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We answer every message. If you already have an account, raising a ticket from inside the app gets you a response time we commit to.
The questions we are asked most
Your plan's allowance counts the shipments you <strong>add</strong> during the current billing cycle. When it is used up, adding another is refused (the API returns <code>402</code>) — but everything you are already tracking carries on updating normally, so nothing goes dark. You are notified as you approach the limit. From there you can buy add-on slots, upgrade, or wait for the next cycle, when the allowance resets. Note that deleting a shipment does not give the slot back: the tracking data was already fetched.
There are two different free things, and they are easy to mix up. Without an account, the public tracking page lets anyone look up a container or bill of lading a few times a day — no signup, results include the route map and event timeline. With a free account you get a monthly shipment allowance instead: shipments you add are saved, keep updating on their own, and appear on your dashboard, along with API access for testing. The current allowance for every plan, free included, is on <a href="/pricing">the pricing page</a>.
Yes, all plans support both container number and bill of lading (BL) tracking. Enter either type of reference number and our system will automatically detect the format and fetch tracking information from the relevant shipping line across our 170+ carrier network.
We support over 170 shipping lines worldwide, including all major carriers like Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Evergreen, COSCO, Yang Ming, ZIM, and HMM. Our coverage is continuously expanding to include regional and niche carriers as well.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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 24 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.
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. A shipment re-syncs at most every 12 hours — and every 4 hours once it is close: within 48 hours of its arrival date, or up to 7 days past it. That is the window where a carrier actually revises a date, so it is the window we watch. 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 minimum gap of 12 hours — or 4 hours while the shipment is within 48 hours of arrival or up to 7 days overdue. 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.
They are the carrier's own words for the steps a container goes through, and Traqo shows each one as the carrier reports it. Empty pickup: you collect the empty box from a depot to load it. Gate in: the loaded box is received at the origin terminal. Loaded: it goes on board the vessel. Vessel departed and vessel arrived: the sailing itself, with transshipment discharge and transshipment load in between when the box changes vessel at an intermediate port. Discharged: it comes off the vessel at the destination port — this is the moment your free days start counting, not the vessel arriving. Gate out: it leaves the destination terminal with you, which is the moment the free-days clock stops. Empty return: the empty box is handed back, also called de-hire or drop-off. Rail load and rail unload cover an inland leg, and customs covers clearance and inspection holds. A milestone you cannot see has not been reported to us yet — we never infer one from the others. Where to return the empty is set by the carrier, on the release or delivery order, so check that document or ask them: we record the return when it happens but we are not told the depot in advance.
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.
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.
Two integrations exist today and you can use them now. Webhooks push shipment events to any endpoint you own — set them up under Dashboard, Developer, Webhooks. The REST API gives you container, bill of lading and vessel tracking in your own tools, documented at /developer, and there is a SeaRates-compatible version of it at /developer/searates if you already use theirs. Both need developer mode switched on for your account. Zapier and Make, Google Sheets, Slack alerts, Microsoft Teams and an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor are not built. You can ask for them: open Settings, then Integrations, and press the button beside the one you want. That records your request and shows you how many other accounts have asked for the same thing, which is what decides the order we build them in. Nothing there is scheduled and we do not promise a date — if someone tells you one of these is coming soon, that is not something we have said. Anything not on that list can be requested from Dashboard, Feature requests, where you can also vote on what other customers have asked for.
Yes. You can attach up to 3 images when you raise a request and on every reply after it, 5 MB each. PNG and JPG only — a PDF or any other file type is refused, because an image is the one kind of file we can make safe before storing it, and we would rather say no than accept something we cannot check. Your images are stored privately and are only opened through the ticket itself; the link expires after a few minutes each time. If a file is refused for any reason, your message still goes through — you will see a note saying the images did not attach, and you can reply with a different one. The assistant in the help drawer cannot see your screenshots: it is told how many you sent and nothing else. A person on the support desk opens them.