Container tracking automation
Stop bleeding money
on demurrage charges.
Automated container tracking and last-free-day alerts
for drayage operators and freight forwarders.
The charges don't wait.
Your team does.
Demurrage rates at major North American ports run $150 to $400 per container per day — and they start accruing the moment your free time expires. A single missed container sitting at the terminal for four extra days costs you $600 to $1,600. Multiply that across a month of shipments, and you're looking at a quiet but brutal margin leak.
The operational reality is harder. Your team is logging into five carrier portals — MSC, Maersk, Evergreen, COSCO, Hapag-Lloyd — every morning, manually checking statuses on 50, 80, 120 containers. One gets missed. Then another. By the time the bill arrives, the container left days ago and the argument with the steamship line is already lost.
The problem isn't that your people aren't working hard — it's that the system forces them to do something machines should do. Container status doesn't change on a schedule. Free days don't wait for your morning huddle. You need monitoring that never blinks, and alerts that show up before the damage is done.
Automated vigilance.
Zero portal logging.
Portbound Ops monitors your containers around the clock and surfaces exactly the information you need, exactly when you need it — delivered to where your team already works.
Real-time alerts in Slack or email
Container status changes trigger instant alerts to your Slack channel or inbox. Know the moment a container is available, held, or approaching its last free day — no polling required on your end.
Last-free-day countdowns
Every tracked container gets a last-free-day countdown. We warn you at 72 hours, 48 hours, and 24 hours remaining — so dispatch has time to act before the clock runs out.
Email-forward intake
Forward booking confirmations and arrival notices to your Portbound inbox. We extract the container numbers and booking references automatically — no portal access or manual data entry needed from your team.
Weekly summary reports
Every Monday, a clean summary lands in your inbox: containers tracked, status changes caught, estimated demurrage avoided. Your ops team sees the value, every week, in dollars.
What you'll actually
see every day.
Alerts that carry exactly what dispatch needs — container number, status, days remaining, location — nothing more.
Live demurrage alerts posted directly to your team's Slack channel — overdue containers flagged in red, available ones in green.
Your week, in numbers.
Every Monday morning a plain-English summary lands in your inbox: how many containers were tracked, how many demurrage warnings were sent, and a conservative estimate of the charges you avoided. No dashboard to log into — just a clear accounting of the value, every week.
Built for the people
moving freight.
Drayage operators
- You're pulling containers from multiple ports — LA, Long Beach, Oakland, Houston, Savannah — often for dozens of shippers simultaneously.
- Every delay at the terminal chips into your driver utilization and your margin. You need to know which containers to prioritize, today.
- Portbound surfaces your most time-sensitive containers first, every morning, so dispatch can schedule the right pulls before the penalties kick in.
- Designed for teams tracking 30 to 300+ containers at any given time.
Freight forwarders
- You're coordinating shipments across multiple steamship lines and booking references, often for clients who expect you to have answers before they ask.
- Your liability for demurrage on consignee-side delays is real. Catching free-time issues early is how you protect the relationship — and your P&L.
- Forward us your booking confirmations. We handle the tracking. You handle the client calls with information in hand, not apologies.
- Works with all major ocean carriers: Maersk, MSC, Evergreen, COSCO, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, and others.
Common questions,
straight answers.
Onboarding is a short call. We set up a forwarding address for your team's email, connect a Slack webhook if you want Slack alerts, and confirm which carriers and ports you work with most. Most customers are up and running within 48 hours of their first call.
No. Portbound works by forwarding booking confirmations and arrival notices to a dedicated email address we provide. We extract the container numbers automatically and begin tracking. Alerts come to you in Slack or email — wherever your team already works. No new portal to learn or log into daily.
We support all major ocean carriers and can add tracking for any container via manual entry. If you have active shipments that haven't been forwarded to us yet, just send the booking numbers or container numbers directly and we'll add them within the hour. Adding carrier support for a new line typically takes 24–48 hours.
When a container receives a last-free-day alert and is picked up before the free time expires, we log it as a potential avoided charge. We use published tariff rates for that carrier and port as the per-day rate. The weekly summary adds these up and shows them as estimated savings. We're conservative — we only count containers where the alert was sent before the free time expired and the container was retrieved in time.
Pricing depends on your container volume and the number of ports you operate across. We've built the pricing to be a fraction of a single demurrage event — the math works quickly. Contact us for a quote and we'll put together a proposal based on your current volume.
A 30-minute call to walk through your workflow, followed by a simple forwarding rule for your email. Most customers are receiving live alerts within 48 hours. If you need a custom carrier integration, give it a week. We handle all of it — there's nothing technical for your team to configure.
No long-term contracts. Send us an email and we'll offboard you cleanly, including disabling the forwarding address and removing your containers from our tracking queue. We'd rather earn your continued business every month than lock you in.
Ready to stop
the bleeding?
Tell us about your operation. We'll show you exactly how Portbound Ops fits — and what the math looks like for your volume.
[email protected]