Everything crews ask us

Sailto is an app for organising charter trips, guided sailing trips and skipper training. It covers the whole process: inviting the crew, keeping profiles with licences and allergies, assigning cabins, running the kitty, coordinating shopping and packing lists, documenting the safety briefing and boat check-in, and keeping the logbook. Everything in one place, visible to the whole crew.

For three groups. Private crews of friends or family with one boat and six to eight people — that's the most common case and the benchmark for how easy it is to use. Sailing clubs with flotillas, changing crews and a fixed fleet. And sailing schools running training courses with learning goals. Private crews see nothing of the club features.

All the organising is free, for good — unlimited trips, unlimited crew members, no credit card. If you want the extras (AI meal planner, cruising area info, map with track, drag-and-drop cabin planner, pot mode), you buy the Trip Pass for a one-off €14.99 incl. VAT — it covers the whole crew. Frequent sailors choose Plus: €24.99 for the first year, then €4.00 a month, each incl. VAT. Details are on the pricing page.

You sign up, create a trip with the wizard — basic details, boat, kitty — and at the end share the invite link with the crew. Altogether it takes a few minutes. The crew doesn't need to prepare anything: whoever opens the link creates an account and is in.

Yes, with no time limit. The free plan isn't a trial period but a full plan with all the organising features. We don't ask for payment details when you sign up, nothing expires and nothing automatically turns into a subscription.

In German and English. The language can be changed in your profile and on the sign-in page; without a choice it follows your browser. The focus remains the German-speaking market — the kitty in euros, cruising areas from the Baltic to the Adriatic. For the legal texts, the German versions are binding; the English ones are reading versions.

Sailto is developed and run by Kilo Moana UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Rellingen near Hamburg, born out of our own experience of charter trips. Full provider details are in the legal notice.

When you create the trip, Sailto generates a unique link together with a QR code. You share it via WhatsApp, email or printed out at the clubhouse. Whoever opens it sees the trip, creates an account and then appears in the crew list — without you having to approve each person individually. With several boats, each boat gets its own link.

No, deliberately not. Sailto creates the link but doesn't send it itself — you share it through whatever channel your crew already uses. That saves us collecting email addresses and saves you an email that ends up in spam.

As many as you like, on the free plan too. There's no crew limit and no charge per person. A club flotilla with thirty participants costs just as little as a family trip for four.

Yes. An account is needed so that expenses, cabins and packing list items can be linked to a person and nobody sees anyone else's data. Sign-up runs through the invite link and takes under a minute. It costs nothing.

Yes. The trip organiser and co-skippers can remove crew members. Kitty expenses already recorded by that person are kept so the settlement still adds up — they don't retroactively disappear from the accounts.

Yes, at any time, even during the trip. Anyone who joins later via the link sees the full current state: calendar, lists, cabin plan and kitty. In the kitty you should then set from when the person shares in the expenses.

Yes. The link can be deactivated and regenerated if it has fallen into the wrong hands or ended up in a public group. Crew members who have already joined are not affected.

The organiser created the trip and has full rights. Co-skippers can do the same — manage the crew, assign cabins, edit the trip — and are meant for trips with shared responsibility. Regular crew members keep their profile up to date, record expenses, tick off lists and vote in polls.

Name and contact details, sailing licences and radio certificate, experience level, diet and allergies, emergency contact, cabin preference and the snorer flag. For training trips, learning goals are added. Only the name is required — everything else is optional.

Only the members of the trips you belong to. These details are deliberately visible to the crew: the skipper needs to know the qualifications on board, and whoever does the shopping needs to know the allergies. Outside your trips, nobody sees them.

It warns you during cabin allocation before the pairing is fixed. Anyone who flags themselves as a snorer spares the crew an uncomfortable second night and the discussion about it. It's optional and can be changed at any time.

Sailto sets up the cabin plan from the boat model, including the number of berths. On the free plan you assign the crew in a list view. With the Trip Pass you drag and drop people onto the layout — with a snorer warning and a block against overbooking. Allocation is done by hand; there's no automatic assignment.

Yes. Everyone can add a preference to their profile — such as the aft cabin, the lower berth or sleeping alone. When assigning cabins, the preferences are shown next to each person, so the skipper can take them into account without asking everyone individually. They aren't binding; the skipper still makes the decision.

Yes, at any time. Changes are visible to the crew immediately. That's particularly handy when people swap after all after the first night.

In two variants. In split mode, everyone pays for whatever comes up, enters the expense with amount, category and receipt photo, and Sailto keeps the balances up to date. In pot mode, everyone pays an amount in up front, and expenses are booked against that shared kitty. Split mode is free; pot mode is part of the Trip Pass.

In split mode no money changes hands up front — everyone pays whatever is due and it's all balanced at the end. That suits crews who trust each other and don't fancy paying in advance. In pot mode, everyone pays in, say, €250 at the start, and the kitty visibly shrinks with every expense. That suits larger or mixed crews where one person looks after the money.

Sailto calculates each person's balance from what they've paid out and their actual share, then suggests the smallest possible number of transfers to even everything out. Instead of seven people sending money back and forth, often only two or three payments remain.

Yes. Every expense can be booked to everyone, a subgroup or individual people. That's the norm for restaurant visits not everyone joins, or the dive only three people booked.

Yes, you can add a receipt photo to every expense — on the free plan too. That saves the roll of paper in the chart table and answers the crew's questions without anyone having to search.

Yes, as a CSV file, also on the free plan. That lets you process the settlement further in Excel or Numbers, for example when a club includes it in its annual accounts. With the Trip Pass there's also a properly typeset PDF export of the settlement, logbook and sea miles log.

No, and that's deliberate. Sailto works out the kitty and shows who owes whom how much — the actual money still moves between you by bank transfer, PayPal or cash. We're not a payment provider and don't want to become one.

Euros. That covers the classic charter areas from the Baltic via the Adriatic to the Balearics. Multi-currency support with automatic conversion isn't currently available.

Yes. From the logbook, Sailto generates a sea miles confirmation as a PDF — for each person individually, with all legs, the harbours visited, the total miles and the share sailed at night. It includes the vessel's name, type, length overall, flag and propulsion, plus a signature field for the skipper. Date of birth, address and the certificate of competence number are deliberately left blank and filled in by hand — they belong to the person, not the trip. The export is part of the Trip Pass. If you sail as a flotilla, the log only counts the legs of the boat the person was actually on.

It's sorted by category and the whole crew can edit it at the same time. Items can be assigned to people so it's clear who is getting what. Whoever is in the supermarket and ticks things off makes it visible to everyone — nobody buys coffee twice.

In several layers. Sailto provides system templates by cruising area and season. On top of that, the skipper adds required items that nobody can simply remove — foul-weather gear, sailing licence, lifejacket. And every crew member adds what only concerns them. Nobody but that person sees these personal additions.

Yes. The free plan allows up to three of your own templates; with the Trip Pass or Plus, as many as you like. Organisations also get club-wide templates that are available to all skippers.

It collects all the dates of the trip: arrival, check-in, casting off, meals, harbour stops, excursions and check-out. Entries apply either to the whole boat or to just one person — your own flight home, for example. Changes are visible to the crew immediately.

The skipper sets up a vote in seconds — which harbour, which dinner, which excursion. There are six types, including single choice, multiple choice, yes/no and open questions, either anonymous or public. The result can be moved into the calendar or the shopping list with one click.

Yes. Sailing licences, ID copies, charter contracts and insurance certificates can be stored with the trip and are then accessible to the crew instead of sitting in eight different phone galleries. Access is restricted to the crew of that trip.

It creates a complete meal plan for the whole trip — breakfast, lunch and dinner, including evenings in harbour. It takes into account crew size, cruising area and all the dietary restrictions entered in the profiles: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, allergies, dislikes. The result can be taken straight into the shopping list or sent to the crew as a poll.

For every harbour or anchorage on your route, the assistant answers the questions you'd otherwise look up in several pilot books: what's the approach like, where is it sheltered in which wind, what can you reach on foot ashore, what should you watch out for. It's meant to complement your trip planning, not replace charts and up-to-date pilot guides.

Claude, the language model from Anthropic. Requests run through our own servers, and Anthropic only receives what the feature in question needs — for the meal planner, for example, crew size, cruising area and the crew's dietary information, without names. Details are in the privacy policy.

Because every request costs us real money — unlike a shopping list, which only needs database space. That's why the meal planner, cruising area info and the narrated trip recap are part of the Trip Pass. It's the only place where we have to pass on marginal costs.

Yes. With the Trip Pass the whole crew has 50 AI requests for the entire trip — the meal planner, cruising area info and the narrated recap all draw on the same allowance, with at most three recaps. With Plus the same allowance applies to each of your trips. When you use them is up to you; only as protection against misuse is each account limited to 30 requests a day.

Yes. The generated plan is a suggestion, not a fixed result. You can swap individual meals, have the whole plan regenerated or take only parts of it into the shopping list.

Everything that repeats between trips is set up once instead of every time: boats with their standard cabin layouts, skippers with their permissions, packing list and checklist templates for the whole club, and your own logo on the invitation page. When a trip is created, all of that comes along automatically.

No, and they don't see any of it either. The organisation area is an optional layer that simply doesn't appear in the interface as long as you don't use it. A family that charters once a year is never confronted with club administration.

Yes. Organisations have their own member roles; owners and administrators manage boats, templates and other skippers. These roles apply only within the organisation and have nothing to do with the permissions inside an individual trip.

Yes. The logo appears on the invitation page your members see when they join. The Org Fleet plan adds your own colour scheme.

Yes. A trip can include several boats, each with its own cabins and its own invite link — so each boat's crew lands directly on their boat. The cabin planner shows the boats separately, the trip overview shows the occupancy of the whole fleet. Included in the free plan.

An overview of the season: current and planned trips, boat utilisation and participant figures. The dashboard is part of the Org Fleet plan. Customer management that recognises returning participants across seasons doesn't exist yet — it's on the roadmap.

If you use Sailto for your participants, then as a rule yes. Send a short email to support@sailto.app and we'll conclude a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR with you.

The kitty settlement can be exported as CSV on every plan, and with the Trip Pass the logbook, settlement and sea miles log are also available as PDFs. An export across all of an organisation's trips doesn't exist yet — it's on the roadmap. There is no API access, and none is planned.

No. Sailto is a Progressive Web App and runs in the browser on iPhone, Android, iPad and desktop. With "Add to Home Screen" you get an icon and a full-screen view like a native app — without a download, without update prompts, without a store account.

No. Sailto needs a connection; only the app shell is cached so that it at least opens without signal. Reading or writing data doesn't work offline. Close to the coast in the Baltic, the Adriatic and the Balearics, mobile coverage is usually enough — on longer passages it isn't.

Through a central sign-in service with your email address. There are no separate Sailto passwords to manage and no more magic-link emails. Sign-in works on all devices with the same credentials.

The app, the database, the sign-in service and all uploaded files are held on servers operated by Strato GmbH in Germany; we run the analytics there ourselves as well. Three features transfer data beyond that: the AI features to Anthropic in the USA, payment to Stripe (Ireland/USA) and the map view to OpenStreetMap in the United Kingdom, which receives your IP address. Data is not sold. Exactly what goes where is set out in the privacy policy.

No. Sailto is funded by the Trip Pass and subscriptions, not by advertising. We don't use ad trackers and we don't sell user data. That's also why we can afford such a generous free plan — it costs us server space, not margin.

We back up the database regularly. Uploaded files — photos, documents, receipts and profile pictures — are currently not backed up separately and exist only once, on our server. Keep your own copies of anything that matters to you. We'd rather say so beforehand than explain it afterwards.

Yes. Just send a short email to support@sailto.app — we will then delete your account in the sign-in service and your profile in Sailto. There is no delete function in the app itself yet.

Nothing is lost. An ended Plus or organisation subscription returns the account to the free plan; all trips, expenses, lists and logbook entries remain fully visible and exportable. Only the extra features are no longer active. Trip Passes you've bought stay valid for their trip for good.

All current versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Edge, on mobile devices and desktop alike. To install it on the home screen, use Safari on iPhone and Chrome on Android.

By email to support@sailto.app. We usually reply within one working day, in German or English. With Plus and the organisation plans, your request is handled with priority.

Yes. No expiry date, no trip limit, no crew limit, no credit card. The maths is meant to work for us because every trip brings further crew members to Sailto through the invite link — free organising is our marketing budget.

A one-off payment of €14.99 that unlocks the extra features for a specific trip — for the whole crew, not just the person who paid. It includes the AI meal planner and cruising area info with 50 AI requests for the whole trip, the map with track recording, the photo gallery, the drag-and-drop cabin planner, the kitty's pot mode, PDF export and unlimited custom templates. The pass does not renew.

Yes. As a consumer you have a fourteen-day right of withdrawal from the conclusion of the contract, without giving reasons — an informal email is enough. The full withdrawal policy with a model form is on a page of its own. When you buy, we ask whether you want us to unlock the features immediately; if you agree and confirm that this means losing your right of withdrawal, it lapses early. Without that consent you keep the full fourteen days.

No. The pass belongs to the trip, not to a person. One person buys it, everyone gets access — including members who only join later. With eight people that's €1.87 each.

Yes. Straight after the purchase, Sailto asks whether the €14.99 should be booked to the kitty as an expense and split across the crew. One click, and the amount is part of the settle-up like diesel or harbour fees.

In the first year, from your second trip: two Trip Passes cost €29.98, Plus costs €24.99 and covers as many trips as you like. From the second year it is €4.00 a month, so €48.00 a year — then it pays off from your fourth trip. If you sail once a year, the pass is cheaper; we'd rather say that clearly.

Yes, and it renews monthly at €4.00. Plus has an initial term of twelve months at the introductory price of €24.99. After that it continues indefinitely and is billed monthly at €4.00 — so the second year costs more than the first. In exchange you are never committed for more than a month: cancel at any time in the customer portal, with no notice period; cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, and there is no refund. The organisation plans follow the same pattern — Org Crew €25.00, Org Fleet €50.00 a month. The Trip Pass never renews.

As a starting point it doesn't fit how people sail. The sailing season in German-speaking countries runs from April to October, and most crews go out once or twice a year. The Trip Pass and the first year of Plus reflect how people actually sail, so Plus can only be taken out annually. From the second year it is billed monthly at €4.00 — so that the renewal doesn't tie you in for another twelve months. Organisations can pay monthly from the start.

Org Crew costs €249 for the first year or €24.90 monthly, each incl. VAT, and covers up to 5 skippers and 15 boats. Org Fleet costs €599 for the first year or €59.90 monthly, with unlimited skippers and boats plus the organisation dashboard. If an annual subscription renews, it is billed monthly from the second year: Org Crew €25.00, Org Fleet €50.00. Both include the Trip Pass features for all of the organisation's trips.

Through the customer portal in your account settings, without emailing support and without a notice period. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for: everything stays usable until then, and there is no refund. In the first year that is the remainder of the twelve months; after that it is at most one month. The Trip Pass doesn't need cancelling — it doesn't renew.

Get in touch. For registered sailing clubs and non-profit youth organisations we can almost always find a solution — just write to support@sailto.app and tell us how many boats and skippers you have.