Practical before decorative
Every feature has to earn its place in the ownership or operating workflow. If it looks impressive in a screenshot and does nothing at 6am on a fuel dock, it does not ship.
Who it’s for
Twenty feet to a hundred. Sail or power. One way of keeping it.
If somebody has to know what’s aboard your boat, when it was last serviced and where the paperwork is, that somebody is who AFTWISE is built for.
Who it’s for — and who it isn’t
Deliberately not for everybody
AFTWISE is built for the person responsible for a boat: an owner, a family that runs one most weekends, a couple who live aboard, a captain running someone else’s yacht. Roughly 20 to 100 feet, with real systems and real records to keep.
It is not fleet-management software, and we are not trying to make it into any. If you run forty hulls for a charter operation, your problem is dispatch and utilization, and ours is the depth of each vessel’s record. Those are different products, and this one is built to be the second.
So the scope stays where it is, and the effort goes into depth instead.
Twenty feet counts
A twenty-foot center console has plenty to remember
Owners of smaller boats often assume something like this is built for yachts. It is, and just as much for the boat on the trailer: it is built for whoever has to answer the questions, and a smaller boat does not ask fewer of them.
An outboard with its own service interval and its own hour meter. Flares with a date on them. An extinguisher with a date on it. A registration that lapses in March. A battery that was new three seasons ago. Or four. A bilge pump you would rather never think about, right up until you do.
If it travels on a trailer, that is a second vehicle with its own registration, its own tires and its own wheel bearings — and AFTWISE keeps those too, along with checklists for the tow, the ramp and the trip home.
That is a genuine operating record. It is simply a shorter one — and Aftwise Owner at $9.99 a month covers all of it, completely, for one boat.
The demonstration boat you look at first does not have to be a yacht, either. AFTWISE ships two — a trawler and a 23-foot center console with a single outboard — and asks which one you want the first time you open it.
Boats this is built for
Every one of these is a vessel type you can pick when you add your boat — sail or power, outboard or diesel, trailered or in a slip. The decks and fittings AFTWISE starts you with on the Vessel Map follow whichever you choose — a center console opens on one deck, not the seven a trawler needs.
- Center consoles
- Bay boats
- Dual consoles
- Bowriders
- Deck boats
- Pontoons
- Cuddy cabins
- Walkarounds
- Express cruisers
- Downeast cruisers
- Sportfish & convertibles
- Trawlers
- Tug-style cruisers
- Flybridge & pilothouse yachts
- Motor yachts
- Cruising sailboats
- Cruising catamarans
- Houseboats
- Liveaboards
- and whatever yours is
Not sure it fits your boat? The free month is the honest way to find out. No account to unpick if you decide against it, and a month is long enough to put your own gear in and see.
Why it exists
The drawer
Every boat has one. Manuals for equipment that was replaced two owners ago. A receipt for an alternator, no note about which engine it went on. A survey from the purchase, four years stale. Somewhere in there, probably, the serial number for the generator.
It is not that owners are careless. It is that boats generate a genuinely large amount of information — equipment, service, documents, trips, crew, money — and the tools on offer each handle one slice of it and none of them talk to each other. So the drawer wins.
AFTWISE started as a working answer to that, on a real boat, because the alternatives did not do the job.
How we build
Four rules we hold ourselves to
Never guess on the owner’s behalf
Where AFTWISE does not have the information to answer honestly, it says nothing rather than estimating. A guessed fuel range or an invented service date is worse than a blank, because you would act on it.
Premium without overload
A complete vessel record is a lot of information. Guided navigation and a clear hierarchy are what keep it usable rather than intimidating — Home shows what needs you today, and the rest waits until you go looking for it.
The record belongs to you
Your own devices and your own iCloud, backups you hold, exports in ordinary formats, and no account to be locked out of. Software companies come and go; your boat’s history should not depend on ours.
The company
Aftwise, LLC
Veteran-owned
AFTWISE runs the way military aviation runs: standard procedures and tech data instead of memory, scheduled inspections, every discrepancy written up and signed off. In the service, the forms stay with the equipment. Here, the record stays with the boat.
By the manual
Seven manuals ship inside the app and open offline, from the Five-Minute guide to the full Operations Manual, so the answer is aboard when you need it, written by the same people who built the app.
Independent
No investors setting the direction, no ads in the app, and no business built on your data. AFTWISE is a boater’s tool made for other boaters; the subscription pays for it, and that is the whole business model.
Why it’s called AFTWISE
“I named it AFTWISE™ because boating should involve less guesswork and more informed decision-making. ‘Aft’ gives the name its nautical foundation, while ‘wise’ reflects the purpose of the app: helping boat owners stay organized, prepared, and in control of their vessel. It is about giving owners the knowledge and tools to boat smarter — and ultimately live freer.” — the founder