Most drone software demos are built to show you what the platform does well. That is fair enough, it is a sales conversation. Getting a full picture usually means asking a few questions the demo will not answer on its own.

Here are the ones worth bringing to your next call, in roughly the order they tend to matter.

Where is our data stored, and under which law?

A vendor should be able to answer this precisely, not with "in the cloud" as a full answer. Ask which country or region hosts flight logs, video and telemetry, and which legal jurisdiction governs access to it. If a government agency in another country could legally request that data, you want to know that before an incident, not after. We go into this in more depth in our piece on where European drone software is actually built, if you want to understand what to look for beyond this one question.

Which drone brands and docks do you actually support today?

Roadmaps are not support. Ask for a current list of aircraft, docks and payloads that work with the platform right now, and how new hardware gets added. If you already operate a mixed fleet, or expect to, ask for a reference customer running the same mix. This is one we get asked constantly, since a lot of our own customers run mixed fleets rather than a single brand.

What does a real integration with our other systems look like?

If you need the platform to talk to a video management system, a CAD or dispatch tool, or a mapping platform, ask to see a live example rather than a slide. Ask how long that integration took to build for the reference customer, and whether it was standard or custom work.

How do you handle regulatory compliance day to day?

Ask how pilot currency, risk assessments, checklists and audit trails work inside the platform itself, not only as an export. If you operate under EASA's specific category, or a comparable framework, ask the vendor to walk through how a routine flight is logged and reported from start to finish.

What happens to our data and configuration if we leave?

This one gets skipped more often than it should. Ask what export options exist for your flight logs, configurations and reports, and how long you have access to them after a contract ends. A straightforward answer here tends to say a lot about how the vendor thinks about the relationship.

Who can see our live video, and how is that controlled?

During an operation, footage often needs to reach more people than just the pilot. Ask how access is managed by role and by mission, whether external partners can be given time-limited access, and what your options are for on-premise or private deployment if a shared cloud does not meet your requirements. It is one of the areas where AirHub's customers tend to ask the most detailed follow-up questions, so it is worth pushing any vendor on the specifics rather than accepting a general answer.

Can we speak to a customer running a deployment similar to ours in size and sector?

Case studies are curated. A short call with an existing customer in a comparable sector, ideally at a similar scale, tends to surface the practical details a demo will not.

Bringing this into your own shortlist

These questions apply whichever platforms are on your list. For what it is worth, we get asked most of these ourselves regularly, and we would rather you ask us directly than assume.

To make that concrete: AirHub is built and hosted in Europe, hardware agnostic across drone brands and docks rather than tied to one manufacturer, and structured around the full mission lifecycle of planning, flying, logging and managing a fleet rather than one piece of it. Live video integrates directly with the video management systems agencies already run, access is controlled by role and by mission, and on-premise deployment is available for organisations that cannot use a shared cloud. It is the platform behind Dubai Police's sub-90 second Drone as First Responder programme and the 700-plus pilots Bombeiros Portugal coordinates nationally, among others. Our trust centre covers the data residency and security side in detail, and our public safety and security use case pages show how the rest of it works in practice.

If you would rather put these questions to us directly, book a demo and bring the list.