Demurrage and detention don't send a warning. The clock starts when the box is unloaded, and you learn about it on an invoice — long after the decision that caused it. Lastfee sees it coming, tells you exactly what to do, and checks whether the carrier's invoice was even valid.
You get a few free days. Miss them and you pay every single day — first for leaving it in the port, then for holding the empty box.
To stop one charge, someone has to open six systems, work out in their head which of four hundred containers is closest to its deadline, guess what's blocking it, chase the right person — and remember to chase again tomorrow.
Since May 2024, US law requires a carrier's demurrage or detention invoice to contain a specific list of items — container numbers, free-time start and end dates, the rule and daily rate applied, a dispute contact.
Checking that by hand takes about twenty minutes an invoice, so almost nobody does it. A computer does it in a second. Every invoice you receive runs five checks — here's a real one.
The evidence pack — invoice, bill of lading, gate records, hold timestamps, email thread — assembles itself. A person always approves a challenge before it's sent. That step never becomes automatic.
That's where we start. Six things happen after it.
Your contract terms first, then the carrier's. Working days versus calendar days. Weekends, port holidays, gate closures, reefer rules, tiered day bands. And a plain-English explanation of exactly how the date was reached — so you can paste it into an email and argue with the carrier.
One short list, sorted by dollars at risk divided by hours remaining. A $4,000 container with six hours left outranks a $6,000 one with three days. Your team stops working the container someone shouted about.
Not "at risk" — the actual blocker, and the email, missing document or event gap that proves it. If we can't prove it, we say we don't know instead of guessing.
Drafts the email, sends it on your click, chases at four hours, escalates at eight, escalates again at sixteen. Reads the reply, extracts the promise, updates the container. Nothing goes quiet for three days because one person was busy.
Five checks on every charge you receive. Legally complete, sent in time, dates right, maths right, and whether you were actually blocked from collecting. Then it builds the challenge pack for you.
Against a control group of your own containers, so the number survives your CFO. Every dollar traces back to a specific container you can check.
This calculator deliberately uses the pessimistic end of every range. If it flatters us, it's useless to you.
Most vendors merge these into one impressive figure. That's exactly how they lose the finance director in month four.
No system replacement. No IT project. If all you have is a spreadsheet and an inbox, that is genuinely enough to start.
No. Lastfee sits on top of whatever you already run and reads from it. Your TMS, ERP, spreadsheets and email all stay exactly where they are. We deliberately support the messy options — CSV upload, email forwarding, EDI, file transfer — because the companies with the worst demurrage problem usually have the worst integrations.
Visibility tools tell you a container is at risk and stop there. That's the easy part. Lastfee tells you why it's stuck with the evidence, who should fix it, and what to do — then does the chasing, escalates when nobody replies, checks whether the resulting invoice was even valid, and proves what it saved. Knowing is not preventing.
Because we split them. Recovered cash is verifiable in your bank account. Prevented cost is an estimate, and we say so — measured against a control group of your own containers that we monitor but don't act on, so you get your genuine baseline rather than our assumption. Every claimed dollar links to a specific container you can inspect.
No. At launch nothing goes out without a person clicking send. There's a five-level autonomy control you set yourself, and some actions never move above "AI drafts, human approves" no matter how good the model gets — anything that commits money, admits fault, blames a third party, or submits a dispute. There's also a pause-everything switch.
Deadlines and dollar amounts are never produced by a model. They come from fixed, versioned rules, and every figure shows its working — the source event, the contract, the holidays applied, the rule version. The AI predicts how likely something is and how long it'll take, never the money. Where it can't prove a cause from evidence, it says it doesn't know rather than guessing.
A platform fee, a small per-container fee that gets cheaper as you grow, and a capped share of cash we actually recover for you. We don't charge a percentage of "prevented" savings — that number is an estimate about something that didn't happen, and charging for it would turn every invoice into an argument about methodology.
Twenty minutes. No deck. We run your real charges through the five checks and show you what comes back.