Drone Work
I have been flying drones commercially for a few years. Let me tell you, its a young man's game. You really need to hustle to make money unless you meet the right people. There are a lot of kids out there living out of their car catching drone gigs on the fly.
First off, you don't need to pay any money if you already have a Faa certificate. Its pretty simple, take the drone classes on the FAA faast website and pass the online tests. Once you have your certificate of completion, fill out online iacra and have an instructor sign off your iacra. That is it. You must have an instructor sign off iacra because the FAA needs proof that you actually did the work (ID verification). Someone off the street must go to a testing location where they are verified by the testing center.
Once you have a license, you are probably going to spend at least 1500 on a descent drone and equipment. When you are on a job, you need several batteries, portable chargers, good tablets, high quality SD cards, spare props, landing pads, dslr camera, network storage or large computer storage device, etc... It isn't just the drone itself is what I am getting at. Once you have the gear, you need to make contacts and find work. This is where the hustle comes in.
Apps like Dronebase and other third party contract work really don't pay much depending on where you are at. I lived in a remote area for a year and could pretty much drive the prices up because if I didn't accept cheap bids, they would reissue the job with a higher price. Here in Houston now, the average job is about $70 and you have to be the first one to grab it. You might get two per week if you were on it. Keep in mind, you can't just take every job, weather, time of day for lighting, airspace requirements play into everything. To make matters worse, most easy work like real estate photos aren't available because most realtors either don't care or buy their own drone. You would think the money they could make, they would hire a professional but in reality, most realtors are vultures and don't care about the quality of their own work.
Big jobs like cell tower inspections can pay more but are time limited. This is where I had the best luck. I would get contracts for like 20-30 cell tower inspections for modeling. Pay should be between 100-500 per site depending on where you have to drive to. Most contracts like these have time deadlines and you can't really accept an unlimited number. When you do large contracts, you have to move and be mobile. Its tough getting all the data and uploading it from a hotel room or mobile location. You need fast internet and the amount of data transfer would basically be impossible without real high speed internet. Doing three sites per day, I had two computers running high speed internet uploading 24/7 to keep up with the amount of data I captured. With this situation, now you need two people, one to manage the data upload and one taking the photos. More hustle required here. I am flying more now and so I just don't have time to travel to remote locations for drone work. Hard on you and your vehicle.
The real kicker here I think would be areal survey companies for construction. If I was going to do it big, I would get a platform that could carry some serious weight with a real LIDAR camera and FLIR camera. A platform that could swap those two could really make some money. Surveying large plots of land for developers could make bigger cash. FLIR could possibly open up government contracts as well. This type of operation would need serious cash and lots of bodies. Not possible for someone cash strapped like me to get off the ground. Would be neat though. Again, even with this kind of company, you still need to travel to work, upload data, and make connections.
Flying drones is fun but its a hustle. The more technology involved attracts young people who will work for free. Unless you have something to offer that a kid in high school doesn't, you are going to be competing for work with kids with toys. I would honestly suggest instructing or any other work you can do without a medical. Perhaps try some Droning on the side to experience the hustle.
Good luck