From an internship
to three customs tariffs
Transinaut did not start as a product idea. It started in an office where HS codes were looked up by hand, and with the conviction that the work deserved better.
What happened,
in order.
An internship at a Moroccan freight forwarder
The founder spends an internship at a freight forwarder in Morocco. Tariff classification there is done by hand: page through the nomenclature, weigh up neighbouring wordings, start again. That is where the problem was seen up close, before it was a product.
Seven months studying the market
Nothing was built in this period. Forwarders, importers and declarants were asked how they actually classify: which tools, which mistakes, and what those mistakes cost. The answer that kept coming back — “I ask a colleague” — is what decided the rest.
Build starts, on the Moroccan tariff alone
First version, one tariff and partial coverage: 54 of the Harmonised System's 97 chapters. Publishing half the nomenclature and saying so was preferred to promising all of it and serving it roughly.
Full coverage of the Moroccan tariff
The remaining chapters are loaded. The database now covers the whole nomenclature published by the Moroccan customs administration, with official wordings, units and import duties.
A more intelligent search
Search stops being limited to the exact words of the official wordings. It now bridges a plain description of goods and the vocabulary of the nomenclature — precisely the gap a declarant's experience used to fill.
- In progress
Canada and Australia
The product stops being single-country. Canada's Customs Tariff arrives with its twenty-five tariff treatments, its sections and its General Rules; Australia's Customs Tariff follows. Each country keeps its own URL, its own tariff and its own language of publication.
The next chapter
starts with a code.
Describe some goods and see what the assistant makes of them. No account needed to search, free for the rest.