Buying

What ship chartering software costs

Published 25 August 2026 · updated 22 September 2026

There is no list price for ship chartering software, and for most of this market there is no price at all until you have sat through a demonstration. That is not an accident of marketing. It is what enterprise sales looks like from the outside, and it is a large part of why a small broking desk gives up and stays on a spreadsheet. But public bodies buy this software too, and when they do the price becomes a public record. This page uses those records.

How much does ship chartering software cost?

A few hundred dollars per user per year at the small end, and tens of thousands per user per year at the enterprise end. Most vendors in this market publish nothing at all and ask for a demonstration before they will quote. Neptune Atlas publishes every tier and every seat price, and plans start at US$59.99 per month.

Both ends of that range are filed records rather than estimates, and both are on this page. Netpas lists Distance at 190 dollars per user per year on its own order page. A US Department of State award puts a ten user Kpler subscription near twenty five thousand dollars per user per year. They are not the same product sold at two prices; they are different products, which is most of why a single answer to this question does not exist.

Why the question is hard to ask

Search for what this software costs and the results confuse three different markets. Yacht charter booking, air charter broking and container freight forwarding all use the word charter, all have software, and all rank for the same phrases. None of them is a shipbroking desk fixing thirty thousand tonnes of iron ore. If you want a useful answer you have to say ship chartering or shipbroking every time.

The second difficulty is real rather than linguistic. This software is sold in modules to buyers of wildly different sizes. The same vendor may serve a forty broker operator running a fleet and a three broker shop that wants a tonnage list, and the two contracts have almost nothing in common. A single number could not describe both, so vendors quote instead.

What is published, checked on 25 August 2026

Seven vendors were checked by opening their own sites and looking. One publishes a price.

Q88 is counted separately from Veson because it is sold separately, though its own pages now carry a Veson Nautical copyright line. Two of the seven are worth seeing for yourself. Q88 maintains a page headed Fee Schedule whose entire content is an invitation to contact support for pricing information. ClearVoyage publishes a page whose title tag reads Transparent Pricing and which contains no price. Both are ordinary enterprise practice. Both also tell you what to expect from the sales process.

Two of those vendors are set out in more detail elsewhere on this site, with what each one is actually for: Neptune Atlas against Veson, which is the category leader and priced accordingly, and against Netpas, which is the cheapest serious tool in the market.

Netpas is the exception, and it is the only place in this market where the shape of the pricing is visible rather than inferred. Their published figures, per user, billed annually in advance, read from their order page the same day, in US dollars.

What public buyers actually paid

Government departments buy maritime data and software, and their contract awards are published. These are not estimates or industry talk. Each is a filed record with a supplier, a value and a term. The two most recent are linked below; the older awards sit on the same two registers, searched by supplier.

Three things fall out of that table. The Kpler award is described in the record as renewing a subscription for ten named users over a single year, which puts it near twenty five thousand dollars per user per year. That is a different universe from the Netpas table above, and both are real: they are not the same product sold at different prices, they are different products.

The second is renewal drift. The same buyer, buying the same Seasearcher subscription, paid about thirty per cent more across three years. The Sea-web line moved by about thirty eight per cent across seven. Whatever you are quoted, the number that matters is the one in year three.

The third is what is missing. There is no public federal record of an IMOS licence at any price, which is worth knowing because a figure of five hundred thousand dollars a year for IMOS circulates widely online. It traces back to a single unsourced comparison page on a domain that is now parked and offered for sale. Do not carry that number into a negotiation as though it were a benchmark.

The one published escalator

AXSMarine does not publish a price, but it does publish, in clause 13.1 of its general terms and conditions, the rate at which that unpublished price rises. For a standard one year subscription, "the Subscription Fees shall automatically increase by 4% upon each renewal".

The same clause addresses two and three year commitments, and it is worth reading closely. Having credited the client's loyalty and long term engagement, it provides that the fees "shall increase upon each renewal by 4%". The longer commitment buys the same escalator as the short one. And clause 13.7 reserves the right "to apply GRI (General Rate Increase) on fees at any time in its sole discretion", so four per cent is a floor rather than a ceiling.

This is not a criticism of AXSMarine, who at least write it down. It is the clearest available illustration that in this market the headline number is the least interesting term in the contract.

The meter matters more than the licence fee

Look again at the third column of the Netpas table. A licence buys a hundred and fifty distance queries and thirty weather queries a day, and nothing on the order page sells more of either, so the daily ceiling is simply the ceiling. Their mail analyser is metered separately again, at five thousand mails a day. None of that is hidden. It is printed plainly, which is more than most of this market manages.

A licence fee is annual and predictable. A meter is neither, and it is counted in the unit you use most on the days you are busiest. Two products at the same headline price are not the same purchase if one of them stops answering on a Thursday afternoon in a firm market. Before comparing any two quotes, find out what is counted: distance lookups, vessel records returned, mails analysed, seats, saved searches, contacts stored.

What a quote is made of

Where a price is negotiated, it is usually assembled from four things. Seats, almost always the base unit, so ask what the second and fifth cost rather than the first. Modules, which are separate lines: the demonstration shows all of them working together and the quote may not include all of them, which is where most of the disappointment in this market comes from. Data, licensed from somebody and inside your price whether or not it appears as a line, carrying restrictions on what you may do with what you see. And implementation, which for enterprise products is a project with a fee and a timeline and your own people's time inside it, frequently the largest number in year one.

The questions that decide the number

What is metered, and what happens when the meter runs out. What the second and the fifth seat cost. Which modules are in this quote and which were only in the demonstration. Whether there is an implementation fee, and how many days of your own people it assumes. What the minimum term is, and what renewal does to the price. And last, asked least and regretted most: if we leave, what can we take with us, and in what format. Much of what a desk accumulates in this software is licensed reference data that was never yours to remove, and the answer is often that you may take your own records and nothing else. That is a defensible position for a vendor to hold. It is not a pleasant thing to discover in the month you are trying to move.

What this site charges

Neptune Atlas publishes every tier and every seat price, monthly and annual, on the pricing page, on the straightforward reasoning that a desk deciding whether this class of software is affordable at all should not have to book a call to find out. Distances are not metered. Additional seats step down in price, self serve. An account can be opened without talking to anybody, and it puts you on a free tier where the world fleet register is searchable, with no end date. Every paid plan also starts with 7 free days, which begin only when the plan is chosen, and it takes payment details up front.

Since this page calls that the question asked least and regretted most, it had better answer it here rather than leave it hanging. Your own records are yours: fixtures, positions, cargo enquiries and laytime sheets, and every document the desk has issued is kept as issued. The world fleet register underneath them is licensed reference data and does not leave with you, and there is no bulk export of it at any tier. That is a real limit, and it is the same limit every vendor selling licensed reference data has. The difference is only whether you are told before you sign.

For a desk of two or three the deciding question is usually not feature by feature but whether an evaluation is affordable in attention as well as money, which is the subject of chartering software for a small broking desk. If you would rather test the arithmetic before anything else, the laytime and demurrage calculator and the time charter equivalent calculator are free, need no account, and run entirely in your own browser.

References

• USAspending.gov, Award 19AQMM24P0918, renew Kpler subscription for ten users, 2024. usaspending.gov
• UK Find a Tender, Lloyd’s List Intelligence Seasearcher Subscription, Maritime and Coastguard Agency, notice 2026/S 000-016222. find-tender.service.gov.uk
• AXSMarine, General Terms and Conditions, clauses 13.1 and 13.7. axsmarine.com
• Netpas, Order page. The published per user annual prices. netpas.net
• Q88, Fee Schedule. q88.com

Related