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Two CMMS quotations land on your desk. One reads €80 per vessel per month, the other €120. The natural reflex is to pick the first — and that is precisely the mistake. The advertised maritime CMMS pricing on the front page of a quotation accounts, over three years, for only a third to a half of what the project will actually cost you. The rest is spread across rollout, data migration, crew training and the time your teams will spend in the tool — with, on the other side of the ledger, everything the tool stops you from losing.

Comparing two maintenance systems on their monthly price is like comparing two ships on their length overall: the figure is accurate, but it tells you nothing that matters. The only honest measure is the total cost of ownership (TCO) over three years, which adds up three columns: what you pay, what you invest in time, and what you avoid. The third column is the one every comparison table leaves out — and it is almost always the one that decides.

This article gives you the complete method, item by item, with a calculation table to rebuild on your own figures and the questions to put to every vendor before you sign.

Why calculate over three years, not one

Three years is not an arbitrary figure. It is the period that spreads the initial effort — equipment inventory, importing the makers' maintenance schedules, training — across a window in which the tool delivers in steady state. The first year concentrates most of the human investment; the following two reveal the real return: fewer unplanned breakdowns, fewer emergency purchases, class surveys prepared in hours rather than days.

It is also the horizon of a full technical cycle for most fleets: a drydocking, several technical stops, a partial crew turnover. A tool that has not proved its value after three years never will. Conversely, judging a planned maintenance system on its first six months means judging it at the exact moment when it costs the most and returns the least.

Column 1 — what you pay: licences, rollout, training, data

Licences

The first and most visible item. Two models dominate the market, and they do not compare directly.

• Per-vessel pricing: a fixed price per unit per month, whatever the number of users. The cost is predictable and proportional to the size of the fleet. This is the 91�鶹��Ʒ model: €10 per month on the Leisure plan, €100 on Premium, €150 on Enterprise, per vessel, rollout included. These published prices make a useful benchmark: if a competing quotation departs from them sharply, the difference should be explainable line by line.
• Per-user pricing: every account is billed. This model penalises exactly the behaviour you are trying to establish — that the whole ship uses the tool, from the chief engineer to the rating closing out a work order. In practice, operators on this model ration accounts, logins get shared, and the individual traceability the ISM Code expects evaporates.

Check what the licence actually covers too: number of modules, document storage, mobile app, updates. A teaser rate with every module billed as an option can double between the demonstration and the second year.

Rollout and data migration

This is the most variable item on the market: included with some vendors, billed at €2,000 to more than €15,000 per vessel with others, as consulting days. It covers initial configuration, building the equipment tree, importing your history and the makers' maintenance schedules. Ask the question head-on before signing: "is migrating my data included, and who does it?". Our phase-by-phase implementation checklist sets out what that work actually involves.

Training

Allow half a day to a day per vessel for a well-designed tool, several days for a system built for shore-based industry and adapted to the sea afterwards. Two traps to cost in: training the reliefs — on a vessel, the person you trained signs off after two months, and every untrained relief is a recurring cost — and remote training for crews scattered across several ports. A tool whose interface is understood without a manual reduces this item to almost nothing; that is a selection criterion in its own right, not a comfort.

Column 2 — what you invest: your teams' time

The real investment in a CMMS project is not financial but human. It breaks down into three jobs, all concentrated in the first quarter.

• The equipment inventory: listing the ship's machinery, references and serial numbers. Allow two to five days per vessel depending on size and the state of your documentation. QR-code tagging of assets is usefully done in the same pass.
• Building the maintenance plan: turning the makers' recommendations and your own experience into job plans and intervals. This is the heart of the project — our 4-step method structures it.
• Day-to-day entry: closing out work orders, logging running hours, issuing parts from stock. That item is not an extra cost but a transfer: you already record this information somewhere — notebooks, spreadsheets, emails. The question is how much time the tool adds to it or takes off it.

This is where two solutions at the same face price diverge the most. Ship maintenance software designed for seafarers — a mobile app usable one-handed in the engine room, offline entry that synchronises at the port call, an interface free of software jargon — divides this cost by two or three compared with a desktop system built for a workshop ashore. Value that time at your officers' real loaded cost, between €40 and €70 an hour: the gap runs to thousands of euros per vessel per year.

Maritime CMMS pricing: the hidden costs to flush out before signing

Some items appear on no quotation and only surface in use. Our 32-criteria selection scorecard devotes a full chapter to them; here are the five that come up most often in audits.

Add one item nobody invoices but everybody pays: the cost of a failed rollout. A CMMS abandoned by the crew after six months means the whole of columns 1 and 2 written off, plus a dent in credibility for the next attempt. The six mistakes that sink a rollout are well known and avoidable — factoring them into the risk calculation is part of an honest TCO.

Column 3 — the cost of inaction: what "doing nothing" already costs you

The third column turns the calculation on its head, because the alternative to a maritime CMMS is not free: it is the status quo, and it carries a price you are already paying without seeing it on any invoice.

• The spreadsheet standing in for a system: the hours spent consolidating per-vessel files, the conflicting versions, the deadlines tracked from memory. Our comparison of Excel versus a maritime CMMS puts figures on the exercise: once you value the hours actually spent maintaining it, the "free" spreadsheet becomes the most expensive option on the market.
• Unplanned downtime: a breakdown that proper planned maintenance would have caught means parts on express freight at a 30 to 50 % premium, a maker's technician at emergency rates, a rescheduled port call, sometimes a tow or a lost fishing trip. Depending on the trade, one day of downtime is commonly worth €3,000 to €15,000 — more on a passenger vessel or a service vessel on a contract with availability penalties.
• Detention at inspection: a maintenance history that cannot be produced, or is incomplete, remains one of the shortest routes to a deficiency — or a Port State Control detention, with a public listing that follows the vessel for years. The same logic applies under USCG Subchapter M for US inland and coastal operators: a TSMS without records is a finding waiting to happen.
• Over-maintenance and over-stocking: without a reliable history, parts are replaced on precaution and stocked for reassurance. Operators who structure their maintenance generally record a 20 to 35 % fall in upkeep costs; we set out the mechanisms in our guide to reducing vessel maintenance costs.
• Resale value: at survey, a vessel with a complete, traceable technical history sells better and faster than one whose memory left with the previous chief engineer.

A single major immobilisation avoided over three years pays, on its own, for several years of subscription to a planned maintenance system. That is the order of magnitude to keep in mind while reading quotations.

How much does a maritime CMMS cost over three years?

For a working fleet of five vessels on a mid-range plan at €100 per vessel per month, allow around €18,000 of licences over three years, plus €8,000 to €12,000 of internal time in year one if rollout and training are included — a TCO in the region of €26,000 to €30,000. Against that, one day of downtime avoided per vessel per year and 10 % fewer parts purchases represent €60,000 to €100,000: the balance turns positive in the first year.

The table below works through that calculation. The amounts are illustrative and deliberately conservative: the method matters more than the figures, and the exercise only has value redone with your own data.

Even halving the gains and doubling the internal time, the balance stays comfortably positive — without putting any value on detention risk, resale value, or the survey credits a class-approved PMS can earn on machinery surveys.

Calculating your maritime CMMS TCO with your own figures

Total cost of ownership is calculated, not estimated. The approach takes four steps and one meeting.

1. Document your last twenty-four months: list every unplanned immobilisation with its full cost — parts, labour, freight, operational consequences. That is the baseline without which everything else is opinion.
2. Cost your current system: weekly hours spent on spreadsheets, chasing suppliers, preparing surveys and audits. Value them at loaded cost.
3. Build the table above for every shortlisted offer, requiring a written commitment from each vendor on rollout, data migration, training and support. Next year's maintenance budget will be all the easier to defend for resting on this costing.
4. Ask each vendor how their tool would have prevented the breakdowns in your baseline. The precision of the answer says more than any brochure.

Then fix the indicators that will verify the calculation along the way: preventive ratio, MTBF on critical equipment, stock value, corrective hours. Our guide to the 15 maritime maintenance KPIs gives the definitions and thresholds. And if the build-or-buy question is still open in your company, our comparison of in-house development versus off-the-shelf software shows that the TCO of a home-built tool is almost always underestimated by a factor of three.

Key takeaways

Maritime CMMS pricing cannot be read off the front page of a quotation. It is calculated over three years, in three columns: what you pay — licences, rollout, data migration, training, demanding transparency on every line —, what you invest in crew time, the item where a tool designed for seafarers makes two offers at the same face price diverge, and what you avoid — downtime, emergency purchases, over-stocking, detentions. On a working fleet, the third column almost always outweighs the first two combined within the first year.

The practical consequence: never compare prices, compare TCOs. A tool at €100 per vessel per month, rollout included, adopted by the crew and fed every day, will always cost less than a tool at €60 abandoned at the first crew change — and infinitely less than the spreadsheet that gives you the illusion of being free.

91�鶹��Ʒ publishes its prices — from €10 to €150 per vessel per month, rollout and training included — precisely so this calculation can be made without surprises. Designed in Marseille by seafarers and deployed on more than 700 vessels, the 91�鶹��Ʒ CMMS should be judged on your figures, not ours: put your last twenty-four months of downtime in front of us — it is the exercise we enjoy most, and the trial is free for 30 days.