We sell hardware. The designs are yours.
Every OpenDrone product comes with its full source on GitHub. Incutec is the Belgian startup that started the initiative, hosts this website, sells the products here, and does what the community can't do on their own.
01 · Job one: the community designs it
The direction of OpenDrone belongs to the people who fly. The community designs, reviews, tests and decides. We try to support where we can.
The intent for us is to move from designer to maintainer as contributors arrive. We believe there's plenty of talent out there to take on the challenges of hardware development. We will support that in any way we can to drive innovation in our hobby. If you feel like you want and can help, then here is how.
02 · Job two: Incutec brings it to market
Incutec handles the part you cant fork: production, quality control, certification, distribution, and the legal responsibility for what is sold. That does not change because the design is open. The best support comes from community members helping each other; our job as a small team is vertical integration, building the capability to make these things well.
The community project needs no revenue; the company manufacturing and supporting the boards does. We don't make money from ads, affiliate trackers, resold analytics, bundled apps, or features locked behind firmware keys. Our analytics are cookieless (Plausible), and the product works whether or not this web store exists.
03 · Why a company is in the loop
Incutec is a young startup from Leuven, Belgium, founded in June 2026. We're trying out a new business model where development is decentralised like Open-Source code projects, but a company still holds the responsibility of bringing the product to market.
OpenDrone is our pilot project; we think FPV is the perfect place to start. Development is already mostly decentralised in code, but we are increasingly reliant on Chinese goods and the companies behind them to innovate on the hardware side. We don't think this is bad, but we think they shouldn't be the only players.
04 · A record label for hardware
For the future business model of Incutec, think of it as a music record label for hardware: someone brings us a working design with real demand, and we handle certification, manufacturing, sales and support.
That infrastructure is built once, with OpenDrone. Most products are a mixture of PCB manufacturing, machining and injection molding. If we can build this infrastructure once, we can expand to more projects. Each one, like OpenDrone, will retain its own staff and final assembly, but the pipeline between 'prototype' and 'sold product' is something we can re-use again and again, once we know how. OpenDrone is what will teach us.
05 · What you buy
A finished, tested, packaged product, sold by Incutec. The price covers the PCB, the components, the assembly, the QC time, the packaging, the courier, VAT, support, and the engineering for the next revision. Nothing hidden in it. Where it is made today and what we are building toward is the production page's story.
06 · Why CERN-OHL-S
CERN-OHL-S v2 is a reciprocal, copyleft open-hardware licence. It keeps the design open: modify an OpenDrone board, ship your own version, and if someone asks for your sources, you hand them over on the same terms. The point isn't to stop clones. We can't, and we wouldn't want to. The point is that every clone carries its sources forward to the next person.
07 · What this means for you
- If Incutec disappears tomorrow, you still have the files, and the community still owns the project. Anyone, including you, can order a revision and keep it alive.
- Want a 4" version, a 3S-only build, a heavier-copper variant? Fork it, change it, fab it. If it's good, open a PR upstream.
- Teacher or club? We would rather you copy the design than buy a cheap closed alternative.
08 · Even this website
The store you are reading is also a repository: OpenDrone-hw/OpenDrone-Web. The pages, the 3D hero, the checkout wiring, the tooling that renders the board art: all of it is public.