About Seafarer Index
Seafarer Index is a free, login-optional reference portal for the world's roughly 1.9 million seafarers. Ports, ships, companies, flag states, STCW certificates, maritime terminology, wage scales, seafarer welfare centres, and crisis helplines — each entry gets its own permanent URL you can bookmark, link, or share in a group chat.
Why this exists
Working seafarers spend most of their careers away from reliable internet. When they do have signal, the information they need — the number of a seafarer centre in the next port, whether a flag state is ITF-listed, what the STCW Advanced Fire Fighting refresher costs in Manila — is fragmented across a dozen subscription databases, industry PDFs, and outdated forum threads.
Seafarer Index is the opposite: one URL-addressable page per thing, built from public sources, designed to load over bad satellite links, and indexable on Google so you can find it with a phone search in the messroom.
Principles
- Imported data, not user-generated. Content ships with the site from public maritime sources. The forum is a small secondary layer; it is not the primary value.
- No AI in the user flow. No per-request LLM cost, no model vendor lock-in, no hallucinated data.
- No tracking, no ads. No analytics scripts, no fingerprinting, no third-party cookies. The only cookies are your sign-in session (if any) and your theme/low-data preference.
- No login to browse. Sign-in only gates posting in the forum. Reading is always open.
- Static-first. Pages prerender at build time; they load in seconds on 0.5 Mbps.
- Cited. Every figure links to its source on /sources. Glossary entries cite IMO conventions where applicable.
How it's built
Open-source stack: Next.js 16 (React Server Components), Tailwind CSS v4, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), hosted on Netlify. All text, database schema, and build scripts are in the GitHub repo. Send corrections via pull request or the forum.
How you can help
- Spot an error? Use the "Report an error" link at the foot of any detail page, or open an issue on GitHub.
- Add your national union, training centre, or seafarer centre — email the site owner with a link to the official listing.
- Translate: the UI is already scaffolded for Tagalog, Hindi, Indonesian, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin and Spanish; translation files are in the repo.
- Post in the forum — real seafarer answers are the hardest data to source.
Funding
Seafarer Index is self-funded. There are no ads, no paywalls, no data sales. If you work in maritime welfare and want to underwrite the hosting so this stays free, get in touch.