Paladin Drones Floats $8,000 30-Day DFR Trial As Flock Hands Out Free Pilots

Paladin Drones is offering public safety agencies a 30-day pilot of its Drone as First Responder system for $8,000, with the entry fee credited back against a full contract for up to three consecutive 30-day periods. The Houston company announced the offer on X Monday, telling agencies to book a demo before June 30 to enter the program.

The pilot covers drone and dock installation, training and implementation, and live operational use of the system inside the requesting agency’s city. The footnote in Paladin’s announcement says the credit applies for up to three 30-day periods. On the most natural reading, a department can stack consecutive pilots and roll the entry fees against a permanent contract.

DroneXL has tracked Paladin’s expansion across police and fire departments for more than a year, including programs in Stamford, Dublin, and Grand Chute. The $8,000 entry point is a new public disclosure for the company, which has historically negotiated DFR contracts through a private demo and quote process rather than publishing fixed trial pricing.

The pilot terms read against actual DFR contract sizes

To understand what $8,000 buys, look at what full DFR programs cost. Dublin, Ohio approved roughly $492,000 over three years for four DJI M30T drones running on Paladin’s autonomous deployment platform. Stamford, Connecticut launched its Paladin-equipped DJI M30 program in October 2025. Orlando just approved $6.83 million for 11 Skydio X10 drones over eight years. Brooklyn Park, Minnesota signed a $4.6 million Skydio expansion as part of a 10-year, $12.4 million Axon agreement.

An $8,000 refundable evaluation is a sales motion built for the smaller agency that cannot write a half-million-dollar check on a system it has not seen run on its own streets. The price fits a chief’s discretionary procurement authority in many jurisdictions.

The model also responds to direct pressure from Flock Safety. South Bend, Indiana is running a one-year, no-cost Flock pilot that would convert to roughly $300,000 annually if the city extends. Flock has used the same playbook in Greenville, Mississippi and elsewhere. The free entry carries an implicit conversion expectation and a year of operational dependency. Paladin’s pitch sits between Flock’s no-cost door opener and a full procurement: pay something, get the money back if you stay.

The hardware question after the FCC ban

Paladin’s traditional system pairs a modified DJI M30 or M350 with the company’s Paladin EXT LTE module and Watchtower software. That stack powers the Stamford, Dublin, Grand Chute, and Burlington deployments DroneXL has covered. It is also the stack that gets complicated after December 22, 2025, when the FCC added DJI to its Covered List. Existing DJI-based Paladin deployments are not directly affected. The ruling blocks new product authorizations going forward, and previously imported equipment remains operational. New agencies entering the trial face the harder question.

The pilot listing does not specify whether new agencies get DJI-based hardware or the NDAA-compliant Knighthawk 2.0 that Paladin revealed at the World Defense Show in Riyadh in February 2026. The Knighthawk 2.0, built in partnership with Polish manufacturer Beyond Vision, gives Paladin a clean supply chain for departments that cannot accept Chinese-origin airframes. For agencies in Florida, Tennessee, and other states that have banned Chinese drones from government use, that hardware question is the entire purchase decision.

The litigation overhang Paladin still carries

Paladin enters this sales push with a public legal fight. Court filings in late October 2025 from former Vice President of Sales Khaled Kadah allege the company owes him a $250,000 bonus and unpaid commissions, with accusations of corporate sabotage and an attempted leadership coup. Paladin disputes the claims, and the case is ongoing with no judicial findings. Long Journey Fund IV, an investor in the company, flagged concerns about leadership alignment in its filings.

Departments evaluating Paladin against Skydio and BRINC will see that litigation in any due-diligence search. A 30-day pilot that converts to a multi-year contract requires confidence in the vendor’s institutional stability. The credit structure helps the financial conversation, but it does not answer the question of who runs sales 18 months from now. Paladin also operates a separate Fortify trade-in program for fleet upgrades, so this $8,000 pilot is one of several sales motions, not the only one.

DroneXL’s Take

Paladin is doing what a Series-backed DFR vendor in a fragmenting market should do. Skydio is bundled into Axon’s body-camera installed base. BRINC works through a Motorola Solutions partnership. Flock hands out no-cost pilots backed by an ALPR install footprint that gives city managers something familiar to point at when they justify the spend. Paladin has Watchtower, an LTE-first architecture, and more than 20,000 logged flights with a 90-second average response time. An $8,000 refundable entry trial monetizes the demo without losing the deal.

DroneXL has tracked Paladin since IACP 2024, when DJI-based DFR was still the company’s core offering, through its SkyeBrowse 3D modeling partnership to its Knighthawk 2.0 reveal in Riyadh. The company has visibly evolved from a DJI integration shop into a vertically integrated DFR platform with its own NDAA-compliant aircraft. A fixed $8,000 entry with a clear credit mechanism makes the comparison easier for a small-city procurement officer who has 90 days to figure out if DFR works in their jurisdiction.

The question Paladin’s offer does not answer is the one every public safety chief will ask in the demo: which drone are we flying. The Knighthawk 2.0 was a Riyadh launch with the United States, India, and Portugal named as target markets. U.S. agencies that already operate DJI fleets have a different calculus than an Indian or Portuguese department evaluating Paladin for the first time. Watch Paladin’s communications between now and the June 30 demo deadline for whether the company commits, in writing, to a single trial hardware configuration. That question is not abstract. For an agency post-FCC ban, it is the procurement.

Source: Paladin Drones announcement on X; pilot program details at paladindrones.io/demo.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.