How much does RTK actually cost?

Precision GNSS pricing is deliberately hard to compare, because the things being sold are not the same thing. A five-figure quote and a €300 board can both be described as “RTK”. This guide lays out what each part of the market actually charges, and — more usefully — where the costs hide.

No brand names here, deliberately. Individual products and their prices change every season; the categories and the places the money hides do not, and those are what let you compare an offer you are looking at today against one you saw last year. Treat every figure below as an order of magnitude rather than a quote — the shape of the table is the point.

The four ways centimeter GPS is sold

1. The dealer bundle — roughly $15,000–40,000

Receiver, display, steering hardware, installation, training, and a correction subscription, sold through a dealer network and often tied to a machine brand.

For that money you are buying a system, and if you need hands-off auto-steer on a specific tractor, that is a genuine thing to buy. What you are also buying is a display you may not want, a channel that has to be paid, and switching costs that appear later. Corrections at this end frequently run $1,000–2,500 a year, and are sometimes bundled in a way that makes the number hard to see at all.

The category’s weakness is that positioning has become the cheap part. The receiver inside a $25,000 system is not twenty times better than one inside a $1,000 one; the accuracy figures are broadly similar. You are paying for integration and support, which is fine — as long as you know that is what you are buying.

2. Survey-grade base and rover — roughly $4,000–15,000

Two receivers, a radio link, a controller and field software. Built for surveyors, priced for a business that bills by the day, and generally excellent hardware with excellent support.

Own the base and you own the corrections: no subscription, and it works where there is no internet. That independence is worth real money in remote work. The costs are the second receiver, the tripod and mast, power, a radio pair with range and licence limits, the accuracy of the base position (an error there is a constant error in everything you measure), and the maintenance.

3. Bare boards and DIY — roughly $200–900

A GNSS board, an antenna, and whatever you assemble around them, usually with a free community correction network or a self-hosted base.

The cheapest route by a distance, and a good one if building is part of what you want. The invoice omits: your evening spent on connectors and enclosures, correction-server configuration at the edge of a field, weatherproofing, firmware you maintain, and the fact that when it stops working in the middle of a job there is nobody to call. Support is a forum thread, and it might be a good one.

4. Finished, phone-connected receivers — roughly $500–2,000

A sealed receiver with no display of its own, pairing to the phone you already carry, with a correction subscription sold alongside.

This is the newest category and where Northing sits. The pitch is that the expensive parts of a “system” — a bright screen, a fast processor, a data connection, a device that gets replaced every few years — are already in your pocket, so you should not have to buy them again in a ruggedised form at four times the price.

Where the money actually hides

The sticker price is the part everyone compares. These are the parts that decide what you pay over five years.

Year-two corrections. The single biggest gap between a quote and a cost. Ask what year two costs, in writing, before you buy anything.

Metering. A subscription priced per connected hour, or per session, or in tiers you outgrow, will not cost what the headline says in a heavy season. Flat annual pricing is easier to plan against even when the number is not the lowest.

The display you did not want. Bundles frequently include a screen because the margin is there. If you already own a phone or tablet, it is several thousand you are spending to solve a problem you do not have.

Lock-in on cancellation. Some receivers become metre-class devices the day the subscription lapses. That converts an annual fee into a permanent one, and it should be priced as such.

Installation and training. Real costs in the dealer channel, sometimes several thousand, sometimes bundled invisibly.

What it is worth in three years. Positioning hardware holds value unevenly. A receiver tied to one dealer’s ecosystem, or one whose corrections cannot be bought separately, has a thin second-hand market because the next owner inherits the lock-in as well as the box. A receiver that speaks a published protocol and works — at reduced accuracy — with no subscription at all is a straightforwardly saleable object. Nobody includes resale in a quote, and it is a real part of the five-year number.

Your own time. The honest cost of the DIY route. Not zero, and worth pricing at whatever an hour of your time is worth — but genuinely zero if you enjoy it, which is a legitimate answer.

What about free corrections?

Free correction sources exist and they are not a trick. Two kinds are worth knowing about.

Public reference networks. Many countries run permanent GNSS stations for scientific and survey purposes and publish their data, sometimes free to anyone, sometimes free to registered users, sometimes for a fee. Where one exists near you and you are willing to do the configuration, it is a genuinely excellent deal. The catches are coverage that follows research funding rather than farmland, a baseline limit — accuracy degrades with distance from the nearest station, so being 60 km away is not the same as being 6 km away — and no service guarantee whatsoever. When it goes down for maintenance during your only dry week, that is simply how it is.

Community-run networks. Volunteers running base stations and sharing corrections. Wonderful in dense areas, absent in sparse ones, and dependent on whoever is paying for that station’s electricity staying interested.

Satellite-broadcast free modes, like Northing Global, are a third category and behave differently: no zones, no account, no internet, but convergence-based accuracy rather than instant centimeters. That trade is covered properly in RTK vs PPP.

The honest summary is that free corrections make the subscription line zero and move the cost to configuration, coverage risk, and no support. That is a good trade for some people and a bad one for others, and it depends far more on your tolerance for maintenance than on your budget.

A five-year comparison

Rough orders of magnitude rather than quotes, and the point is the shape rather than the digits:

	Up front	Corrections / yr	5-year total
Dealer bundle	$15,000–40,000	$1,000–2,500	$20,000–50,000+
Survey base + rover	$4,000–15,000	$0 (own base)	$4,000–15,000 + upkeep
Bare board + free network	$200–900	$0	$200–900 + your time
Phone-connected receiver	$500–2,000	$200–600	$1,500–4,500

The interesting result is that the two ends of that table are much closer than the middle suggests, and the difference between them is mostly who does the work — you, or the vendor.

What Northing charges, in full

• $799 one-time for the receiver, with the first 12 months of Northing RTK included.
• $299 a year after that. Flat. No per-hour metering, no tiers, and a reminder email before every renewal.
• $0 if you cancel — the receiver keeps working on Northing Global, the free mode built into every unit, anywhere on Earth, at 10–20 cm class accuracy once converged.

Five-year total if you keep the subscription: $1,995. Five-year total if you cancel after year one: $799, and you still own a working decimetre-class instrument. Both numbers are on this page because both are real outcomes.

What that does not include: nothing that we know of. There is no display to buy, no installation charge, no dealer, no activation fee, no second data plan for the receiver, and no separate charge to use the SDK.

Is it worth it for you?

A crude but useful test: what does a wrong answer cost, and how often does it happen?

If overlap and skip on repeated passes are costing you input, or a re-do costs a day, centimeter accuracy pays for itself quickly and the subscription is a rounding error against the loss. If you need to mark points and come back to them occasionally, and a hand-span of error is tolerable, you may not need a subscription at all — the free mode may be enough, and RTK vs PPP is written to help you work that out rather than to talk you into the paid one.

And if you enjoy building things, the bare-board route is genuinely good. It is not the product we sell, and it is not a worse choice for everyone.

Next: what is RTK GPS for how the technique works, or the pricing for ours in one place.

Common questions