Your people are out there. Running a TAK server is the only thing standing between you and seeing them.

The twenty minutes this is for

It is the middle of something, and somebody asks where a unit is. The honest answer is that you knew twenty minutes ago. The radio still works — it is carrying the question rather than the answer, one transmission at a time.

TAK was built for exactly this, and the clients are free. What stops most teams from having it is not the cost and not the difficulty. It is that somebody has to stand up a server, keep a certificate authority alive after that, and be the person who owns both at two in the morning.

Those are the two problems. A server nobody has patched in eight months is worse than no server, and a certificate that expired on a Friday night is a real operational problem for whoever is on the map at the time. What we sell is not the software — it is not having to be the person who owns them.

What a hosted TAK server actually takes off your plate

TAK Server is free to download and free to licence. Neither of those is the expensive part. The expensive part is everything wrapped around it: a Linux host that stays patched, a certificate authority you stand up and then have to rotate, TLS and DNS that have to keep working, a database somebody backs up, and a person who owns all of it at two in the morning when a certificate expires.

A cloud based TAK server removes that whole category of work rather than making it easier. You create an account, create a network, and hand out enrolment packages. The server is already running, already holds a valid certificate chain, and was already patched this week.

• A certificate authority that issues, enrols and rotates without anyone opening OpenSSL
• TLS, DNS and a hostname that already resolve
• Updates applied continuously, not in a maintenance window somebody has to schedule
• Capacity that follows the team, instead of a box you sized last year
• Federation configured from a console instead of by hand-editing XML at both ends

Works with the TAK clients you already run

ATAK on Android, iTAK on iOS and WinTAK on Windows all connect to the same network, unmodified. There is no ArgusTAK client to install and no fork of anything to keep up with. The clients come from tak.gov and reach us exactly the way they would reach a server you built yourself.

Getting a device on is a data package, not a support ticket. Generate one in the console, send it to the operator, and they import it. The certificate, the hostname and the channel configuration all travel inside it, so nobody is reading a hostname down a phone line or typing a port number into a form.

What it costs to find out

Five connected devices, 10 MB of storage and automated certificates are free, with no card and no clock on it. That is enough to put a squad, a crew or a hunting party on one map and decide whether TAK is the right tool before spending anything at all.

Past that, Team is $3 per user per month and adds organization management, expanded storage, inter-organization federation, and data packages and missions. It is also where streaming video becomes possible, with each feed drawing on the same allowance as your users and devices. The pricing page has the detail.

When you should run TAK Server yourself instead

Not everyone should buy this. If you already run Linux services in production, already operate a certificate authority, and already have a patching schedule somebody is accountable for, then self-hosting TAK Server works and costs you nothing in licence fees. Plenty of organizations should do exactly that, and we would rather say so here than after you have paid us.

The case for hosting is narrower than “it is easier”, and it is the one made at the top of this page. The full comparison goes through it line by line.

If policy requires the data to stay in a named country or cloud, that is a different question again, and the answer is a private server — the same service, in a region you choose.