Terms of service

Neptune Atlas is a hosted ship broking desk operated by Neptune Labs Inc.(corporation number 1001748164, [to be supplied: the jurisdiction Neptune Labs Inc. is incorporated in]), of [to be supplied: a postal address for commercial e-mail, required by CAN-SPAM and CASL]. These terms are the agreement between Neptune Labs and the company whose desk it is. Using the product, or letting somebody at your company use it, means accepting them.

Where the data in your desk includes personal data, our data processing agreement applies and forms part of these terms. It is published rather than negotiated per customer, and it is the answer to the procurement question this clause used to dodge.

A desk is one company. Each person on it gets their own sign-in, and a seat is a person rather than a device. Sharing one login between brokers is not permitted, partly because it is a licence question and mostly because the audit trail, the private mailbox and the fixture history all become meaningless when two people are one account.

The account owner is responsible for who they invite and for removing people who leave. Anyone with owner or administrator rights can do both from the team screen.

You are responsible for keeping credentials secure. Tell us promptly if you think an account has been compromised and we will help you close it.

A subscription to the product. Your plan decides which parts of it you may use, and the pricing page lists what each tier includes. The list on that page is generated from the same table the software checks before answering a request, so it cannot promise a feature the product then refuses.

Creating an account is free and takes no payment details. It starts on Browse, which has no time limit: you can search the world fleet register for as long as you like without ever entering a card.

Choosing a paid plan starts a seven day trial. A card is taken at that point and nothing is charged during those seven days. At the end of the trial the subscription begins and the card is charged for the first period, unless you cancel before then. Cancelling during the trial costs nothing, and you can cancel at any time from the billing screen. A trial is once per account.

Subscriptions are billed monthly or annually in advance through Stripe, which holds the card. We never see or store a card number. Seats are graduated, so the price per broker falls as a desk grows; the total for any number of seats is worked out on the pricing page before you buy.

Changing tier takes effect immediately and Stripe prorates the difference. Cancelling stops the next renewal and access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not refund part-used periods, and we would rather you cancelled than sat on a plan you are not using.

If a payment fails we keep the desk working through a grace period rather than locking a broker out of their own fixture book mid negotiation. Prices can change; we will give at least 30 days notice by e-mail before a change affects a renewal, and you can cancel instead.

Your positions, cargo enquiries, fixtures, charterparties, laytime records, contacts and notes belong to you. Each desk is held in its own database schema rather than in a shared table with a customer column, and on every request the application checks which desk the signed-in person belongs to before it reads anything. That separation is enforced by the application; the database does not give each desk a separate login of its own.

Ask us for a copy of your desk at any time while the subscription is live and we will provide one within 30 days. There is no self-service export button today. An earlier version of these terms implied otherwise; it was wrong, and saying so plainly is better than leaving a promise nothing in the product keeps. A copy provided this way excludes the licensed reference data described below, which is not ours to hand over.

If you cancel, the desk is marked for deletion and held for 30 days so an accidental cancellation is recoverable. At the end of that window a daily check lists the desk as due and we run the deletion, which removes the desk's schema, its stored files, its mailbox connections, its users' personal data and the IP addresses on its audit records, and writes a receipt recording which tables were deleted, how many rows, and what was deliberately kept and under which exemption. Ask us and we will send you the receipt. You can ask for the deletion to happen sooner, and we will do it.

Three things survive that deletion, and each is named rather than buried: invoices and subscription records, which a tax authority may ask about for up to seven years; verification documents, which are the evidence behind a decision we may have to explain; and the record of any telephone call between your people and ours, which is our own record of our own support line and not part of your desk. Everything else goes.

The world fleet register, the port list, ownership records and inspection history are reference data licensed from third parties. Your subscription grants you use of it inside this product. It does not grant you a redistribution licence, so you may not resell it, publish it in bulk, or pass it to anybody else as a dataset.

Reasonable use inside the product is expected and fine: searching the fleet, quoting a hull to a principal, sending a recap. Extracting the register wholesale is not, and is the one thing likely to end an account.

Where a tier lets you connect your own vendor API key, that contract is between you and the vendor and the data returned under your key is governed by your agreement with them. We hold the key encrypted and use it only to answer your own requests.

Every record carries the source it came from, so if a vendor relationship ends, the data covered by that licence can be identified and removed without touching anything you own outright.

You can connect your own e-mail account so that the mail a broking desk runs on sits beside the ships and fixtures it is about. Your mail stays with your provider. We keep an index so the list is quick: sender, recipients, subject, date, and a preview of up to 400 characters of the opening text.

The product reads message bodies without waiting for you to open anything. A background sweep fetches bodies in batches so it can tell a circular or a cargo enquiry from ordinary mail and offer it to you. The body itself is not stored; the preview is. An earlier version of this clause said a body was fetched only when you opened a message, which described the screen and not the sweep behind it.

Where the mailbox is Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com, it is reached through an application Neptune Labs registered with Microsoft, holding the Mail.Read and Mail.Send permissions you grant at sign-in. That is a different arrangement from an ordinary IMAP connection to your own provider, and the privacy notice names Microsoft as a sub-processor accordingly.

A connected mailbox is private to the person who connected it, including from an owner or an administrator of the same desk. That is enforced in the database query rather than in the interface. A message becomes desk business when somebody deliberately sends it there, and not before.

Disconnecting a mailbox deletes the stored credential and the whole index of that mailbox, and where the provider publishes a standard revocation endpoint we hand the grant back to them as well. Microsoft does not publish one today, so on a Microsoft mailbox the product tells you where to remove the application's consent yourself; deleting our copy of a token is not the same as ending the permission behind it, and this clause used to imply that it was. Connecting a mailbox is your confirmation that you are entitled to, which matters where the account is a shared address belonging to your employer.

A statement of facts can be imported by uploading it. A PDF that carries its own text is read here, on our own machine, at no cost and with nothing leaving it. That path is always tried first.

A scan or a photograph is sent to Anthropic in the United States to be transcribed. The whole document goes, as uploaded. A statement of facts names the vessel, the port, the agent and the master, and it usually carries the master's handwritten remarks at the foot; the reader is deliberately asked to transcribe those too, because they are frequently the part a demurrage claim turns on. The transcription comes back, is stored against your laytime record so a broker can be shown what was read, and is kept for two years.

The model transcribes and is not permitted to interpret. It does not decide whether a period counts, does not compute a total and does not correct a row that looks wrong; every one of those is decided by a rule you can be shown, or by you. Uploading a document is your instruction to send it, and if that is not acceptable for a particular document, do not upload it.

Telephony is our own tooling and is not something a desk buys. It appears in no plan. Earlier versions of these terms and of the privacy notice described it as a customer feature with a recording setting a desk could ask us to change, which was a description of an intention rather than of the product.

What it actually is: Neptune Labs answers a telephone. Calls run through Amazon Connect, and we hold the number, the time, the duration, and where recording is on, the audio, a transcript produced by automated analysis of the recording, and a summary. That is a record of our own support line, and it is ours rather than yours, which is why it is not deleted when a desk closes.

Recording is announced before it starts, and pressing 9 during the announcement continues the call without it. If you would rather a call that was recorded were not kept, say so and we will delete the recording and the transcript. A desk can also tell us not to record calls from its people at all. If this ever becomes a feature a desk operates, this clause changes before it ships and not after.

Cargo and open tonnage can be posted to a board that every desk on the platform can read, on every plan including the free one. A listing is a copy of the fields you chose to publish, taken at the moment you post it, and not a window onto your own record: correcting a vessel's particulars in your desk afterwards does not change the listing until you edit the listing.

Nothing is posted by a machine. A circular that arrived in your mailbox is not published to the board by us, ever. Every row follows a deliberate press by somebody at your desk.

A listing carries your desk name, your country and a contact line, unless you post anonymously, in which case enquiries reach you through us. What you publish there is published: you decide what goes on it, and a listing can be withdrawn at any time, though a broker who has already read it has already read it.

Fixtures, recaps, cargo enquiries and estimates can be shared by link so a principal or a counterparty can read one without an account. Those links are unguessable and expire, and a shared record can be revoked at any time from the record itself.

A link is nonetheless readable by anyone who has it. Deciding what to share and who to send it to is yours; the product will not second-guess a broker about which principals may see a recap.

The register is incomplete and the product says so on the screens where it matters. A large number of hulls carry no deadweight and many carry no researched owner. Positions are what owners and brokers have told you; they are not a guarantee that a ship is open, and an absent position is not a statement that a ship is fixed. AIS coverage has gaps, so a ship missing from a map is not evidence she is not sailing.

Nothing here is chartering, legal, tax or financial advice. Laytime, demurrage, distance and voyage figures are calculations over the facts you enter. Responsibility for those facts, and for any claim, offer or fixture made on them, is yours.

Do not extract the reference database in bulk, share one login across a team instead of buying seats, attempt to break the isolation between desks, probe or attack the service, or use the product to send unsolicited mail at a volume that puts the platform's sending reputation at risk.

Outreach from this product reaches people who never signed up for anything, and the anti-spam law of your country and theirs applies to you as the sender. The product enforces a platform-wide suppression list: an address that has asked any desk to stop writing to it cannot be sent to from any desk's connected mailbox, the screens show it without a link to write to it, and that is not a setting you can turn off. The one exception is a reply to a message that person sent you themselves.

If you find a security problem, tell us at support@neptunelabs.ca before telling anybody else, and we will not come after you for having looked.

We can suspend an account that is doing one of the things above, that has not paid, or that we are required to suspend by law. Except where the problem is serious or urgent we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

You can leave at any time by cancelling. If we ever discontinue the product we will give at least 90 days notice, refund the unused part of any period paid in advance, and make your desk available for export throughout.

The service is operated on a commercially reasonable basis and no contractual uptime guarantee is offered on the self-serve tiers. It is provided as it is, without warranties beyond those which cannot lawfully be excluded.

Our total liability in any twelve month period is limited to the fees you paid in that period. We are not liable for lost profit, lost business, or a fixture that was or was not made. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

We will update this page as the product changes, and the date at the top is when it last moved. For a change that materially reduces what you get or increases what you pay, we will e-mail the account owner at least 30 days beforehand, and carrying on afterwards is acceptance. If you would rather not accept, cancel and we will refund the unused part of the period.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario, Canada, and its courts have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer rather than a business, which a broking desk will not be, this does not remove rights you have under the law of the place you live.

Questions about these terms: support@neptunelabs.ca.

By post: [to be supplied: a postal address for commercial e-mail, required by CAN-SPAM and CASL].