What it costs to find out

What free actually means here

Most teams do not fail to adopt TAK because it costs too much. They fail because trying it properly meant a project, and a project meant a budget cycle, and by the time the budget cycle ended the person who wanted it had moved on. The free tier exists to remove that entire sequence.

It is not a trial. Five connected devices, 10 MB of storage, automated certificates and all three TAK clients, with no card, no clock and nothing that switches off at the end of a month.

It exists because deciding whether TAK fits your team is genuinely hard to do from a brochure. Five devices is enough to put a patrol, a crew or a hunting party on one map for a weekend and find out properly — which is a better use of everyone’s time than a sales call.

One thing about it is easy to miss from the device count. You can be in somebody else’s network without giving up anything: they set aside a slot, you put one of your own devices in it from your own inventory, and you can swap that device or leave whenever you like. Your devices stay yours. That is usually the sticking point when two groups want to work together and neither wants to hand over their kit.

A free account runs one network of its own. Running several — separate networks for separate groups, administered together — is what an organization is for, and that starts at Team.

What Team adds, and when teams actually need it

Team is $3 per user per month, billed $36 per user annually. The line where teams cross over is usually not device count. It is the first time two groups need to see different things, or the first time somebody needs to share a mission’s imagery and overlays rather than just everyone’s positions.

One thing worth understanding before you size a plan, because it is the part teams meet unexpectedly. What you buy is a pool of tokens — the console calls them that, under Manage Tokens. Your users and devices draw on it, and so does anything else that consumes capacity: a video feed costs its bitrate’s tokens once for the publisher and once for every viewer you allow, so quality and audience multiply rather than add, and each external TAK Server you federate with costs five. None of it is metered separately or billed as an extra, which is why the number you pick matters more than the feature list.

• User and organization management — roles, invitations and per-organization isolation
• Expanded storage for imagery, overlays and data packages
• Inter-organization federation, so two agencies can share a picture without merging
• Federation with an external TAK Server — the one from tak.gov that most agencies already run. You add the peer yourself: its certificate, a hostname and port, and four switches per peer — inbound CoT, outbound CoT, and data packages in each direction, accepted and shared independently. Five tokens per peer
• Data packages and missions, with change history and subscriptions handled by the server
• Streaming video into ATAK and WinTAK, with each feed drawing on the same allowance as your users and devices rather than arriving with the plan

What is not on the bill

The price of a hosted TAK server is easy to compare against a licence fee and easy to get wrong against the alternative, because most of what self-hosting costs never appears on an invoice at all.

• No server to buy, rack or rent, and none to re-size when the team doubles
• No certificate authority to stand up, and no OpenSSL
• No patching window, and nobody carrying a phone for one
• No hostname, TLS certificate or DNS record to keep alive

Comparing this against other hosted TAK offerings

Hosted TAK is usually priced one of two ways: per connected device, or per user. They are not interchangeable. Per-device pricing punishes the team where one operator carries a phone and a tablet, and rewards the one that shares a device between shifts; per-user pricing does the reverse. Work out which shape your team is before comparing two numbers that look similar.

The second thing worth checking is what the floor costs. A per-device plan with a five-seat minimum is not free to try, whatever the per-unit figure says. Ours starts at zero for five devices because the point of a free tier is to answer the question “does TAK work for us” without a procurement conversation attached to it.

Enterprise and private servers

Enterprise is quoted individually. It covers external system federation, auditing, history and advanced routing, a support agreement, and the white box that lets a reseller sell all of it under their own brand. It is also where a private server sits — a dedicated instance in the cloud region you choose, for requirements about where data lives.

If you are still weighing hosted against building it yourself, the comparison page is more useful than this one.