Frequently Asked Questions

HELM has four tiers: Captain (€199/mo) for a single vessel with 25 crew seats; Owner (€399/mo, most popular) for up to 3 vessels and 100 crew seats; Management (€999/mo) for unlimited vessels and crew; and Management Pro (€1,499/mo) for fleet operators and brokers who need a dedicated account manager, quarterly captain training, a 4-hour priority SLA, and an annual compliance audit call.

Yes — every plan, including Captain at €199/mo, includes all 50+ systems: AI Copilot, Smart OCR, Predictive Maintenance, Port Guides, Live Radar, Weather Playbook, Emergency/MOB, MLC Hours-of-Rest, Fleet Chat, and more. There are no system add-ons or paywalled features. The only differences between plans are vessel count, crew seat limits, and the support and reporting features listed for each tier.

Owner (€399/mo) is designed for private owners running up to 3 vessels with 100 crew seats. It adds Fleet P&L consolidation, Sunday Snapshot PDF, Daily Owner Digest, Branded Reports, Charter Marketplace, and APA Reconciliation PDFs on top of everything in Captain. Management (€999/mo) steps up to unlimited vessels and crew, adds a Fleet Overview dashboard, priority email support, platform & privacy tools, audit logs, and a custom onboarding session. Choose Owner if you have 1–3 yachts and want rich owner-facing reporting; choose Management if you operate a fleet or manage vessels on behalf of clients.

Management Pro (€1,499/mo) is built for professional fleet operators, management companies, and superyacht brokers who need enterprise-grade support. On top of everything in Management, you get a dedicated account manager, quarterly captain training sessions, a 4-hour priority SLA, a custom onboarding workshop, an annual compliance audit call, and early access to new features before general release.

Yes — upgrades are instant and prorated to the day. Your data, crew, and settings carry over seamlessly. Many customers start on Captain for a single vessel and upgrade to Owner when they add a second yacht or want the Fleet P&L and Owner Digest features.

Yes — 14 days free, no credit card required. You get full access to all systems on the Captain plan during the trial. At the end of the trial you choose which plan to continue on, or you can cancel with no charge.

Yes — paying annually saves two months compared to monthly billing. The annual discount is applied automatically at checkout when you select the yearly billing option. You can switch between monthly and annual at any renewal date.

A crew seat is one named user account with login access. Captain plan includes 25 seats (more than enough for most single-vessel crews). Owner plan includes 100 seats across all 3 vessels. Management and Management Pro have unlimited seats. Guests, brokers, and accountants you invite also consume a seat, so factor those in when choosing a plan.

Fleet P&L consolidation, Sunday Snapshot PDF, Daily Owner Digest, Branded Reports, Charter Marketplace, and APA Reconciliation PDFs are available from Owner (€399/mo) upward. These are owner-facing financial and reporting tools that go beyond single-vessel operations.

Captain and Owner plans include standard email support with a 1-business-day response. Management plan includes priority email support. Management Pro includes a dedicated account manager and a 4-hour priority SLA — meaning a qualified team member responds within 4 business hours, any day of the week.

HELM is purpose-built for superyachts 20m to 100m+. The platform scales from an owner-operator 22m sport-fisher with 4 crew to a 120m charter flagship with 35 crew. All systems work identically at any size — only plan limits (vessels and crew count) differ.

No. HELM is a web app — works in any modern browser. It's also a PWA, so you can install it to your phone or tablet home screen for a full-screen app experience with offline read-access and push notifications.

Yes — the service worker precaches the app shell and uses stale-while-revalidate for assets. API data falls back to an offline JSON when connectivity drops. When you reconnect, changes sync automatically.

Yes — the vessel selector at the top of the sidebar scopes every module to the active vessel. Owner-plan users with multiple vessels and Management-plan users see a Fleet Overview page that rolls up all vessels into one dashboard.

The AI is an advisor, not an authority. All passage recommendations, weather verdicts, and maintenance predictions are grounded in real OpenWeatherMap and vessel data. Captains retain full responsibility — the AI speeds up analysis, it doesn't replace judgment. Key figures are always cited from source data.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 by Anthropic, via the Emergent LLM key (no separate API billing required). Vision tasks such as document OCR use the same model's multimodal capabilities.

APScheduler runs a sweep every 3 hours comparing current OpenWeatherMap forecasts against the prior sweep. Delta movements that breach captain-set thresholds (wind > 25 kts, gusts > 35 kts, precipitation > 60%) trigger alerts with email and push notification. Every captain action (postpone, reroute, proceed) is logged to the Weather Playbook for future reference.

Yes. The Hours of Rest module enforces MLC Title 2 Reg 2.3 (≥10h per 24h, ≥77h per 7 days, rest in no more than two blocks with one ≥6h). Non-compliance is flagged red in real time, and PDF reports are generated to flag-state inspection format. Medical Incident Report PDFs comply with Title 4 Reg 4.1.

The Emissions module reports CO2 at 2.725kg per litre of MGO, calculates your 70% 2026 compliance liability at €80/tonne, and produces the A–E CII rating per IMO MEPC.339(76) based on vessel size and fuel consumption.

Yes. From any voyage with a guest manifest, click Share to generate a signed public link (no login required) with vessel details, IMO, flag state, departures/arrivals, guest table, and waypoints. Many port authorities accept the branded PDF directly.

Charter Marketplace is included from the Owner plan (€399/mo) upward. Every vessel gets an auto-scaffolded public listing. Toggle it to public, customise the headline, rate, and highlights, and share the link with brokers. Enquiries land back in your Charter Marketplace inbox and trigger an email to the captain.

Yes. On any charter booking, click Preference Form — a unique no-login link is generated. Each guest enters dietary restrictions, allergies, cabin preferences, beverage preferences, and special occasions. Submissions appear directly on the charter record.

Yes. HELM ships with 27 systems × 12 role presets — the permissions matrix is viewable at /team. Additionally, any captain or owner can override permissions per user (e.g., grant a chief stew access to charter ops for one charter) without changing their base role.

Go to /team → Invite people → add their email with the appropriate role preset (Accountant for a bookkeeper, Management for a management company, Guest for read-only preview). They land on a one-tap accept page — no signup form required.

Yes — two cadences, available from the Owner plan (€399/mo) upward. Sunday Snapshot (08:00 UTC Sunday) — full weekly PDF via email with fleet roll-up, vessel P&L, and expiring docs. Daily Owner Digest (07:00 UTC Mon–Sat) — short email and push with open tasks, overdue count, and charters this week. Both can be disabled per owner in Integrations & App.

Available on Owner (€399/mo) and above, Fleet P&L consolidation rolls up income, expenses, and net position across all your vessels into a single view. You can drill into any vessel for the detail, or export the consolidated report as a branded PDF — useful for accountants, management companies, or owner reporting.

The Live Fleet Tracking module accepts manual position fixes today and is wired to accept external AIS feeds (AISStream.io, MarineTraffic, or shipboard NMEA 0183/2000 gateways). Setup is a 5-minute integration on the Management settings page.

HELM's Financial module is self-contained today. Xero and QuickBooks CSV import is on the roadmap for 2026 Q2. In the interim, every expense and invoice export is available as CSV or PDF for manual import.

Your data is retained for 30 days after cancellation, during which you can export everything from /platform. After 30 days, data is permanently deleted. You can also trigger immediate deletion on request.

Yes — USD, EUR, and GBP global toggle in the sidebar. All financial figures are displayed in your chosen currency and persisted on your user profile.

HELM uses Stripe Checkout for card billing and Stripe Customer Portal for self-serve card updates and cancellations. HELM never sees or stores card details — PCI-DSS compliance is inherited from Stripe.

Absolutely — in fact it's ideal. Most yachts onboard during winter refit so all certifications, maintenance schedules, and crew rosters are in place before the season starts. Typical implementation: 2 weeks for a single vessel. Management plan includes a custom onboarding session; Management Pro includes a full custom onboarding workshop.

HELM Copilot is your first line of support — ask any question from any page. Captain and Owner plans include standard email support with a 1-business-day response. Management plan includes priority email support. Management Pro includes a dedicated account manager and a 4-hour priority SLA.

Not currently — HELM is sold direct. However, Management and Management Pro customers can invite clients as read-only Owners so the platform is accessed under one unified brand experience. Full white-label is on the 2027 roadmap.