The Marina Software Buyer's Guide
The Math: Total Cost and Revenue Impact
Comparing vendors on net economic impact, not lowest price
This is where Part Four comes together. You've seen the pricing models, the hidden fees, and the contract terms. Now you turn them into one number per vendor. But not the number most buyers use. The lowest-cost vendor and the best-outcome vendor are often not the same vendor, and this chapter is about telling them apart.
Cheapest isn't cheapest
Every chapter of Part Four so far has been about cost. Here's the turn that ties it together: cost is only half the equation. The right question was never "which vendor costs the least." It's "which vendor leaves the most money in my account at the end of the year."
Those can be very different vendors. A cheaper platform that leaks revenue, through missed renewals, uncaptured bookings, or untracked fuel margin, can easily cost you more than a pricier one that plugs those leaks. The sticker price and the economic outcome are not the same measurement.
A cheaper vendor that leaks revenue isn't cheaper. It just moves the cost somewhere you're not looking.
So the number you actually want is net economic impact: what you spend, set against what the software helps you earn or stop losing. The rest of this chapter builds that number, one side at a time.
The full cost side
Start with true cost, not the headline. Pull every category from Chapter 14 into a single figure across the whole contract term, not per month.
- Subscription, at your real volume and in the vendor's actual pricing model.
- Implementation and setup.
- Data migration.
- Training, across your full seasonal staff.
- Support tier, if real support sits above the base plan.
- Integration fees, per connector you'll switch on.
- Payment processing markup, applied to your payment volume.
Sum those over the term. A low monthly fee stacked on heavy setup and a processing markup routinely beats a higher monthly fee with neither. That total is your true cost of ownership, the first half of the number.
The revenue side
This is the half buyers almost always skip. Software doesn't only cost money, it changes how much you collect. The revenue levers from Chapter 6 belong in the comparison as real line items.
- Booking capture. Online booking that fills transient nights you'd otherwise miss to a phone that rang after hours.
- Ancillary revenue. Point-of-sale, add-ons, and upsells charged cleanly to the stay instead of slipping through.
- Renewal and late-fee capture. Automated dunning and renewals that collect what you're owed without anyone remembering to chase it.
- Fuel margin protection. Reconciled fuel sales that stop the quiet leakage of shrinkage and pricing errors.
Revenue impact is genuinely harder to pin down than cost, so estimate it conservatively and in ranges. A believable low-end number you can defend is worth more than an optimistic one you can't. The point isn't a precise forecast, it's an honest order of magnitude.
Net economic impact
Now put the two halves together. Net economic impact is simply the revenue a vendor captures or protects, minus its total cost. Compare your finalists on that number, and the ranking can flip.
Two finalists, over a three-year term. Numbers are hypothetical, chosen to show the shape:
Vendor A: cost $30,000 − revenue gain $10,000 = net cost $20,000
Vendor B: cost $45,000 − revenue gain $40,000 = net cost $5,000
Vendor B costs $15,000 more, and comes out $15,000 ahead, because it captures and protects far more than its extra price. On sticker price, A looked like the deal. On net, A is the expensive choice.
That flip is the entire reason to do this math. The pricier vendor didn't win by being pricier; it won by returning more than it charged. Sticker price alone would have sent you the wrong way.
Run it for your finalists
You don't have to build the spreadsheet yourself. The calculator below models both sides for each vendor at once, so you can see the net side by side instead of arguing about monthly fees.
Total cost and revenue impact calculator
Enter your finalists with full cost inputs (subscription, implementation, migration, training, support, integrations, processing) and revenue inputs (booking capture, ancillary, renewals, fuel margin). Get total cost, revenue impact, and net economic impact side by side, so the strongest economic fit is obvious rather than assumed.
Running a portfolio rather than a single marina? Chapter 22 applies this same net-impact math at the multi-site level, where small per-site differences multiply across every property.
Add up the whole cost, estimate the revenue impact honestly, and compare vendors on net, not on price. The best economic choice is the one that leaves you with the most at year end, which is rarely the one with the smallest invoice.
Planning the switch: what a realistic migration looks like
The decision is made. Part Five is about the work of switching without losing a season to it: the real timeline, the phases, and the things that go wrong when a vendor promises a three-week miracle.
Read Chapter 17 →References and further reading
- Sharper MMS, Map the Switch Migration Assessment
- Association of Marina Industries (AMI), industry research and benchmark data. marinaassociation.org
- Storable Marine, AMI, and Marina Dock Age, Navigating the Numbers: 2026 Marina Operator Insights & Technology Automation