Chartering software for a desk of two or three

Not because a spreadsheet is good. Because the alternative is a quote. Every established vendor in this market prices on application, which means a demo, a discovery call and a number that arrives a fortnight later attached to an onboarding plan. A desk of three brokers works out that the evaluation alone costs more attention than it has, and goes back to the workbook that at least opens.

The second reason is shape. Software written for a forty-broker operator assumes a configuration exercise, a data migration and somebody whose job is to own the system. A small desk has none of those and is not going to acquire them to buy a subscription.

The price is published. Every tier, every seat, monthly and annual, on the pricing page. You do not have to ask, and nobody has to qualify you before you are allowed to know.

Seats get cheaper as you add them. The second broker costs about half the first and it keeps stepping down after that, self serve, without a conversation. A small desk is the case where per seat pricing usually punishes you hardest, so it is the case this curve is shaped around.

You can look before the trial starts. Creating an account costs nothing and takes no card. It puts you on Browse, where the world fleet register is searchable and the rest of the desk shows as a locked outline. Every paid plan has 7 free days, and they begin when you choose one, which is after you have seen it.

Four cases, and in all of them a bigger vendor is the right answer. Saying so here is cheaper for both of us than finding out on a call.

You need it wired into a fleet system you already run. There is programmatic access on the Enterprise tier, but if the requirement is a deep two way integration with an existing operations platform, buy from the people who make that platform.

You need sale and purchase, or a clause library. Neither is built. This product records a fixture and works the time under it; it does not draft the charterparty and it does not cover asset deals.

You need your own ships' real speed and consumption. Estimates here assume by size class and say so on every row that uses the assumption. If your desk operates a known fleet and has those figures, software that stores them will estimate better than this will.

You need a market freight index. This records what your desk fixed. It does not publish rates and it is not a benchmarking product.

Two of the calculations a broking desk does every week are free on this site, need no account, and run entirely in your browser: the laytime and demurrage calculator and the time charter equivalent calculator.

If you are working out what this class of software costs generally, rather than what this one costs, what ship chartering software costs goes through the published prices in this market and what drives them.