rather than by an engineering decision, which is worth stating plainly because it is the reason the class behaves so inconsistently. Two machines at the same low price can be completely different aircraft: one may have satellite hold and a poor camera, another a decent camera and nothing holding it in the air. There is no single specification that all cheap drones share.
What is consistent is where the money is taken from, and it is taken in the same order almost every time:
| What gets cut | What the cheap version is | What it costs you in the air |
|---|---|---|
| Camera mount | A rubber bracket with software stabilisation | Tilting horizon, vibration in the footage, a cropped picture |
| Sensor | A very small sensor with an inflated resolution claim | Noise as soon as the light drops, no exposure latitude |
| Positioning | Altitude hold only, with no satellite fix | Constant drift, no return to home, aircraft lost in wind |
| Radio and video link | Ordinary Wi-Fi to a phone | Lag, dropped picture, short range, recordings with missing frames |
| Motors | Brushed rather than brushless | Short service life, less thrust, more noise |
| Battery and charger | Unbranded cells, a simple charger with no balancing | Capacity that falls away quickly, and a genuine fire risk |
| Spares and support | Nothing sold separately | One crash of useful life |
The first two cuts on that list are acceptable, and a cheap drone that made only those is a sensible purchase. The third and fourth change what the aircraft is: a machine with no satellite fix is not a cheaper version of a camera drone, it is a different thing that will be lost in the first strong breeze. The sixth is the one to take seriously.
Caution
The cell and the charger are the wrong place to save money. Lithium polymer packs from unidentified suppliers, charged on a basic charger with no per cell balancing, are a common cause of fires in this hobby. Charge in a fireproof bag on a hard surface, never unattended and never overnight, stop using any pack that has swollen, been punctured or grown hot in a crash, and do not put a damaged pack in a household bin. Take it to a household waste recycling centre and hand it to the staff rather than dropping it into any container.
What cheap drones cost
Cheap drones run from about fifteen pounds to a hundred and fifty, and the band divides into three parts that behave quite differently in the air.
Below fifty pounds the machine is a toy: brushed motors, minutes of flight, drift in any breeze, and a camera present only so that the box can mention one. Between fifty and a hundred pounds the aircraft usually gains altitude hold, folding arms and a recorded picture, but still nothing that holds a position, so it flies well on a still morning and disappoints on every other day. Between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds satellite hold starts to appear, and this is the first point in the whole range where the aircraft will stop and wait when you take your thumbs off.
The bottom of the band buys a machine to learn on and lose. The next band up buys flying time and convenience. The band above this one, from roughly two hundred to five hundred pounds, buys the mechanical gimbal, and that is where paying more stops changing the flying and starts changing only the picture. If the reason for the purchase is footage, saving a hundred pounds by staying below the gimbal is the most expensive economy available, because the recordings are the thing you were buying. Camera drones sets out exactly what the mount and the sensor are worth at each level.
What to check before buying a cheap drone
Check these in this order. The first three tell you which cuts were made, which is the only question that matters at this price.
- Search the specification for GPS or GNSS. If it is absent, the machine drifts and has no return to home, whatever the listing photographs imply.
- Search for the word gimbal. If the listing says stabilisation without saying gimbal, it means software, and software stabilisation crops the picture and cannot fix a tilted horizon.
- Read the sensor size, given as a fraction of an inch. A resolution figure quoted with no sensor size behind it is a software figure.
- Check how the video reaches you, since ordinary Wi-Fi to a phone is short range, laggy and drops in any built-up area.
- Check the take-off weight in grams with the battery, because staying under 250 g is one thing a cheap machine can genuinely give you.
- Check whether propellers, arms and batteries are sold separately, as a machine with no spares available is a machine with one accident of life in it.
- Look at the charger supplied and whether it balances cells, and budget for a proper one if it does not.
- Read the poorest reviews first and look for the same fault repeated, since a repeated fault is a design problem and a scattered one is bad luck.
What flying a cheap drone is like
Flying a cheap drone in the first ten minutes depends entirely on which cuts were made, and the difference is immediate. A machine with satellite hold flies like an expensive one: it climbs, stops and waits, and a new pilot relaxes within a minute. A machine without it never sits still, so the pilot is correcting continuously and the flight is work rather than pleasure. Nothing in the price tells you which of the two you have bought, but the specification does.
What the band demands, universally, is realism about conditions. A cheap drone is flown on still days in open ground, at modest height, within easy sight. The skill it teaches is knowing when not to fly, which is a genuinely useful thing to learn and cheaper to learn here than anywhere else.
This band punishes three things hardest. It punishes wind, because a light machine with no satellite fix goes downwind and does not come back. It punishes distance, because a Wi-Fi video link fails long before the aircraft is out of sight and a pilot who cannot see the picture usually panics. And it punishes neglect of the battery, since cheap cells lose capacity quickly and a pack that gave a full flight in the spring will give noticeably less by the autumn.
The UK rules that apply to cheap drones
Most cheap drones weigh under 250 g, which puts them in the lightest class of the Civil Aviation Authority scheme, the least demanding one, though a camera on board still brings a registration requirement with it and a heavier budget machine moves into a stricter class. Price makes no difference to any of this: the 400 foot ceiling, about 120 metres, and the requirement to keep the aircraft in your own sight apply to a thirty pound machine and a three thousand pound one alike. The Civil Aviation Authority publishes the requirements and revises them, so check the current position there, and use the site's pages on registration and where you may fly for the detail.
Cheap drones against the alternatives
Buying at a low price is a choice against two siblings, and each of them is the better answer for a large group of the people who end up here.
Camera drones are the better answer for anybody whose reason for buying is the footage. This is one of the commonest mistakes in the hobby: a buyer wants aerial video, spends a hundred pounds instead of three hundred, gets a wobbling tilted picture that no editing repairs, and buys again within the year. If a photograph or a video clip is the actual output you want, the cheap band does not produce it at any price inside itself, and waiting two months to buy properly costs less than buying twice. Camera drones covers what changes at each level of mount and sensor.
FPV and racing drones are the better answer for anybody who wants the most flying per pound. A small first person view machine and a simulator give more hours of genuine flying per pound than any budget camera machine, though the goggles and the radio are bought once and are the real cost. In that discipline the aircraft is the cheap part and crashes are repairs rather than losses.
The toy end is the better answer when the aircraft is for a child or for an indoor winter, since there is nothing in the fifty to a hundred and fifty pound band that a child will use more carefully than a twenty pound one.
Is a cheap drone the right buy for you?
Yes, if you are buying to find out whether you enjoy flying, buying for somewhere you are likely to lose the aircraft, or buying an affordable machine on a genuinely low budget with clear eyes about the picture it will produce. Below about a hundred and fifty pounds, an aircraft with satellite hold and a mediocre camera is a better purchase than one with a better camera and no hold, and that is the single most useful decision available in this band.
No, if you want usable video, or if you fly anywhere exposed. This class is also the wrong buy for anybody who will be annoyed by owning a thing that does not work well, because the money saved is small and the annoyance lasts as long as the drone does.