Guides and answers for tracking, billing, the API and everything else.
No — it is an intake allowance, not a ceiling. It counts the references you <strong>add</strong> during each billing cycle. A shipment added in an earlier cycle keeps tracking at no extra cost until it is delivered and does not consume anything from the current allowance. So if your lanes run six or eight weeks, you will normally have far more containers in the water at one time than your monthly number, and that is the plan working as intended rather than an overage. Re-adding a reference you already added in the same cycle is free too — it counts once.
No. The tracking data was already fetched from the carrier, so the reference still counts against the cycle it was added in — deleting stops the tracking, not the billing, and an add-and-delete loop spends your allowance rather than recycling it. There is one deliberate exception for genuine mistakes: a reference deleted shortly after it was added and never re-added is refunded, a small number of times per cycle. If you have deleted something by accident and it was not refunded, contact support and we will sort it out.
On an annual plan the shipments pool for the whole year rather than resetting every month, so a busy month borrows from a quiet one — which is the point of it, and usually the reason people ask. Any add-on slots you buy join the same pool and stay for the rest of the period. Annual billing is not switched on for everyone yet; if it would suit your volume, tell support and we will pick it up with you rather than leave you waiting on a page.
Yes. Open Settings, then the Billing tab, and fill in your registered company name, billing address and tax registration number. Everything you save there is printed on every invoice we issue from then on, so your finance team can book it without asking us to reissue anything. We label the number for your country automatically: VAT in the EU and UK, GST in India, Australia and Singapore, RFC in Mexico, and so on. For the handful of countries that have no single standard format, the number still appears on the invoice as its own labelled line. Two things are worth knowing. Only the account owner can change these details. And a change applies to your NEXT invoice, because invoices already issued are never reprinted, so fill this in before you upgrade if you can. If you have already been billed and need an earlier invoice corrected, contact support and we will sort it out.
Because no billing details have been saved on the account yet. Until somebody fills them in under Settings, then Billing, the only identity we hold for you is the email address you signed up with, so that is all the invoice can carry. Adding your company legal name, address and tax ID there fixes it for every invoice issued afterwards. The account owner has to be the one to do it.
Yes. Settings → Notifications has a switch for each email we send — disruption alerts, the daily disruption digest and the daily shipment report. Turning one off stops it immediately. Transactional mail (login codes, receipts, a failed payment, replies to your support tickets) still reaches you.
Free days are the time the carrier and the terminal give you to use a container at destination before charges start. Traqo runs one combined clock per shipment rather than separate detention and demurrage countdowns, because two countdowns on one box is a question an operator cannot answer from a screen, and a wrong split is worse than an honest merge. The clock starts from the confirmed discharge at the destination port — not from a vessel appearing alongside on a map — and stops when the box is collected. Days are counted as calendar days in the destination port's own timezone, so a box discharged late at night has already burned a day by local midnight, and everyone looking at that shipment is told the same number wherever they are sitting. How many free days a shipment gets comes from the most specific setting that applies to it: one you set on that shipment, then your rule for that port, then your rule for that carrier and country, then your blanket default, then what the carrier told us, then the tariff master, then the platform default. We always show you which of those the number came from, because "seven free days" means something different depending on whether you set it or we assumed it. Where free-time tracking is switched on for your account, you can ask the assistant about any container you track and it will tell you the phase, the deadline and how long is left.
Rate us when the prompt appears in the app. If you rate us highly we will ask whether you would post a review on G2, and show you exactly what the thank-you is worth before you start. Press the button, write the review on G2, then come back and press "I posted it" — the reward lands on your account at that point, not when you first click through. We cannot see G2 reviews from our side, so it is on your word, and we are grateful for it. If you close the tab before confirming, you have not lost anything: two days later we send one email with the same link, and it works for thirty days. That is the only reminder we send. The reward itself is set by us and shown to you on the button, so it is always the current one rather than a number in a help article.
The email body shows the first 8 columns; everything after that is tagged "attachment only" and is still in the attached spreadsheet. Drag a column above the eighth position to bring it into the email itself.
It gives you an estimate, clearly labelled as one, and never a bill. The figure is your own tariff rate multiplied by the days over — we do not receive your carrier's invoice, we do not know about a rate you negotiated and never told us, and terminals bill on their own rules. Treat it as a warning that money has started running, not as the amount you will be charged. Charge estimates are a paid-plan feature; the countdown itself is available lower down the plans. The point of the estimate is the decision it prompts: a container three days from its deadline is a phone call worth making today, and that is worth much more than a precise number arriving after the fact.
No. Anyone can be asked, on any plan including the free one. What matters is whether the product has actually done something for you — tracking a handful of shipments, seeing one arrive, or getting a free-time alert before demurrage started. We used to ask only paying customers, which meant most people who used the product every day were never asked at all.
Yes — Settings → Notifications → Daily shipment report → How often offers every day, weekdays only, or once a week on a day you choose. You can also narrow it to only delayed shipments, or only those arriving in the next 7 days.
Yes, and closing the prompt is not the same as refusing it. If you close it or press "Maybe later" we will leave you alone for a fortnight and then ask once more, up to a few times. If you would rather never be asked, press "Don't ask again" on the prompt and that is the end of it. Rating us also stops it — once you have answered, the prompt has done its job.
Yes. Per customer you can switch on alerts for departure, arrival, ETA change and free days ending. Each event is independent, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe so the customer stays in control.
Alerts are switched on for them but there is no contact email on file, so nothing can actually be sent. It is shown in amber because it looks configured and delivers nothing. Add a contact email to the customer and the alerts start working.
Where annual billing is switched on, yes — and you can raise it yourself in a moment, without waiting for one of us. Ask the assistant, or use "Request a quote for approval" on the billing page. You get a numbered quotation as a PDF, emailed to you with a payment link, and it holds the price for a set window so your approval process has time to run. Nothing is charged when it is issued: it is a document describing what you would buy, and the charge only happens if and when somebody pays the link. Quotations are for annual plans, including annual Custom, because the annual commitment is the one that usually needs releasing a budget. Two practical notes: fill in your billing details first, because the registered company name and address on the account are what head the document, and only the workspace owner or a billing manager can raise one.
You can, from the dashboard — but ask them first. The unsubscribe link switches off all four events at once and it was their decision. Re-enabling without asking is how an account ends up marked as spam, which hurts delivery for every email you send.
Nothing is sent on a quiet day. The digest only goes out when there is something active to report, because an empty summary trains you to ignore the real ones.
Settings → Notifications → Daily shipment report has a "Send me a test report now" button. It sends immediately using your current columns, scope and attachment format.
It counts new registrations. Your plan limit is the number of shipments ADDED during the billing period, so deleting one does not normally return the slot — otherwise a single slot could be recycled endlessly. One exception for genuine mistakes: a shipment deleted within 48 hours of being added is refunded and never counts, capped at 3 refunds per billing period (scaled up on annual plans). Re-tracking a container you already track, and a reference that fails to resolve, never consume a slot at all.
At the start of your billing period, not on the first of the month. The banner on your shipment list shows how many you have added, your limit, and the exact date the period expires.
Buy add-on slot packs from the billing page — they extend your current plan, including the largest standard one, without moving you up a tier. If you are regularly exhausting the top plan, that is worth a conversation about volume pricing rather than repeat packs.
Check the Status column on your shipment list — it reads "arrived" once the carrier reports the vessel berthed at the destination port. We do not mark arrival before the carrier publishes it, because a vessel alongside on a map is not a confirmed discharge and only the confirmed one affects your free days. To be told rather than having to look, switch on arrival alerts for yourself or for your customer.
The carrier is the source of truth and we report what they publish. A difference usually means one of three things: their website reads an internal system that updates before the public feed; the box is transhipping, so it can show arrived at an intermediate port; or you are tracking a BL covering several containers, one of which moved before the others. If we are more than a day behind on a shipment that is clearly moving, send us the reference and we will check the feed.
The Timeline column shows when we last synced with the carrier. Ocean carriers publish in batches rather than continuously, so a status that synced a while ago is not stale data on our side — it is the most recent thing the line has said. That timestamp is the honest answer to how current it is.
Use Book a demo in the top navigation, or the "Thinking about Traqo" option on our support page. Tell us your rough monthly container volume and the lanes you run, and we will show it tracking your own references rather than a canned example — it is a far more useful half hour than a generic tour.
Yes. Paste a container or bill of lading number into the tracker on our home page — no account, no card, no call. Signing up gives you a dashboard, alerts and the daily report on top of that.
We track over 170 ocean carriers. Paste a reference into the tracker on the home page and you will know in seconds — that is faster than us checking a list for you. If your line is genuinely missing, tell us which one and we will look at adding it.
There is no fixed daily sync time. Each shipment re-syncs on a rolling 12-hour gap — at most twice a day, which is also the most the carrier feeds will give us, so asking more often returns the same data. Opening a shipment refreshes it there and then on any plan, and that counts towards the same gap rather than being extra. Because the gap runs from each shipment's own last sync rather than from a clock, there is no 9am or 10am batch to align an integration to. If you are scheduling a job against it, read the last-synced timestamp on the shipment (or lastSyncedAt on the API) rather than assuming a window.
Paste it anyway — spaces, dashes and full stops are stripped before we look the reference up, so "DXB 1040857" and "DXB1040857" are the same reference to us. If it still does not resolve, the likely reason is that it is a house bill issued by a forwarder rather than the ocean carrier; ask for the master BL.
Do not schedule against a sync time — there is not one. Ask for what changed instead: GET /api/v1/shipments?updated_since=<ISO timestamp of your last run> returns only the shipments whose tracking data has moved since then, which is the primitive built for exactly this. Every row also carries last_synced_at, so you can see how current each one is rather than assuming. If a shipment matters and its timestamp is older than you can accept, call the tracking endpoint for that reference and it re-syncs on the spot, subject to a 12-hour minimum gap. For a heavy overnight job the cheap pattern is: pull the delta, check timestamps, and force a re-track only on the handful that are both stale and important.
Check spam first — the code is a plain transactional email and filters occasionally hold it. Codes are short-lived, so if one arrives after you have already requested another, use the newest. Repeated requests in a short window are rate-limited, which looks like nothing happening: wait a minute rather than pressing send again. If nothing arrives at all, the address may have bounced previously — write to the support desk from any address and say which account it is.
120 requests per minute per API key by default, over a fixed 60-second window. Every response carries X-RateLimit-* headers, not just the ones that fail, so you can pace against the remaining count instead of waiting to be refused. Over the limit you get a 429 with Retry-After in seconds. Higher limits can be configured per plan.
Not necessarily — 402 has two distinct causes and data.error tells you which. "shipment_limit_reached" means you have used every shipment slot for the billing period; "payment_overdue" means a payment failed and the grace period has ended. Branch on data.error rather than the message text. Either way, references you already track keep updating; what is blocked is adding new ones.
Yes — the Developer page shows used, limit and remaining live, and the same figures are available to your integration. Poll that rather than learning your position from a 402.
No — keys are stored hashed, so we genuinely cannot read an existing one back. Issue a new key and revoke the old one. That is a deliberate design choice: a key we could show you is a key anyone who reached our database could show themselves.
Cancel from the billing page. You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for, and it does not renew. Your shipments and history stay readable while the account exists — cancelling stops the billing, it does not wipe the account. If you want the data removed entirely, ask us and we will handle it as a deletion request.
Yes — invoices are on the billing page and are also emailed when a payment succeeds. If you need specific details on them (a company registration or tax number, a purchase-order reference), tell the support desk what has to appear and we will set it on the account so future invoices carry it.