For shipowners, managers and freight operators
The spreadsheet the whole chartering desk depends on
Every Greek shipping office has one: a workbook nobody dares change, holding the voyage economics, the certificate dates or the crew rotation. We turn those into software that several people can use at once - without replacing the systems that already work.
The estimator below computes a real TCE from the standard formula. Change the bunker price and watch the whole voyage stop being worth doing.
In plain language
What is TCE, and why does every chartering decision come back to it?
TCE - time charter equivalent - is the daily earnings of a vessel on a voyage after voyage costs are taken out, and it exists so that two fundamentally different deals can be compared. A voyage charter pays a freight rate per tonne of cargo, out of which the owner pays for bunkers, port charges and canal dues. A time charter pays a fixed hire per day and the charterer pays those costs. Comparing the headline numbers tells you nothing. TCE converts the voyage charter into an equivalent daily figure: gross freight, less commissions, less bunkers, less port and canal costs, divided by total voyage days including ballast and port time. It is the single number a chartering desk argues about, and it moves violently with bunker price and speed - which is why it belongs in software with an audit trail, not in a workbook that four people email around.
Words that get used interchangeably and should not be
- Ballast and laden legs
- Ballast is sailing empty to reach the cargo; laden is sailing with it. Ballast days earn nothing and cost fuel, and a voyage that looks profitable on the laden leg alone frequently is not.
- Laytime and demurrage
- The time the charterer is allowed for loading and discharging, and what they pay when they exceed it. Calculating it depends on the charter party's own wording, which is why generic products get it wrong and why claims are so often settled on whoever's spreadsheet is more defensible.
- Port State Control (PSC)
- Inspection of a foreign vessel in port against international convention. A detention is expensive and public. Most deficiencies found are documentary - an expired certificate, a record book that does not reconcile - which is to say, preventable by software.
- Electronic record books
- IMO-accepted digital replacements for paper logbooks - oil record book, garbage, ballast water. Approval and consistency are the whole game: a digital record that disagrees with another digital record is worse than paper.
A voyage estimate, computed here
The standard TCE calculation, running in your browser: distances and speed give you sea days, consumption and bunker price give you fuel, port days and costs come off the top, and what is left divides by total days. Push the speed up and watch fuel eat the gain - the cube-law relationship between speed and consumption is in there, because leaving it out is how estimates flatter a fixture.
Voyage
Vessel
Commercial
- Sea days
- 21.0 days
- Total voyage days
- 32.0 days
- Consumption at this speed28 mt/day at 14.0 kn, cubed for speed
- 19.9 mt/day
Speed and consumption are cubed, not linear. Speeding up shortens the voyage and burns the gain - watch the TCE as you move it.
- Gross freight
- US$960,000
- Less commissions
- − US$36,000
- Fuel cost57% of voyage cost
- − US$234,794
- Port and canal costs ($)
- − US$180,000
- Voyage costs
- US$414,794
Time charter equivalent
US$15,913per day
Against market hire
US$2,413 above
Comfortably above market. Fix it.
Real arithmetic on figures you control, in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere. Simplified against a full commercial estimator - no canal transit modelling, no weather routing, no scrubber differential - and it names those omissions rather than hiding them.
Why Piraeus, and why now
The fleet is here, the regulatory push off paper is happening now, and almost none of the software serving it was built for how a Greek office actually works.
- Piraeus
- the management centre for the world's largest merchant fleet by tonnage, with the technology conversation now happening locally rather than in Northern Europe Source: Smart Maritime Network, Athens 2026
- Paper out
- IMO acceptance of electronic record books plus rising PSC scrutiny is moving Greek operators off paper logbooks on a real deadline Source: Digital logbook implementation in Greece
- NIS2
- logistics and transport operators now carry cybersecurity obligations that reach the software their operations run on Source: Enterprise guide to EU compliance regimes
What we actually build
Not a fleet management suite. There are large ones, you may already run one, and replacing it is rarely the right project. We build the parts that are currently a spreadsheet, and connect them to the parts that are not.
Voyage estimation and post-voyage analysis
The estimator your chartering desk actually trusts: bunker prices by port, consumption curves per vessel, port cost history, commissions, and the same model run again after the voyage so estimate and outcome sit side by side. Versioned, so you can see who changed which assumption before the fixture.
- TCE
- Bunkers
- Post-voyage
- Audit trail
Crewing, certificates and expiry
Who is on which vessel, whose certificates expire when, which rotations are unfilled, and what the visa and travel chain looks like for a crew change in a port that just changed. The value is entirely in the alerting: an expiry nobody saw is a detention.
- STCW
- Rotations
- Expiry alerts
- Crew change
Compliance and inspection records
Electronic record books, PSC preparation, inspection findings with the corrective actions tracked to closure, and reporting that reconciles across sources rather than three systems each holding a different truth.
- e-logbooks
- PSC
- HSQE
- Findings
Freight, fleet and land logistics
For the forwarding and road side: consignment tracking, driver and vehicle scheduling, customs paperwork, and proof of delivery that arrives as data rather than as a photograph of a signature in someone's phone.
- Consignments
- Fleet
- Customs
- ePOD
What it connects to
A shipping office runs on more systems than it can name. The work is nearly always joining them.
- Fleet management systems
- Danaos, Hanseaticsoft, BASS, ABS Nautical Systems - read from them where they have an API, and by export where they do not.
- AIS and position data
- Vessel positions and port calls, so voyage progress and post-voyage analysis do not depend on somebody remembering to update a tab.
- Bunker pricing
- Price feeds by port, so an estimate two weeks old is visibly two weeks old rather than quietly wrong.
- Noon reports
- Parsed out of email and reconciled, because that is still how consumption arrives from most vessels.
- Class and flag portals
- Survey and certificate status pulled in rather than retyped from a PDF somebody downloaded in March.
- Accounting and ERP
- SoftOne, SAP, Navision, or the in-house system that has outlasted three IT managers.
What we measure
A chartering desk already argues about TCE. What it usually cannot do is say afterwards which assumption was wrong, which is the only thing that improves the next estimate.
- Estimate against actual, per voyage
- The same model run twice. Without the second run the first is a guess that nobody grades.
- Which assumption moved it
- Bunker price, port days, consumption or freight rate, attributed. This is what versioned estimates buy you and a workbook cannot.
- Expiries caught with time to renew
- Not expiries caught. Caught early enough that the renewal fits, which is a different and harder number.
- Documentary findings per inspection
- The preventable kind. If this does not fall, the register is not being read.
Reference builds
Things we built ourselves to show the approach. Not client work - where a real engagement is publishable it says so, with a name on it.
- Dry bulk shipping
The estimator, with a name against every assumption
A reference build: voyage estimation for a chartering desk, versioned so that estimate and outcome can be argued about afterwards with the assumptions still attached.
Next.js · TypeScript · Postgres · AIS feeds · Python
- Ship management
The expiry nobody saw is the detention nobody planned
A reference build: a crew and certificate register whose entire value is in what it escalates, and to whom, before a Port State Control inspector finds it first.
Next.js · Postgres · Python · HSQE integrations
Questions we get asked about this
- How much does custom maritime software cost?
- Per engagement, and higher than the rest of this site, for the honest reason that the domain takes real time to learn and the integrations are awkward. We will not publish a list, because replacing one load-bearing workbook and phasing in an operations platform are different orders of magnitude. Scoping comes first and is priced separately, and you keep the document even if it concludes that a product you can buy would serve you better than anything we would build. Share the workbook everything currently depends on and you will have a band on the first call.
- Should we replace our fleet management system?
- Almost never. Danaos, Hanseaticsoft, BASS and the rest do the heavy technical and PMS work adequately, and replacing one is a multi-year risk with little upside. The gap in a Greek office is nearly always commercial: the estimator, the certificate register, the reporting that reconciles across systems. That is where custom software earns its cost.
- Why does the voyage estimate need to be software at all?
- Because the workbook has no audit trail. When a fixture goes badly, the question is which assumption was wrong and who changed it - and a spreadsheet that four people emailed around cannot answer that. Versioned estimates with visible assumptions turn a post-mortem into a five-minute conversation, and they make post-voyage analysis possible at all.
- Do you understand the domain, or will we be teaching you?
- You will be teaching us your commercial specifics, and you should expect to - the charter party wording, your consumption curves, how your desk actually decides. What we bring is the vocabulary and the standard models, so scoping is a conversation rather than a course. If a first call suggests the gap is wider than that, we will say so instead of billing you to close it.
- Can it handle laytime and demurrage?
- Yes, with a caveat worth stating early: laytime calculation follows the charter party's own wording, and generic products get it wrong precisely because they assume one interpretation. Building it means encoding your clauses, which is real work and is why it is scoped separately rather than promised as a feature.
- What about electronic record books and PSC?
- We build the operational side - inspection findings tracked to closure, certificate expiry alerting, reporting that reconciles across sources. Where a record book itself needs flag or class approval, that approval attaches to an approved product, and we integrate with it rather than claiming to replace it. Pretending otherwise would put a detention on your record, not ours.
- Is the data allowed to sit in a cloud?
- Usually yes, in an EU region, and we default to that. Where a charterer's or a client's contract says otherwise, or NIS2 obligations make it awkward, we deploy on your own infrastructure instead. This is a question we ask in the first week rather than after the architecture is decided.
- Do you work with freight forwarding and road logistics too?
- Yes. Consignment tracking, driver and vehicle scheduling, customs paperwork and electronic proof of delivery are the same class of problem, usually at a lower price point, and frequently in the same group of companies as the shipping side.
Bring the spreadsheet
Genuinely - the most useful first call is you sharing the workbook everything currently depends on. Forty-five minutes, and you will leave knowing whether it is worth turning into software, what that costs, and whether you should buy something instead.
Or write to hello@appcrafters.gr.