What Netpas actually sells

Netpas Distance is a precomputed port to port matrix with a set of named routing points, and the estimator is a voyage calculator sitting on top of it. Seafuture Inc. sell it out of Seoul. Most of the range runs as Windows desktop software, with a phone companion for distances, and of the desktop products only Tramper Business carries a cloud server.

The matrix is the company. A curated distance table encodes somebody's judgement about which way a ship actually goes, inshore or outside, which side of a bank, which of two straits in which season. That judgement is expensive to build and it does not fall out of a map. Copying the calculator on top of it would be copying the cheap half.

Netpas meters every distance. We do not meter distance at all.

A Netpas licence buys 150 distance queries a day and 30 weather queries a day, for the term of the licence. Nothing on their order page sells more of either, so the ceiling is the ceiling.

Neptune Atlas does not meter distance. There is no quota check on the voyage router and no daily ceiling to run out of, because the distance is not the product here. It is computed by a search over a bathymetric water mask at about three miles a cell, reduced from one arc minute soundings, rather than looked up in a matrix. Which means it will take any two points on Earth, coordinate to coordinate, without either of them needing to be a port somebody has already paired.

What Neptune Atlas does that Netpas does not

Netpas is a calculator, and the parts of a broking day either side of the calculation are where the two products actually diverge. One caveat before the list, because it is the thing a fair comparison has to say out loud: Netpas MMA, at 635 dollars a year, reads e-mail into a cargo and tonnage card database with searching, filtering and a matching service. So the differences below are differences of kind, not a list of things Netpas has never thought about.

Position lists from your own mailbox

Desk and above

Circulars arrive as e-mail and no vendor sells the data in them. Connect the account you already use and each one is read as it lands, with nothing reaching the board until a broker confirms the ship. MMA builds tonnage cards from mail; what it does not do is hold a confirmed open position against a hull in the register.

Cargo enquiries, and the match to tonnage

Desk and above

The enquiry side of the same mailbox, parsed the same way, and a tonnage search that answers it on deadweight, size class and region. MMA matches cards to cards. This matches an enquiry to hulls whose particulars and ownership are already on file.

The fixture book

Desk and above

The recap, the terms and the record of what your desk actually fixed, kept where the next person can find it. Netpas has no fixture record outside Tramper.

Laytime and demurrage from a signed statement of facts

Chartering and above

The agent's document is read into a time sheet rather than retyped out of it. Netpas puts laytime on the estimate sheet instead, which is a real difference and is discussed below rather than scored here.

One cargo across several ships, ranked

Fleet and above

Eight hulls, each ballasted from her own open position and then from her last AIS fix, each capped at what she can actually lift, ranked by the resulting TCE. This one has no Netpas equivalent that we can find.

There is also the shape of the thing. Neptune Atlas is a multi tenant web application with a schema per desk, so a fixture book is shared between brokers as a property of how it is stored. It runs in a browser, installs as an app, and has a desktop shell for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Where Netpas is better

Five things, and none of them are close calls. A desk choosing on any one of them should choose Netpas.

Their distance table is curated and ours is computed. A search over bathymetry encodes where the water is. It does not encode which way a Master actually takes a ship. Our own accuracy test asserts five routes against the common commercial tables at better than eight per cent, and eight per cent is a tolerance, not agreement: it was chosen wide enough to allow an honest grid error and tight enough to catch a route going the wrong way round a continent. If you need the number a charterparty will be argued over, you need a table, and Netpas sells one.

They sell a live weather forecast over the route and we do not. Neptune Atlas ships named planning margins by ocean and season, applied to speed rather than to time. That is a convention, not a forecast, and it is not the same product. The gap is deliberate and it is still a gap.

Their Vessel Manager holds your own ships' speed and consumption. Ours assumes by size class and says so on every row that uses the assumption. For a desk that has typed its fleet in, theirs is simply better, and no data source sells the real figures to close it.

Their estimate sheet converts currency and ours does not. Everything here is US dollars. That bites on port disbursements and agency costs for any desk whose costs are not in dollars.

A price nobody has to seek approval for. At 190 to 319 dollars a year a broker expenses Netpas rather than building a case for it, and they have been established in this industry far longer than we have. That is a head start on trust and on already being installed, and shipping features does not close it.

One more, smaller: our North American emission control area boundaries are traced to about thirty miles where the regulation gives an offset rather than a stated line. The enclosed seas are exact, because there the regulation names the line and we copied it.

The price, and what the difference buys

Netpas is cheaper. It is worth being plain about that rather than arranging the comparison until it is not. These are their published prices per user, billed annually in advance, as read on 25 August 2026.

Netpas product	Per user, per year	What the licence limits
Netpas Distance	$190	150 distance, 30 weather, per day
Netpas Estimator	$319	150 distance, 30 weather, per day
Netpas MMA	$635	5,000 mails analysed, 30 filters, per day
Tramper Single	$463	personal, no server
Tramper Business	$793	the only Netpas product with a server
Netpas Suite	$1,059	bundle
Netpas Supreme	$1,262	bundle, everything

Every figure above is from netpas.net/order, read on 25 August 2026. Check it rather than take it from here.

Netpas Estimator at $319 a year is a metered Windows calculator for one person. The comparable Neptune Atlas tier is Chartering, which is roughly three times that and carries the estimator plus the world fleet register, the position list, the cargo book, the fixture book, laytime worked from a signed statement of facts, three connected mailboxes each, and distances that do not run out. Whether that is worth the difference depends entirely on whether you want a calculator or a desk.

If what you need is a distance and a freight number, Netpas is the better buy and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Our plans and what each one carries are published in full, and the arithmetic is free to try first: the TCE calculator and the laytime calculator need no account.