Built by people who think the maritime-data market is broken
Vessel intelligence today means an enterprise contract worth tens of thousands a year — priced for the majors, out of reach for the desks that still need to know where the cargo is. Port Flow is the opposite bet: honest tanker intelligence, transparently priced, that a single trader, charterer or underwriter can switch on in one click.
OCTOPODUS
Port Flow is a product of OCTOPODUS, an independent software studio (Laurent Guglielmetti, entreprise individuelle, France — SIREN 491 489 654). Small, focused tools that do one job and do it honestly. We'd rather ship a real accuracy benchmark — good or bad — than a marketing claim.
I'm Laurent Guglielmetti. I've run a business for twenty years — long enough to know the difference between a tool that looks impressive in a demo and one that actually earns its place on a working desk. Port Flow is built to the second standard: every number is measured, every limit is written down, and the methodology is public so you can judge it yourself.
If you work in tankers — trading, chartering, P&I, compliance — I'd genuinely like to hear what would make this useful to you.
What we stand by
- Published accuracy. Our predicted-ETA error is on the benchmark page, measured against the broadcast ETA on the same closed voyages — not hidden, and recomputed as voyages close.
- Auditable screening. Every sanctions list we ingest is versioned: fetch timestamp, SHA-256 of the source file, entry count. A vessel that leaves a list is dated as delisted rather than silently deleted, so a past screening can be reproduced.
- Stated provenance. Every stored position carries its source. Open data is used under its licence with visible attribution — see sources.
- No lock-in. Monthly plans cancel anytime. A 15-minute demo needs no signup and no card.
What Port Flow does not do
The limits below cost us sales. We publish them anyway — a benchmark means nothing if the boundaries around it are hidden.
- Terrestrial AIS only — no satellite AIS. Coverage is strong near coasts and in the straits we track, and thins out in the open ocean. Mid-ocean STS transfers can be missed entirely. We do not resell satellite AIS today.
- Radar (SAR) is experimental, not a product feature. A free Sentinel-1 pipeline runs on a handful of areas, but its detector is not calibrated and it has produced no confirmed detections to date. Nothing in the paid plans depends on it. Dark-vessel findings you see come from AIS gap analysis, not from radar.
- A dark-fleet signal is an observation, not a verdict. We report what the transponder did — a gap, a jump, a rendezvous. Intent, ownership and legality are for your compliance team to establish.
- Upstream feeds can fail, and we say when they do. Our primary AIS provider went dark for three days in August 2026. The site kept serving last-known positions with a visible staleness banner rather than an empty map, and a second open-data feed now runs alongside it. Current state is always on the status page.
- Not a navigation or safety system. Port Flow is decision support for commercial and compliance work. It must never be used for piloting, collision avoidance or any safety-critical decision.