Introducing ShippingRates: The Intelligence Layer for Global Container Shipping

Published: March 2026

Container shipping moves $14 trillion in goods every year, yet the cost of shipping those goods remains one of the most opaque parts of global trade. Freight rates change weekly. Demurrage and detention charges — the fees carriers impose when containers sit too long at ports or warehouses — cost the industry an estimated $22 billion per year. And the data you need to understand these costs is scattered across dozens of carrier websites, buried in PDF tariff schedules, and locked behind enterprise sales calls.

If you are a logistics manager, you have probably built a spreadsheet that tries to compare D&D charges across carriers for a single country. If you are a developer, you have probably scraped carrier portals to feed data into an internal tool. If you are building an AI agent for supply chain operations, you have probably discovered that no clean, structured data source exists.

ShippingRates was built to solve all three problems.

What Is ShippingRates?

ShippingRates is an intelligence platform for container shipping. It provides structured, queryable data on carrier rates, demurrage & detention tariffs, port information, and total landed costs — delivered through two interfaces:

• An API at api.shippingrates.org with 27 endpoints covering carriers, ports, countries, D&D tariffs, freight rates, exchange rates, sailing schedules, and cost calculators.
• A Dashboard at app.shippingrates.org with visual tools for D&D calculation, carrier comparison, and analytics — no code required.

The platform covers 8 major ocean carriers (Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, CMA CGM, ONE, Evergreen, COSCO, and ZIM), spans 158 countries, and maintains over 13,095 demurrage & detention tariff records.

What makes it unusual: ShippingRates was designed from day one for both human users and AI agents. Developers get a REST API. Logistics teams get a dashboard. AI agents get an MCP server, an OpenAPI spec, and machine-readable discovery files. Every audience gets the same underlying data, through the interface that fits their workflow.

For Developers & AI Agents

The API

The ShippingRates API is a standard REST service with JSON responses. The base URL is https://api.shippingrates.org. Interactive documentation is available at api.shippingrates.org/docs, powered by Scalar, with code examples in Shell, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python.

The free tier gives you 25 requests per month with no signup, no API key, and no credit card. Just make requests:

# See what data is available
curl https://api.shippingrates.org/api/stats

# List all carriers
curl https://api.shippingrates.org/api/lines

# Get D&D tariffs for the United States
curl https://api.shippingrates.org/api/dd/US

# Compare D&D charges across all carriers for Germany
curl https://api.shippingrates.org/api/dd/compare/DE

# Calculate total landed cost for a route
curl "https://api.shippingrates.org/api/calculate?origin=CNSHA&destination=USLAX&carrier=maersk&container=40HC"

When you need higher volume, paid endpoints use the x402 payment protocol. Your HTTP client pays per-request with USDC on Base or Solana — no API keys to manage, no monthly invoices, no signup forms. You pay for exactly what you use, and the protocol handles authentication through your wallet.

The MCP Server

If you are building or using AI agents, ShippingRates provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server at mcp.shippingrates.org. This lets AI agents like Claude, GPT, or any MCP-compatible client query shipping data using natural language:

• “What are the demurrage charges for Maersk in Brazil?”
• “Compare D&D costs across all carriers for imports to the UK.”
• “Calculate the total landed cost for a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam.”

The MCP server exposes the same 27 endpoints as the REST API, structured as tools that agents can discover and invoke programmatically.

AI Discovery Endpoints

ShippingRates publishes a full set of machine-readable discovery files so that AI agents, crawlers, and developer tools can understand the platform without human guidance:

These files mean that an AI agent can arrive at the ShippingRates domain, discover what the API offers, understand how to authenticate, and start making useful queries — all without a human reading documentation on its behalf.

For Shipping Professionals

Not everyone who needs shipping intelligence writes code. The ShippingRates Dashboard at app.shippingrates.org provides visual tools for the same data, designed for logistics managers, freight forwarders, and operations teams.

D&D Calculator

Select a country, carrier, and container type. The calculator shows you demurrage and detention rates by day, including free time allowances, so you can estimate charges before a container arrives. No more digging through carrier PDF tariff schedules.

Carrier Comparator

Compare demurrage and detention rates across all 8 carriers for any country, side by side. See which carrier offers the most free days, which has the steepest escalation, and where the cost crossover points are. This is the view that used to require maintaining a spreadsheet across 8 different carrier websites.

Analytics

Track your API usage, monitor rate trends, and explore the data coverage across regions and carriers. The dashboard gives you the same intelligence that powers the API, without writing a single line of code.

Data Coverage

ShippingRates maintains structured data across the following dimensions:

The eight carriers covered represent the vast majority of global container shipping capacity. Together, they operate through the three major shipping alliances — Gemini (Maersk + Hapag-Lloyd), Premier (MSC + ZIM), and Ocean Alliance (CMA CGM + COSCO + Evergreen + ONE) — and handle the routes that move most of the world’s containerized trade.

Tariff data is updated as carriers publish new schedules. The platform monitors carrier tariff pages, normalizes the data into a consistent structure (carrier, country, container type, charge type, free days, daily rates by tier), and makes it queryable through both the API and the dashboard.

What Makes ShippingRates Different

Wallet-Verified Access — No API Keys

Most APIs require you to sign up, verify an email, generate an API key, and attach it to every request. ShippingRates uses the x402 payment protocol instead. Free-tier requests need no authentication at all. Paid requests are authenticated and paid through your crypto wallet (USDC on Base or Solana) in a single HTTP header. There are no API keys to rotate, no OAuth flows to implement, and no monthly invoices to reconcile. You pay per request, and the protocol handles the rest.

AI-Native from Day One

ShippingRates was not built as a human-only product with an API bolted on later. It was designed from the start for three audiences simultaneously:

• Humans get a dashboard with visual tools and a blog with industry analysis.
• Developers get a REST API with interactive docs, an OpenAPI spec, and code examples.
• AI agents get an MCP server, agents.json for capability discovery, ai-plugin.json for ChatGPT compatibility, llms.txt for LLM context, and ai.txt for crawler permissions.

This is not a checkbox exercise. Every endpoint is structured so that an AI agent can discover it, understand it, and use it without human intervention. The MCP server at mcp.shippingrates.org lets agents query shipping data as naturally as a developer calls an API.

Transparent Pricing

There is no “contact sales for pricing” page. The free tier is 25 requests per month, no strings attached. Paid endpoints list their per-request price in the OpenAPI spec via x-price extensions. You can see what every request costs before you make it.

Open Standards

ShippingRates is built on open protocols and specifications: OpenAPI 3.1.0 for API documentation, MCP for agent communication, x402 for payment, and standard discovery files (agents.json, ai-plugin.json, llms.txt, ai.txt) for machine readability. There is no proprietary SDK required and no vendor lock-in. If your tool speaks HTTP and JSON, it can use ShippingRates.

Getting Started

There are three paths into ShippingRates, depending on how you work:

Path 1: API (For Developers)

1. Start with the free tier — 25 requests/month, no signup.
2. Explore the interactive docs at api.shippingrates.org/docs.
3. Make your first request:

   curl https://api.shippingrates.org/api/stats

4. Read the OpenAPI spec for the full endpoint reference.
5. When you need higher volume, connect a wallet and pay per-request via x402.

Path 2: Dashboard (For Shipping Professionals)

1. Open the dashboard at app.shippingrates.org.
2. Use the D&D Calculator to look up demurrage and detention charges for any carrier and country.
3. Use the Carrier Comparator to compare rates side by side.
4. No code, no API calls — just the data you need in a visual interface.

Path 3: MCP Server (For AI Agents)

1. Point your MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP host) at mcp.shippingrates.org.
2. The agent will discover available tools automatically via the MCP protocol.
3. Ask questions in natural language: “What are Hapag-Lloyd’s detention charges in Japan?”
4. For programmatic agent discovery, read agents.json or llms.txt.

Start Using ShippingRates

The data is live. The free tier is open. Pick the path that fits your workflow:

Questions? Explore the blog for deep dives on D&D charges, carrier alliances, EU ETS surcharges, and more. Read the llms.txt file for a machine-readable overview of everything the platform offers.