Four Subscriptions
a Sailor Owes.
The Rest Is a Tax.

A short audit of the recurring fees you have been signed up for since you bought your last chartplotter. It is, on inspection, an interesting bill. We are going to draw a line in it. Where the line falls — and what we do and do not charge for ourselves — is the subject of this piece.

Open any modern marine-electronics catalogue and count the recurring fees. Charts (€89/year, plus €179 for the “Premium” tier, because of course there is a Premium tier). Weather (€79/year). AIS plot overlay (€49/year, because somebody decided the AIS receiver you already bought should be re-licensed annually). Remote monitoring (€39/year, despite the boat dialing home over your own cellular plan). Cloud sync (€29/year, despite “the cloud” being a CSV file on a server that cost the vendor approximately nothing to keep running). “Pro features” (€59/year, with no public answer to the question of why the non-Pro features were left in the firmware in the first place). Welcome to the modern marine catalogue. We have read the small print, and we have opinions.

The Modest Annual Pile of Receipts

Add it up. A competently equipped cruising boat — chartplotter, AIS, weather overlay, remote monitoring, cloud sync, an app or two with a “Pro” tier — has, by the time you finish chandlering it, signed its owner up for somewhere between three hundred and five hundred euros a year in automatic renewals. Forever. On top of a fleet of devices you already paid for once, in cash, at the time of purchase, on the explicit understanding that those devices worked.

None of this is illegal. Most of it is not even unusual. Quite a lot of it is not honest, and the rest of this piece is about which is which.

What an Honest Subscription Actually Pays For

A subscription is legitimate when the vendor is doing something — continuously, every month — that costs them money to keep doing, whether you renew or not.

Real recurring costs look like this: salaries (people doing work); compute (servers and electricity); data acquisition (survey teams, sensors, satellites); infrastructure (cell towers, ground stations, fibre under the seabed). The vendor cannot stop paying for any of that the moment your renewal lapses. If the vendor were to vanish tomorrow, your subscription service would vanish with them, because there are real humans and real machines whose work was funded by your contribution. That is an honest subscription. You are buying a slice of an ongoing effort.

A dishonest subscription is recognisable by one feature: if the vendor were to vanish tomorrow, the service you are paying for would keep working anyway. Because there is no service. There is a feature that was paid for once, sometime in 2017, and the firmware has been running it on every device since then. The recurring fee is rent. The vendor’s recurring cost is whatever it takes to keep cashing your direct debit, which is a real cost — but probably not what you thought you were paying for.

Four Subscriptions a Sailor Genuinely Owes

Four categories pass the test cleanly. The rest of the marine catalogue should be measured against them.

1. Charts

Cartography is a continuous human effort. There are people in offices reading hydrographic surveys, integrating port-authority updates, redrawing the marina you anchored in last summer because the new pontoon went in over the winter, and re-surveying the shifting sandbank you crossed last week. The UK Hydrographic Office, NOAA, Navionics, C-MAP, OpenSeaMap — every one of them is paying staff every month to keep the chart truthful. A chart subscription is, when you trace the money back, a salary subscription. Sailors should be happy to pay it, and broadly are.

2. Weather

A modern forecast is the output of a supercomputer the size of a small building. ECMWF runs one of them, in Reading. NOAA runs another, and Météo-France AROME a third, and the DWD ICON model a fourth. These numerical models burn megawatts of electricity a day, ingest data from a global network of sensors and satellites, and are tuned by people with doctorates in atmospheric dynamics who, like everyone else, expect to be paid for their work. A weather subscription is buying compute time and physicists. Fair trade.

3. Connectivity

Starlink Maritime, Iridium Certus, the second SIM in your card-holder, the marina WiFi included in the slip fee. Each of these is, materially, a real network: satellites in orbit, ground stations on land, cell towers along the coast, fibre under the seabed. None of it is free to operate. The bandwidth that arrives at the antenna on your masthead costs somebody real money to deliver to you. Fair trade.

4. Insurance

Worth including this one, even though it lives outside the marine-electronics catalogue strictly speaking, because the same money-trace test applies and the same verdict holds. Marine insurance — hull, third-party liability, crew — is the textbook example of an honest recurring cost. What the premium pays for is the actuarial work that prices the risk, the claims-handling staff, the surveyors who inspect the boats, the reinsurance contracts that backstop the underwriter, and — most importantly — the reserve pool that actually pays the claim when somebody else’s bad day becomes your invoice. None of those is a feature flag in a database. All of them require continuous money to keep alive.

And the reason this subscription is not optional, in any meaningful sense, is a statistical fact about time itself. The probability of an accident on a boat is proportional to the time the boat spends afloat. Which is another way of saying that what could happen, given long enough, sooner or later will. A cruising sailor with 20,000 nautical miles under the keel has accumulated four thousand hours’ worth of opportunities for the season’s worst day to land. Most of those hours, gracefully, will pass without incident. One of them, eventually, will not. Insurance is the only honest answer to the arithmetic — and the premium is the price of having somebody else pick up the bill on the day the statistically inevitable bad event becomes a real one.

And, By Strict Subtraction: Everything Else

Run the same money-trace test against everything else in the marine subscription catalogue and the analysis falls out quickly.

• “Premium AIS plot overlay.” Your AIS receiver does the AIS — that’s what AIS is. The “overlay” is pixels on a screen. Pixels are paid for once, when the firmware is written. The vendor’s recurring cost is zero. Recurring fee: not zero.
• “Anchor alarm Pro.” The anchor alarm exists in the firmware. It will fire whether you have paid or not (the firmware was paid for in 2019 when the device was designed). What the subscription unlocks is a checkbox that was set to off until your card was charged. The unlocking costs the vendor approximately nothing.
• “Cloud sync.” Your boat dials home over your cellular plan or your marina WiFi. The “cloud” stores a few kilobytes of configuration and a long list of timestamps. A small server in a rack somewhere holds it. The cost per boat per year, at scale, is comparable to the cost of running the direct-debit collection. The fee is largely the price of being able to keep charging the fee.
• “Remote monitoring.” The device dials home, as above, over your connectivity, which you pay for separately. The vendor is not paying for the satellite or the cell tower; you are. The vendor is paying for a database row, which is one of the cheaper things to maintain in the modern economy.
• “Pro features.” A category of subscription with no published explanation of why the non-Pro features were left in the firmware in the first place. Unlocking a feature flag costs the vendor a single column update on a database that already exists. Charging fifty-nine euros a year for it is — by any normal accounting — a margin, not a service.

We are not saying these things should be free in some virtuous, zero-margin sense. Vendors are entitled to make a margin. We are saying that calling them subscriptions rather than features included in the original purchase is a marketing choice, not an engineering one — and a choice that mostly works to the vendor’s benefit and the sailor’s confusion.

Where We Stand, Plainly

Remote access to the Galvanic Voice is free — and will stay free. There is a modest amount of server infrastructure on our side that supports it, and we are not going to detail that in public. The relevant fact for this piece is that it costs us almost nothing in operational terms — nowhere near enough to justify a subscription fee. The boat does the heavy lifting of dialing home over your existing connectivity: your second SIM, your phone tethering, the marina WiFi you are already paying for. We did not build a private cellular network, we are not paying Iridium for your packets, and the portion of the work that does happen on our side is operationally inexpensive enough that asking you to pay a recurring fee for it would be — well, exactly the thing this article is about.

We are sailors. We have signed up to too many automatic renewals to list, on too many devices we did not need to. We are not going to be the company that does it to other sailors.

Honest About What May Come Later

We are discussing the possibility of shipping nautical charts inside the Galvanic Voice in a future release. We may eventually offer a paid weather service. If we do, both will be subscriptions — because both of those will cost us recurring real money to deliver. We will not be the vendor of cartographers without paying the cartographers; and we will not be the vendor of a numerical weather model without paying for the supercomputer time. If we charge a subscription for something, the test is the test we have applied to everyone else all the way through this piece: is there someone, somewhere, whose ongoing work is being funded by it? If yes, the subscription is honest. If no, it is the other thing.

And the Test Worth Applying to Every Other Vendor

Next time a marine product you already own asks you to renew a subscription, ask the vendor one question: “What are you doing, continuously, that costs you money to keep doing, that justifies this fee?” A good vendor will have a good answer. A real cartographer, a numerical weather model, a satellite constellation in orbit. A less good vendor will have a vague answer about “the service” or “ongoing development” or “the platform.” Listen carefully to the vague answers. They are usually the sound of a direct-debit collection running in the background.

Charts, weather, connectivity, insurance. Four subscriptions a sailor honestly owes — because they pay for someone doing something, or for somebody being on the hook when time inevitably catches up with the boat. Everything else, until proven otherwise, is a tax dressed up as a service.

We do not collect that tax.