Starboard Suite vs Peek Pro for Fishing Guides

Both of these vendors charge either a commission or a flat fee, and both segment their customers by revenue. That is genuinely the same commercial architecture. The difference is that one prints its bands on a public page with the thresholds and the amounts attached, and the other keeps the identical structure inside a merchant agreement that names neither.

You can therefore read one of these cards in ninety seconds and conclude that it costs six thousand dollars a year at guide scale. The other requires a sales process to produce any figure at all, and the contract behind it reserves the right to move that figure later. Same shape, opposite disclosure. Every vendor costed in this series sits on the booking software topic page.

How similar is the underlying structure?

Closer than either page suggests, which is what makes the disclosure gap so stark.

Starboard's page draws two lines and prices the three zones they create. Beneath the first line, at two hundred thousand a year, the charge is five hundred monthly and fixed. Between that line and a million it becomes three percent of what runs through. Past a million, terms are discounted by arrangement.

So the vendor charges a flat fee to small customers and a percentage to larger ones, with the switch happening at a published threshold.

Peek Pro's merchant agreement entitles the company to a commission or a flat fee on services purchased through or entered into the platform, and permits calculation on gross transaction value.

That is the same menu of two instruments. What the document never does is say which applies to whom, at what level, or at what threshold one gives way to the other.

Both companies also segment by revenue. One publishes its thresholds at two hundred thousand and a million; the other has three business-size pages in its sitemap at three hundred thousand and six hundred and fifty thousand, all of which render empty.

Fishing Guide Tampa Bay, FL

Gon Get'Em, TX

Which direction does each rate move?

One only improves. The other has a clause allowing it to worsen.

This is the sharpest practical difference and it is worth reading carefully in both documents.

On the published card the movement is one way. Grow past two hundred thousand dollars and the flat fee gives way to a percentage that is the same money at the boundary and proportional above it. Nothing in the structure lets the vendor raise your rate.

On the unpublished card, clause 5.4 permits the company at its sole discretion to place a merchant and its services on the company's own consumer sites, notes that such enrolment may result in increased commission rates, and provides that the merchant shall pay those increased rates.

The wording is conditional and this kind of language is not unusual in a marketplace addendum. It still describes a rate that can move on an action the counterparty takes rather than one you take.

For a guide, the question to settle in writing is narrow and important: does the uplift apply only to bookings the marketplace produces, or to your existing business as well. The agreement does not resolve it, and the two readings differ by thousands.

Each card is worked through individually in the Starboard Suite review and the Peek Pro review.

What is included when you can see the price?

A great deal, and it is the strongest thing the published card has going for it.

The vendor does the configuring. Your reservations module is dressed to look like the rest of your site, whoever works for you gets taught how to drive it, and later versions arrive without an invoice.

Nothing is metered: not the number of people you give logins to, not how many kinds of trip you list, not how many places you launch from. Gift certificates and discount codes are present from the outset rather than dangled above you.

Against six thousand dollars that is a real package, and for an operator who wants somebody else to build the thing it has genuine value.

On the other side none of that is public. Whether setup is charged, whether training exists, whether there are caps on anything, and whether a trial is available are all questions the domain does not address.

That asymmetry matters for a small buyer. You can weigh a known package against a known price; you cannot weigh an unknown package against an unknown price, and the effort of finding out falls entirely on you.

Does the customer-facing fee differ?

One offers it as a tool you control. The other's contract sweeps it into the fee base.

One page tells you a ticketing charge is available at whatever level you set, that declining it is entirely acceptable, and that whatever it raises belongs to the operator rather than the software company.

That is a lever in your hand. Use it to offset the service fee, set it higher and keep the surplus, or decline it entirely and absorb the cost.

The other document handles surcharges in a way worth noticing. When it enumerates what its charges can attach to, the list runs through sales of tickets, extras bolted on, gratuities, convenience charges and surcharges alike.

Read plainly, a convenience fee you add is itself inside the base the commission is calculated on. So a surcharge intended to recover your software cost may attract a further charge from the software.

That is worth confirming rather than assuming, because it inverts the logic of surcharging entirely. On one platform passing a fee to customers reduces your cost; on the other it may increase the base you are charged on.

Why do both segment by revenue at all?

Because revenue is a proxy for what a customer can bear, and it is a poor proxy for guiding.

Banding by turnover is the default across this end of the market, and the logic is straightforward. A larger business can absorb a larger bill, so the vendor sorts prospects into brackets and prices each one accordingly.

What that logic assumes is a relationship between revenue and the work the software does. For most activity operators the assumption holds: more turnover means more bookings, more customers, more support load, more infrastructure.

Guiding breaks the link. A guide grossing a hundred and forty thousand dollars from two boats generates a couple of hundred reservations a year. A kayak rental grossing forty thousand might generate two thousand.

On any measure of what the platform actually does, the rental business is the heavier customer by an order of magnitude, and every revenue-banded price list has it in a lower bracket.

That is why a guide reads as an expensive customer to vendors priced this way, without being one. High revenue per transaction looks like capacity to pay and reflects nothing about system load.

The vendors that meter reservations rather than revenue produce a very different answer for the same business, and that structural difference is worked through in the Bookeo review.

What does a demonstration-only process cost you?

More than it looks, and the cost falls entirely on the smaller party.

Neither of these vendors offers a published trial. Both route you through a scheduled call, which is normal for software sold with implementation attached and is not evidence of bad faith.

It is still a transfer of effort. An hour on a call, a follow-up, and then a number arriving after you have invested enough time to feel some obligation toward the outcome.

The asymmetry is worth naming plainly. A vendor speaks to hundreds of prospects a year and has priced that conversation into its cost of sale. A guide does this once every several seasons, against somebody who does it daily.

Two defences work. Decide your ceiling in writing before the call and treat it as binding, and ask for a sandbox account rather than a guided walkthrough.

The second matters more than it sounds. A rehearsed demonstration travels a route the vendor selected; an account you can break tells you whether a stepped party rate writes as one reservation and whether a settled trip survives being moved a fortnight.

If a sandbox is refused, that refusal is itself a useful answer, and it costs nothing to ask for. The same reasoning applied to the other unpublished vendors runs through that comparison.

Whose business is either priced for?

Ticketed passenger operations, and both revenue ladders confirm it.

A structure whose smallest bracket runs to two or three hundred thousand dollars is a structure built around businesses that clear those figures comfortably. Whale watching, harbour cruises, sunset sails and multi-boat tour fleets.

Those operations have the transaction counts that make a fixed fee disappear per ticket, and the channel relationships that make a marketplace connection valuable.

A guide has neither. Few transactions of high value, sold direct, mostly by telephone, across part of a year.

Sitting at the floor of the smallest bracket on both ladders is also the weakest possible negotiating position on the card where the rate is negotiated.

Neither vendor is doing anything improper. They have simply drawn their pricing around a customer a fishing guide does not resemble, which is the recurring finding across this whole cluster and is set out in the direct-booking piece.

What would make either worth pursuing?

Crossing a threshold on one, and answering three questions on the other.

The published card becomes ordinary the moment you process more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. At that point you are paying three percent for an unusually complete implementation, which is a defensible price.

If you run scheduled per-seat trips alongside private charters, the transaction count also makes its ticketing fee mechanism workable, and the two together change the arithmetic considerably.

The unpublished card becomes assessable only when three things are in writing: the rate, whether it is calculated on gross or net and what that includes, and whether marketplace enrolment can happen without your consent and at what rate.

None of those is an unreasonable ask and all three have short answers. A vendor that will not put them in an email has effectively answered the question of whether to proceed.

Cost the alternative before either call. Fifteen dollars monthly, printed openly, with nothing skimmed from operator or guest. Walking into a negotiated process without that comparison in your pocket is walking in with nothing.

Which suits a fishing guide better?

The published one, and only because you can rule it out quickly.

That is a strange recommendation and it is the honest one. Six thousand dollars a year at 8.33 percent of revenue is the most expensive structure costed anywhere in this series, and its virtue is that you learn this in a minute and can decline without a phone call.

Its rival might well come in cheaper. There is no way to demonstrate that, and everything surrounding the eventual figure leans against a small buyer: a base that may include everything processed, reach into sales other platforms originated, and an uplift the vendor can trigger.

Both, though, are answers to a question a much cheaper vendor also answers. If your season arrives from referrals and repeat clients, neither distribution network is doing anything for you.

The reason to take either seriously is a genuine channel business or a genuine need for somebody else to configure and run the system. Those are real needs and neither is common among one-boat guides.

Near neighbours are collected in the Starboard alternatives and the Peek Pro alternatives, and the cheaper published field in the low-cost roundup.

Which one can you walk away from cleanly?

The one you never had to enter, and that is a real advantage rather than a rhetorical one.

Exit costs rarely appear in comparisons and they decide more than people expect. What binds an operator to a platform is seldom the contract; it is the accumulated weight of what lives inside it.

On a card you can price from a web page, the decision to decline costs nothing at all. You read three numbers, divide one by your own revenue, and move on with your afternoon intact.

On a card that requires a negotiated quote, declining still costs the sales process, and accepting starts a relationship whose terms you learned late and cannot benchmark against anything.

Once inside, both hold the same asset. Guest records, trip histories, notes about who likes which water and who gets seasick, and whatever reviews have accumulated against your listing.

Those compound over seasons and they are the reason a fifth year is easier than a first. Establish before signing what leaves with you and in what format, because a platform that exports a spreadsheet of names and dates is offering something quite different from one that exports nothing.

Ask it of both, early, and in writing. It is the least glamorous question in any software evaluation and the one most likely to matter in four years.

What is established and what is not?

A complete picture on one side and a structure without amounts on the other.

Established from Starboard's own page: a three-zone fee ladder, fixed monthly at the bottom, proportional in the middle, negotiated at the top, with the boundaries printed; implementation, tuition and version upgrades bundled without charge; no ceiling on logins, trip types, launch points, vouchers or codes; and a guest-facing charge whose level the operator picks and whose proceeds the operator keeps.

Established from the competing merchant agreement: fees arrive as either a proportion or a set sum; the figure they are worked from may be everything processed rather than what you net; the enumeration of chargeable components reaches gratuities and convenience charges as readily as ticket revenue; sales that began on somebody else's platform are not exempt; and the company retains latitude to list a merchant on its own consumer sites, with any consequent increase pre-accepted.

Nowhere on that domain will you find a figure of any description: not a proportion, not a fixed sum, not an onboarding charge, not a trial length, not a card rate. Requesting its prices yields a not-found, and its three size-segmented pages come back blank. Starboard withholds less but not nothing: its card rate is absent and no trial is offered, entry being by appointment only.

No rate has been estimated for the unpublished card. The sensitivity figures above price one point at a time so a reader can substitute whatever a service order produces.

A working year on either is outside my experience. Judge this as a weighing of a price list against a contract, nothing more. Both documents were consulted on 25 July 2026, and neither company announces it when the wording shifts.