A Zillow for cruise ships — the first consumer-grade place to search, value, and buy a vessel. The name says it: hull + hello + ships — a friendly front door to a market that has none.
A multi-billion-dollar market, sold by fax.
Buying a ship today means cold-emailing a handful of broker desks, each holding a private, half-current spreadsheet. There’s no unified search, no filters, no price history, no “ships like this,” no alerts. Pricing is opaque; listings are scattered and stale.
Real estate had exactly this problem — until Zillow put every listing, a map, and an estimate behind one search box. HulloShips does that for vessels.
The front door the market never had.
Every brokered vessel, filterable by type, berths, year, tonnage, region, ice class and price — aggregated from the broker desks into one index.
A “Zestimate” for ships — an AI value estimate from comparable sales, age, class and tonnage, so buyers and owners finally see a number.
“Tell me when an ice-class expedition ship under $8M hits the market.” The thing every operator wishes existed.
Each vessel gets a rich, auto-built page — specs, history (we already track where Barney’s ships went), photos, and the route to the broker.
Brokers list and manage inventory; owners list directly. Featured placement, lead routing, deal rooms.
Survey, class, flag/registry, finance & insurance partners — the whole transaction, with Hullo taking a cut of each.
Zillow won by inventing a warm, memorable word. HulloShips does the same: a real friendly greeting (“hullo”) that hides hull in plain sight, with ships making it unmistakable. Bare hullo.com is taken — but hulloships.com is open, which is the better brand anyway.
| Name | Read | Domain status |
|---|---|---|
| HulloShips — the pick | hull + hello + ships; the warm front door | hulloships.com available ~$13 |
| Hullo (bare) | cleaner, but coined-only | hullo.com taken · hullo.io ~$60 |
| Berthzy | berth + Zillow-style “-zy” | berthzy.com ~$13 |
| Hullport | hull + port | hullport.com ~$13 |
Recommendation: brand it HulloShips on hulloships.com. Suggested next step — register it later, once the concept earns its keep; it’s available now at ~$13, so it’s cheap to hold whenever we’re ready. No rush, no spend today.
We don’t build a platform on day one. We build a curated, searchable index of what’s already public — the broker listings — in the WholeVoyage engine. One great search box + AI-built listing pages + The Waterline estimate + alerts. It earns trust and traffic first; brokers come once the audience is there.
HulloShips rides on everything we’re already building: the Ships intel, the charters relationships, and the AI site engine. It’s a network asset — and a saleable one.