RealEarth™ Visualize Your Data

Hello RealEarth users.  You may have noticed that we are instituting watermarking for our busiest and most frequent users as part of a volume-based cost recovery model we are beginning to roll-out.  As demand grows for RealEarth web services, we need to cover the cost of the human and compute resources that support this work.

We started as an internal research visualization service for our Center but now average 7-8-million hits a day from about 1,500 active users within any given 24hr period.  In a sense, we are becoming a victim of our own success.  We would like to continue to serve imagery through RealEarth, and our goal is to make RealEarth self-sustaining, stable, and affordable for the long-term.  We believe it makes sense at this time to ask for help from our highest-volume users.  Please visit our Access Options page for info on RealEarth Plus and RealEarth Pro.

Our fee structure is still a work in progress.  It is meant to solicit support from the users who value and depend on RealEarth the most and those who would prefer that RealEarth continued to be an option and not “go away.”  Success for us will be a self-sustaining system with low costs.  We simply hope to generate enough cashflow to keep the lights on.  We will continue to pursue grants for the development of new features and new products (we are always open to suggestions).  We will review our policies frequently and will adjust our rates to reflect community buy-in to this new cost recovery model.