A live tracker, not a dashboard.

Straits is an independent live monitor of the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Existing coverage sits behind trade-press paywalls or lags by days on government feeds. A journalist on deadline, an analyst pricing risk, or anyone trying to read a fast-moving closure needs neither, so this site reads the same primary feeds and publishes the numbers directly.

The site refreshes every five to ten minutes for prices and vessel transits, every fifteen minutes for war events, and once daily for the editorial brief. Every figure links to its source. There is no advertising, no paywall, no email-gate, and no tracking. The JSON API at /status, the CSV exports at /data/oil.csv, the RSS feed at /feed.xml, and the embeddable status badge at /embed are all free to use. The only ask is a credit link if you embed or quote the figures.

What this is not.

Not a widget-card dashboard. Not a sentiment tracker. The headline sentence is composed automatically from the live figures by fixed rules. It is not hand-written, and it is not a language model inventing numbers into prose. Every value it states is one of the figures already on the page. When an upstream feed goes unreachable, the affected indicator is suppressed or flagged as stale via the data-health chips on each section, never papered over with synthetic data.

Not editorialised. Curated war events use the language of the originating outlet. The daily brief is AI-assisted, generated from the live figures, and never hand-edited. Carrier postures are taken from each line’s public customer advisories. The assessment verdict is derived from named, listed signals rather than analyst judgment.

How the data moves.

Three commitments shape the editorial. Sourced: every figure on every page links back to a primary feed: IMF PortWatch, EIA, AISStream, OFAC, GDELT, Polymarket, Manifold, and the carriers’ own customer advisories. Reproducible: the same JSON that drives the dashboard is exposed at /status and per-indicator endpoints under /api. Bounded: thresholds and methodology are written down, not adjusted after the fact. The full data-sourcing and refresh story lives at /methodology.

When a figure looks wrong, it usually is: feeds drop, vessels spoof, upstreams change format. Reply to any email or send a note to hello@straits.live and corrections get pushed the same day.

Independent.

Straits is unfunded. No investors, no advertising contracts, no commercial partnerships shape the editorial. The site commits to staying free to read, free to embed, and free to query, including for newsroom and academic use. If that ever changes, it’ll be announced here first, and the existing embeds and API endpoints will keep working.

For corrections, source links, embed pitches, or partnership queries, email hello@straits.live. Press inquiries are handled through the same address; see /press for a media kit. Status updates and event-flips are also posted to X and LinkedIn.