The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International is selling subscription access to a database built from more than one million U.S. drone registrations, and it wants between $5,000 and $8,500 for it. The product, Federal UAS Registration Intelligence, appeared on the association’s site in July 2026. It promises manufacturer market share, fleet sizes by named registrant organization, Remote ID compliance rates, and prospect lists for anyone selling into the American drone market.

There is a problem with that pitch, and it has nothing to do with how the community feels about AUVSI. The Federal Aviation Administration does not publish this dataset. DroneXL checked the agency’s Freedom of Information Act reading room on July 31, 2026: the most recent bulk drone registration file the FAA has released to the public covers the third quarter of 2023, and it contains no names at all.

That gap between what AUVSI is selling and what the government makes available is the story. Everything else is noise.

AUVSI Is Charging Up To $8,500 For Registration-Level Drone Market Data

Federal UAS Registration Intelligence is a Tableau workbook sold as a subscription, priced at $5,000 for AUVSI members and $6,000 for non-members during an early window capped at 25 buyers, then rising to $7,500 and $8,500 once that window closes. AUVSI’s own materials are inconsistent about what a subscription actually includes: the pricing header promises quarterly check-ins with every purchase, while the tier listings describe them as merely available, and the marketing deck lists a two-hour onboarding call in one place and a one-hour call in another.

Four dashboards sit inside the workbook. They cover registrations by year and manufacturer, operator counts mapped by city and state, fleet sizes broken out by registrant organization, and a manufacturer deep dive that ties model adoption to country of origin. AUVSI says the underlying records were cleaned and de-duplicated, then enriched with equipment specifications from its own Uncrewed Systems and Robotics Database. The headline figures are 1 million-plus registrations and 46,000-plus registered organizations.

The marketing deck AUVSI published alongside the product page frames the pitch with a slide headed “The Industry Has Been Flying Blind” and lists the questions its analysts will answer for consulting clients. Two of them: how many operators fly Chinese-manufactured drones in a given geography, and which Part 107 operators registered in the last twelve months with fleets of ten or more aircraft.

The FAA Stopped Publishing Drone Registration Files Nearly Three Years Ago

The only bulk small-drone registration data the FAA releases to the public is a quarterly geographic listing posted in its electronic reading room, and that series runs from the fourth quarter of 2015 through the third quarter of 2023 before stopping without explanation. The page was last updated in February 2026.

Those files are geographic by design. The first full release, analyzed in 2017, contained country, state, city, ZIP code, and hobbyist or non-hobbyist status, with aircraft type and a timestamp added for non-hobbyist records. No registrant names. No organization names. Nothing that would let you build a fleet-size table for 46,000 named entities.

The registry split matters here. Aircraft registered under Part 47 with N-numbers sit in a publicly downloadable file. Small drones registered under Part 48 with FA numbers do not, as drone attorneys have documented for years. When a requester asked the FAA in 2022 for a complete electronic list of every Part 48 aircraft, the agency refused, citing personally identifiable information in plain language: “All information that falls under PII isn’t releasable.”

Federal Privacy Rules Allow Public Drone Owner Lookups Only One Aircraft At A Time

The governing document is DOT/FAA-801, the system of records notice covering aircraft registration, and its first routine use permits public disclosure of an owner’s name, address, registration number, and aircraft type through the Aircraft Registry before carving out small drones entirely.

For aircraft registered under 14 CFR Part 48, the notice states that the public “may only retrieve the name and address of owners” by the unique identifier displayed on the aircraft. One drone, one lookup, and you need the number off the airframe to do it. Email addresses, credit card information, and drone owners’ phone numbers are excluded outright. When the FAA released registration data in 2016 in response to public records requests, it posted city, state, and ZIP only, withholding names and street addresses under the privacy exemption.

The agency built a separate, credentialed channel for everyone who needs more. DiSCVR gives vetted federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement a query path from a Remote ID broadcast or serial number to the registration and authorization records behind it. Access runs through a Department of Homeland Security portal. DroneXL has covered what that capability looks like in the field, when a California fire agency used Remote ID to identify pilots interfering with a hazmat response. The point of DiSCVR is that this data is restricted enough to require a badge and a portal account.

AUVSI’s Own Page Says Its Update Pipeline Is Not Confirmed

Buried in the statistics block on AUVSI’s product page, directly beneath the promise of refreshed data, sits a four-word qualifier describing the quarterly update cadence that the whole subscription is sold on, and it is not the language of a signed data agreement.

The qualifier reads “pending FAA confirmation.”

Read it against everything above. An organization with a licensed feed from the FAA does not describe its refresh schedule as pending the agency’s confirmation. Neither the product page nor the marketing deck says where the initial dataset came from. Both describe years of cleaning and standardizing work by the research team, which tells a buyer about effort and nothing about provenance.

Operators Are Angry, And The Strongest Objection Is Not The One Being Shouted

Reaction inside a large private group for commercial drone pilots ran hot within hours, with hundreds of comments about consent and demands that members be removed from the dataset, and several operators saying they had emailed the FAA privacy office directly. None of that is verifiable from outside the group, and it should not be the basis for anyone’s conclusion.

The anger is understandable and mostly aimed at the wrong target. Nothing in AUVSI’s published materials offers a searchable directory of hobbyists’ home addresses. The dashboards described are organizational and aggregate. Manned aircraft ownership has been a public record for decades, the Part 107 remote pilot certificate file is public by statute with an address opt-out, and Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) records alongside published waiver decisions are lawful material for a competent analyst to work with. A skilled team could assemble a great deal from open sources.

There is a plainer possibility worth naming. The 46,000 organizations may not have come from the FAA at all. AUVSI holds membership rolls, exhibitor lists, Green UAS applicant files, and access to commercial business registries, and if organizational identity came from those files while the FAA supplied only counts and geography, the privacy complaint collapses on its own.

Which is where the product runs into itself. AUVSI is not marketing an inference model. It is marketing registration-level truth as the alternative to estimates, and charging a premium for the distinction. If the dataset genuinely is what the marketing says it is, the sourcing question is live and the FAA needs to answer it. If it was assembled from public files and scraped authorizations cross-referenced against member data, then the central sales claim is doing more work than the underlying records support, and the first 25 buyers are paying $5,000 for something closer to a very good estimate. AUVSI can resolve this in a paragraph. It has not.

DroneXL’s Take

I have been reporting on this association for a long time, and the pattern is consistent. In 2024 DroneXL published documents showing AUVSI privately backing an immediate Utah ban while telling webinar audiences it only wanted transition periods. In 2025 we took apart its letter opposing California’s AB 1160. In February 2026 it ran the same playbook for robotics. In May its CEO stood on a stage in Detroit and defended an FCC Covered List action broader than the one the association claims it lobbied for.

Now that same organization is selling the map of what American operators actually fly, with a government and policy use case built explicitly around tracking foreign equipment penetration by manufacturer. The pilots who bought the DJI fleets AUVSI spent three years lobbying against are now line items in a dashboard sold to their competitors and their insurers. Call that whatever you want. It is not neutral research.

The FAA owns a share of this too. Its public registration file went dark after the third quarter of 2023, and a free anonymized quarterly release covering manufacturer, model, weight class, and state would have made a $7,500 subscription unsellable while giving researchers and working pilots the same numbers. An anonymized federal dataset costs the agency almost nothing and takes the privacy question off the table permanently. The vacuum created the product. Agencies that stop publishing should expect somebody to monetize the silence.

So here is what I want. AUVSI should publish its data provenance before it takes another dollar. If the answer is public records requests and reading-room files, say so plainly and retire the ground-truth marketing. If the answer is anything else, pilots deserve to hear it from the FAA, not from a trade association’s sales deck. Groups like the Drone Service Providers Alliance have shown that pressure from working operators moves federal dockets. This is worth that kind of pressure.

AUVSI holds its Fall Assembly and Drone & AAM Policy Symposium on November 9 and 10 at Nationals Park in Washington. Watch whether a single person on that stage gets asked where the data came from.

Sources: AUVSI, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Register, DOT/FAA-801, MuckRock.

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