Starboard Suite vs FareHarbor for Fishing Guides

Both of these platforms put a fee on your customer's checkout screen. Your client sees the same thing either way: the price you quoted, plus something extra, added by software. What differs is where that extra money goes. On one platform you set the rate yourself and keep every cent of it. On the other the vendor sets the rate, does not publish it, and keeps it.

Same instrument, opposite beneficiary. That is the whole comparison, and it is worth more than any feature grid because it decides whether a surcharge is a tool you are holding or one being used on you. Both sit alongside the rest of the category on the booking software topic page.

Who keeps the customer's money?

This is the question, and the two answer it in opposite directions.

Starboard's page invites you to add a ticketing charge at whatever level suits, while making clear the choice is yours and never compulsory. Those receipts land with the operator. Offset the service fee with them, or pitch them higher and pocket the surplus.

That is unusual and genuinely operator-friendly. The surcharge is a lever in your hand, its size is your decision, and any surplus above your software cost is margin.

FareHarbor's customer terms arrange it the other way. A booking fee is charged to the guest for using the service to obtain a reservation, its amount surfaces during checkout, and it is the company's revenue rather than yours.

The clause is also broader than most readers expect, reaching trips agreed in person or by telephone and entered afterwards, not merely those a guest books unaided on the web.

So a guide on one platform decides whether their clients see a surcharge, and a guide on the other has that decided for them, at a rate they cannot look up.

South Branch, NJ

Angler, TX

Is the ticketing fee actually recoverable?

Arithmetically yes, commercially it depends entirely on how many transactions you have.

The recovery mechanism works by spreading a fixed cost across bookings, so its comfort depends on the count rather than the value.

Six thousand dollars across a hundred and twenty guided days is fifty dollars a trip. Across eight thousand tickets on a passenger boat it is seventy five cents, which nobody notices and everybody pays.

Guiding sits at the extreme end of few transactions at high value, which is precisely the shape that makes a pass-through visible. The same fixed fee that disappears on a cruise ticket becomes a line item a client asks about on a charter.

There is also the matter of how the sale happens. A repeat client agreeing a date by text is not passing through a checkout where a surcharge can quietly appear, so the mechanism may not even be available on the bookings that make up most of your season.

The full breakdown of that structure sits in the Starboard Suite review.

Which costs a guide less?

On cash out of your account, the unpublished one, and it is not close.

This is worth stating plainly because it cuts against the usual conclusion in this series. A vendor that publishes nothing is normally the one to be careful of, and here the published card is the expensive one.

Starboard's flat band bills six thousand dollars regardless of how the year went. Anywhere beneath the two hundred thousand threshold the number is frozen, which means a thinner season simply pushes the percentage up.

FareHarbor issues no equivalent invoice for its headline fee, because the fee is borne by guests. On pure operator cost it wins, and it wins by a wide margin.

The company does charge operators separately on bookings that arrive through its interface, at a rate its support material puts at 2 percent, though that figure is visible only in a search preview of a page requiring sign-in and should be treated as soft.

For a referral-driven guide with no connected channels, that charge is unlikely to apply at all, which leaves the operator-side cost close to nothing.

So what are you actually buying with the six thousand?

A complete implementation, and it is the honest case in Starboard's favour.

Setup and configuration are done for you, the reservations module is styled to match your site, training for you and any staff is included, and upgrades cost nothing.

Staff logins, trip types and pickup points are all uncapped, while vouchers and discount codes ship in the base package instead of being dangled as a reason to upgrade.

Anyone with no appetite for assembling their own system gets genuine value from that, and it exceeds what a number of subscription rivals bundle at double their opening price.

None of this is about how well the thing is built. The mismatch is that a single-hull operator gets the identical setup a fleet does, at an effective rate several times higher, because the floor beneath the pricing was drawn around a larger business.

Cross two hundred thousand dollars of processed revenue and the arithmetic stops being unusual, since the bands meet cleanly at that boundary and nothing jumps when you pass it.

What does a non-refundable fee do to a weather day?

It creates a conversation you did not cause and cannot fix, on only one of these platforms.

Scrubbed days are part of the job. Wind, lightning and a river running the colour of coffee remove dates from any season, and what the software does with a refunded reservation is an operating question rather than fine print.

FareHarbor's terms state that booking fees are not returned once charged, except as the terms otherwise provide. Refund a client's day rate in full and they may still be down the fee, on a trip that never happened.

You did not set that fee, you did not receive it, and you cannot return it. What you can do is explain it, which falls to you because you are the one they know.

On the Starboard arrangement the equivalent money was yours, so your refund policy governs it. If you charged a ticketing fee and want to give it back, you may.

That difference is small in dollars and large in the part of the business that matters, because a guide's book is built from people who had a good experience even when the fish did not cooperate.

Which shape of business does each suit?

Both were drawn for ticketed passenger operations, and they diverge on what they do about it.

Departure locations, event types and per-seat vocabulary describe whale watching, harbour cruises and sunset sails. Those businesses clear the revenue thresholds on volume and hide a surcharge inside a low ticket price.

Starboard's answer to a small operator is a floor, which is honest and expensive. You know exactly what you are being asked for and can decline it in a minute.

FareHarbor's answer is to move the cost off your books entirely, which is attractive on cash flow and removes your ability to see or control it.

Guiding falls outside what either was designed around: a handful of transactions, each of them large, run off one hull by one person, across only part of the calendar.

Products designed nearer that shape ask a fraction of what either of these does. The Bookeo review works one of them through in detail, and the low-cost roundup covers the rest.

What does the third way cost?

Under two hundred dollars a year, which is the number that makes this whole comparison uncomfortable.

Both platforms here are arguing about who bears a substantial fee. It is worth stopping to note that several vendors in this category have arranged things so there is no substantial fee to bear.

One publishes plans from $14.95 a month with no percentage taken on any booking, from anybody, ever. A guide freezing the account through an off-season lands near a hundred and twenty seven dollars for the year.

Set that against six thousand dollars of flat band, and the ratio is roughly forty seven to one. Set it against an unpublished customer-paid percentage and the comparison cannot be run at all, which is its own answer.

What the cheap option lacks is distribution and hand-holding. There is no channel network, no agent connections, and no implementation team configuring it for you.

Whether that matters is the only question worth carrying into either sales conversation. If you have never taken a booking from a reseller and you are comfortable configuring software, the premium buys you nothing.

What should you settle before either conversation?

Your surcharge policy, because it determines which of these is even coherent for you.

Most people approach a software decision by comparing products. On this pair the order should reverse, because the products differ mainly in how they handle a decision you have not made yet.

Work out first whether you are willing to show a client a total larger than the number you quoted on the phone. That is a positioning question about your own business and nothing to do with software.

If you are, you want the platform where you set the rate and keep the money, and you should walk in knowing what rate you intend to charge and what it recovers.

If you are not, you need to know that one of these two will surcharge your clients anyway, at a level you cannot look up. Declining to charge a fee is not the same as no fee being charged.

That asymmetry is the most important thing on this page and it is almost never how these two get compared. The wider argument about controlling your own pricing and your own customers runs through the direct-booking piece.

Settle the policy, then pick the platform that implements it. Doing it the other way round means letting a vendor make a pricing decision that belongs to you.

How should you decide between them?

By answering one question about yourself first: will you put a fee on your clients' bill?

If the answer is yes, Starboard is the better structure of the two, because you set the rate, you keep the proceeds, and anything above your six thousand dollars is margin rather than somebody else's revenue.

If the answer is no, Starboard costs you six thousand dollars a year out of your own pocket and FareHarbor costs you close to nothing, which on cash flow alone settles it.

The catch in that second branch is that a fee still reaches your clients. Declining to surcharge does not mean nobody surcharges; it means somebody else does it, at a rate you cannot see, and does not give it back on a cancellation.

So the real choice is between paying a large visible cost yourself, charging your clients openly and keeping it, or letting a vendor charge them quietly and keep it. Those are three different businesses.

The comparison against the vendor that resolves this a fourth way, by charging a modest subscription and nothing to anybody's customer, runs through the other FareHarbor comparison, and the near neighbours sit in the Starboard alternatives and the FareHarbor alternatives.

Does either one grow with you?

One improves sharply at a known point. The other is impossible to forecast at all.

Growth is where these two stop resembling each other. A guide adding boats, staff and days is moving toward a very different position on each card.

On the banded card the direction is favourable and the mechanism is public. Cross two hundred thousand dollars of processed revenue and the flat fee gives way to three percent, which is the same six thousand dollars at the boundary and a proportional charge above it.

That means the worst version of that pricing is the one a small operator sees, and it improves steadily from there. A business at four hundred thousand dollars pays twelve thousand, which is a real number and an ordinary rate.

On the unpublished card there is no equivalent visibility. A customer-paid percentage presumably scales with volume too, but since the rate is not stated you cannot model next season, let alone the one after.

That matters for anybody planning rather than just buying. A cost you can project is a cost you can build a business around, and a cost that appears only on your clients' receipts is not something you can put in a forecast.

The structural neighbour worth reading alongside this is the comparison with Peek Pro, which pairs a published band against another vendor that publishes nothing.

How do you evaluate either without a trial?

Neither publishes one, so the demonstration has to do work it is not designed for.

Trial lengths across this series stretch from a barely useful forty eight hours out to three full months. This pair offers neither, and entry to both runs through a scheduled call with somebody paid to convert it.

Software delivered with genuine setup work is often sold this way, and the cost is that you lose the one honest test available. What a scripted walkthrough displays is the route its author picked, never the awkward corners a real season produces.

The workaround is to ask for a sandbox rather than a screen share, and to build your own trips in it. If that is refused, the refusal is itself informative.

Three cases are worth constructing before anything else. A group booking where the price steps up past the second angler. A morning trip that has to make the afternoon unavailable on the same hull. A settled booking dragged three weeks later without the deposit coming apart.

Any platform that handles those three cleanly can run a guiding business. Any that fights one of them will cost you more in wasted evenings than the difference between these two price structures, a point the Rezdy comparison reaches from the opposite direction.

Bring a competitor's published figure into the room as well. Against a vendor charging under two hundred dollars a year, both of these have a case to make, and making them state it out loud is the most useful thing a small operator can do in a sales conversation.

What can and cannot be established?

One card is fully readable. The other yields structure without a single rate.

Readable on the Starboard side: three service-fee bands at a flat five hundred dollars monthly below two hundred thousand of processed revenue, three percent between there and a million, and discounted terms above; the inclusion of setup, configuration, training and upgrades; unlimited employee accounts, event types, departure locations, gift certificates and promotional codes; and the operator-retained customer ticketing fee at a rate the operator chooses.

Readable on the FareHarbor side: that a booking fee exists, that the guest bears it, that its scope extends to trips agreed offline and entered afterwards, that the amount appears during checkout, and that it is not returned once charged.

Absent on the FareHarbor side: the booking fee percentage, any subscription, setup, or trial. Requesting its pricing page lands on a not-found page and the site's own inventory lists no pricing URL. Absent on the Starboard side: the card processing rate and any free trial, the route in being a scheduled demonstration.

The 2 percent interface charge rests on the weakest evidence here, surfacing only in search preview text for a page that requires an account. Confirm it in writing before it informs anything.

A working year on either is outside my experience, so read this as a weighing of published commercial terms and not of daily use. Both sources were consulted on 25 July 2026. Companies at this end of the market rewrite their terms quietly, so check again before you sign.