The model
Boats cost money before they make any. Here's what membership costs, where a boat's income is supposed to come from, the risk we're not pretending isn't there, and an honest list of what we still don't know.
Membership
Three tiers. Enough to filter out people who aren't serious, not enough to run a company on.
See the boats, the berths and the terms on offer.
A live profile and the right to be shortlisted for a berth.
Open a project, set the berths, run the shortlist, issue the articles.
These are opening numbers, not a settled price list. The subscription exists to filter for people who are serious about going, not to be the business itself.
The real business
A boat earns the way any working vessel earns — plus a couple of things only a platform can add.
The catch
Maintenance doesn't care whose equity it is
Boats eat money. Constant maintenance — sails, rigging, ropes, engines, haul-outs — never really stops. A crew has to be able to look at a ledger and see that their hours and their buy-in produced more than they cost. Proving that split, boat by boat, is the hardest thing on this list, and it's the first thing we're building. Until that ledger exists, "equity" is a word rather than a number.
Fair's fair
Owning a boat is a liability. So is owning almost anything else.
An old house is the same or worse. Something is always failing, and a house you're still paying a mortgage on isn't an asset either — it's a liability with a nicer view. Owning anything real works this way; a boat just makes the maintenance visible.
Split across four or five people who hold equity and actually live aboard full time, the maths changes. Say maintenance runs about $10k a year against rent of about $18k a year for the same people, spread across four or five shares — the boat wins, and it isn't close. Treat those two figures as illustration, not a quote for any specific vessel.
"Boats are a money pit" is mostly a hobbyist's complaint. It usually comes from someone who also has a house, and a job they don't love, and who uses the boat twice a year — then blames the boat for the other fifty weeks.
If the boat is your home and your business, the comparison isn't boat against nothing. It's boat against rent plus a commute. Most people who'd actually join a crew like this are selling most of what they own to be there.
The hard part
This is the thing that turns equity from a word into a number.
Hours in, capital in, revenue out
Every crew member should be able to open one page and see it for their own boat: hours logged, cash put in, revenue that came out, and how the split was worked out — visible to everyone aboard, not just claimed by whoever's holding the books. That page doesn't exist yet. It's first on the list, ahead of charters, ahead of Retreats, ahead of anything with a subsidiary attached, because none of the rest is worth building if the split can only be promised instead of shown.
Open
A fraction of a percent, we said. Which fraction, taken on what — gross charter revenue, net profit, a sale, an escrow — isn't decided. It waits on there being enough real transaction volume to look at.
The good-season version of the ledger is straightforward: hours and cash in, revenue out. Nobody has written the version for a year where that number goes negative for everyone who put in time. That's the harder document.
Boats may be favourable for writing off losses, and there's an open question about registering a vessel as both a home and a business. We don't have a settled answer. Nothing here is tax advice.
We've said backers can buy support, or a real stake in a specific boat. What that stake pays out in — cash, a priority berth, a vote on the project — isn't fixed yet.
We're not selling a return. We're building the ledger that would prove one, if it ever exists.