Buying

What ship chartering software costs

Published 25 August 2026 · updated 17 October 2026

Ship chartering software has no list price, and for most of this market there is no price at all until you have sat through a demonstration. This is not an accident. It is how enterprise sales work, and it is a big reason why a small broking desk gives up and keeps using a spreadsheet. But public bodies also buy this software, and when they do, the price becomes a public record. This page uses those records.

Neptune Atlas is ship chartering software for brokers, ship owners and charterers. Plans start at US$59.99 a month, and every price is on the pricing page.

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 and ask for a demonstration before they give a price. Neptune Atlas publishes every tier and every seat price, and plans start at US$59.99 per month.

Both ends of that range come from filed records, not 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. These are not one product sold at two prices. They are different products, and that is the main reason there is no single answer to this question.

Why the question is hard to ask

If you search for what this software costs, the results mix in three other markets. Yacht charter booking, air charter broking and container freight forwarding all use the word charter, all have software, and all appear in results for the same search terms. None of them is a shipbroking desk fixing (agreeing a charter for) thirty thousand tonnes of iron ore. For a useful answer, say ship chartering or shipbroking every time.

The second problem is real rather than a matter of words. This software is sold in modules to buyers of very different sizes. One vendor may serve an operator with forty brokers and a fleet, and also a small office of three brokers that only wants a list of ships. The two contracts have almost nothing in common. One number cannot describe both, so vendors give quotes instead.

What is published, checked on 25 August 2026

We checked seven vendors by opening their own websites and looking, and one publishes a price.

Q88 is listed separately from Veson because it is sold separately, although its pages now show a Veson Nautical copyright line. Two of the seven are worth checking yourself. Q88 has a page headed Fee Schedule whose only content is an invitation to contact support for prices. ClearVoyage has a page whose title tag reads Transparent Pricing, and it shows no price. Both are normal enterprise practice, and both tell you what the sales process will be like.

Two of these vendors are covered in more detail elsewhere on this site, with what each one is really for: Neptune Atlas against Veson, the market leader, which charges high prices, and against Netpas, the cheapest serious tool in the market.

Two more are compared in Neptune Atlas against AXSMarine, a platform sold by quote, and Neptune Atlas against ShipNext, a marketplace with published yearly prices. Kpler, which publishes no price, is in Neptune Atlas against Kpler.

Netpas is the exception, and the only place in this market where you can see how the prices are built instead of guessing. Here are their published figures, per user, paid yearly in advance, in US dollars, read from their order page on the same day.

Kpler and Seasearcher subscription prices in public contracts

Public-sector contract awards sometimes disclose subscription prices for maritime data and software. The Kpler, Lloyd's List Intelligence Seasearcher and Sea-web entries below are prices paid by specific public buyers for stated contract terms, not standard prices available to every customer. The linked award records show the supplier, contract period and recorded amount.

That table shows three things. First, the Kpler award is described as renewing a subscription for ten named users for one year, which puts it near twenty five thousand dollars per user per year. That is a completely different level from the Netpas table above, and both are real, because they are different products rather than one product at different prices.

Second, prices rise at renewal. The same buyer, buying the same Seasearcher subscription, paid about thirty per cent more over three years. The Sea-web price rose by about thirty eight per cent over seven. Whatever price you are quoted, the one that matters is the price in year three.

Third, something is missing: there is no public federal record of an IMOS licence at any price. This matters because a figure of five hundred thousand dollars a year for IMOS is widely repeated online. It comes from a single unsourced comparison page, on a website that is now parked and for sale, so do not use that number in a negotiation as if it were a benchmark.

The one published escalator

An escalator is a contract term that raises the price automatically. AXSMarine does not publish a price, but in clause 13.1 of its general terms and conditions, it does publish how fast that hidden price rises. For a standard one year subscription, "the Subscription Fees shall automatically increase by 4% upon each renewal".

The same clause covers two and three year commitments, and it is worth reading closely. It credits the client's loyalty and long term commitment, and then says the fees "shall increase upon each renewal by 4%". The longer commitment therefore gets the same yearly increase as the short one. Clause 13.7 also keeps the right "to apply GRI (General Rate Increase) on fees at any time in its sole discretion". Four per cent is therefore the minimum increase, not the maximum.

This is not a criticism of AXSMarine, which at least writes it down. It is the clearest example that, in this market, the headline price is the least important 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 the order page sells no extra queries, so the daily limit is final. Their mail analyser has its own separate limit of five thousand mails a day. None of this is hidden; it is printed clearly, which is more than most of this market does.

A licence fee is yearly and predictable. A usage limit (a meter) is neither, because it counts the thing you use most on the days you are busiest. Two products with the same headline price are not the same purchase if one of them stops working on a Thursday afternoon in a busy market. Before you compare two quotes, find out what is counted: distance lookups, vessel records returned, mails analysed, seats, saved searches or contacts stored.

What a quote is made of

A negotiated price is usually built from four parts. Seats are almost always the basic unit, so ask what the second and fifth seat cost, not just the first. Modules are separate lines. The demonstration shows all of them working together, but the quote may not include all of them, which is where most disappointment in this market comes from. Data is licensed from someone else; it is inside your price whether or not it appears as a line, and it limits what you may do with what you see. Implementation is the setup, and for enterprise products it is a project with a fee, a timeline and your own staff’s time, and it is often the largest cost in year one.

The questions that decide the number

What is metered, and what happens when the limit runs out? What do the second and the fifth seat cost? Which modules are in this quote, and which were only in the demonstration? Is there an implementation fee, and how many days of your own staff’s time does it assume? What is the minimum term, and what does renewal do to the price? And finally, the question buyers ask least often and most often wish they had asked: if we leave, what can we take with us, and in what format? Much of what a desk builds up in this software is licensed reference data that was never yours to take. Often the answer is that you may take your own records and nothing else. That is a fair position for a vendor to hold, but it is unpleasant to learn it in the month you are trying to change systems.

What this site charges

Neptune Atlas publishes every tier and every seat price, monthly and yearly, on the pricing page. The reason is simple: a desk deciding whether it can afford this kind of software at all should not have to book a call to find out. Distances are not metered, and extra seats cost less per seat and can be added yourself. You can open an account without talking to anyone, which puts you on a free tier where you can search the world fleet register, with no end date. The free shipping tools on this site, for IMO checks, sea distance, laytime and TCE, cost nothing either. Every paid plan also starts with 7 free days, which begin only when you choose the plan, and payment details are taken at the start.

This page said that buyers rarely ask that question and later wish they had, so here is the answer for Neptune Atlas. Your own records are yours: fixtures, positions, cargo enquiries and laytime sheets. Every document the desk has issued is kept exactly 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 on any tier. That is a real limit, the same one every vendor selling licensed reference data has; the only difference is whether they tell you before you sign.

For a desk of two or three people, the deciding question is usually not about features but whether trying a product is affordable in time and attention as well as money, which is the subject of chartering software for a small broking desk. If you want to test the arithmetic first, the laytime and demurrage calculator and the time charter equivalent calculator are free, need no account, and run entirely in your own browser. For a shortlist of the realistic options and what each one publishes, see the best ship chartering software for small desks.

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

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