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 ten minutes for prices, about every twenty minutes for vessel positions, every fifteen for war events, and every three hours for the editorial brief. Every figure names its source or says why it doesn’t. There are no ad networks, no paywall, no email-gate, and no tracking cookies. 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 rewritten through the UTC day. Once the day ends it stays as written, and a person edits it only to fix an error. 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: figures name their source wherever we can: IMF PortWatch, EIA, OFAC, GDELT, Polymarket, Manifold and the carriers’ own advisories. A few supplementary feeds keep their upstream private, and the methodology page lists which. 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, ad networks or sponsors shape the editorial. The site commits to staying free to read, free to embed, and free to query the summary API, including for newsroom and academic use. A separate machine-payable premium tier meters deeper history and per-vessel intelligence for AI agents and pipelines (see /api under Premium). If the free commitment ever changes, it’ll be announced here first, and the existing embeds and summary endpoints will keep working.

One change, announced here first as promised. From 13 October 2026 the free API allows 1,000 requests a day per IP address (resets at 00:00 UTC), on top of the 60 a minute it has always allowed. That’s about one call every 90 seconds, around the clock, so most people will never notice. A few automated clients poll far past that, and the cap asks the heaviest users to pay for what they use. Reading the site, the embeds, the CSV downloads and ordinary API use all stay free. If you need more, an API pass is $29 a month and lifts the limits to 600 a minute and 100,000 a day.

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 Bluesky. X posting is paused for now.