Trade compliance is where importers lose the most money and get the least advice.

Freight is where most attention goes. Rate negotiation, mode selection, carrier consolidation — these are legible problems with legible answers. A five percent freight savings on a $10M import volume is $500,000, so the CFO understands the pitch and the transportation manager understands the work.

Compliance sits upstream and gets less attention because the mechanisms are less visible. A misclassified HS code accrues underpaid duties across the four-year statute of limitations. Interest and penalties compound the exposure. A single audit finding on high-volume imports can produce a seven-figure retroactive assessment. And unlike freight, there is no monthly negotiation to correct the trajectory. The mistake is baked in until someone catches it.

Tarsis exists to make compliance visible enough to manage.

Customs software targets either consumer ecommerce or Fortune 1000. Big 4 trade practices — the KPMG, PwC, EY, and Deloitte teams — serve their largest accounts, with per-engagement fees that assume a corporate tax function is the buyer.

The mid-market foreign manufacturer — the Korean tier-2 supplier or German Mittelstand subsidiary in the $50M–$500M revenue band — sits in the gap. Too complex for consumer software. Too small for Big 4 hourly rates. This company pieces together a broker for filings, a forwarder for freight, and an internal spreadsheet for classifications, and accepts the compliance risk as a cost of doing business.

Tarsis is built to serve this company specifically. Not as a stripped-down Big 4 offering, but as a compliance function scaled to what mid-market operations actually need.

Tarsis leads with services because trade compliance is not a self-serve problem. Classification decisions require judgment about facts you have to gather. FTA qualification depends on origin substantiation you have to document. Valuation methodology requires understanding of your commercial arrangements, including assists, royalties, and post-importation adjustments.

Software can support these decisions. Software cannot make them for you responsibly.

The Tarsis platform is in design and will launch when the first cohort of advisory clients has helped establish what the software should do. Decision support, not automated decision. Classification reasoning chains that surface authority. Landed-cost modeling with lane-specific defaults. Reasonable-care audit trails that regulators recognize.

This is deliberate sequencing. Software that leads without advisory tends to be wrong at the edges — and in trade compliance, the edges are where the six-figure findings live.

Tarsis is not a licensed customs broker. Filings are performed by a curated network of broker partners we vet, contract with, and manage as a program.

The network launches with two broker partners, expanding to three or four as engagement volume grows. Each partner is licensed under 19 CFR 111, carries appropriate errors-and-omissions coverage, and has agreed to a service-level standard for entry review turnaround, communication cadence, and audit response.

You are the client of record with the broker. Tarsis is the program manager. If you already work with a broker and want to keep them, we work with them. If you don’t, we match you with a partner that fits your import profile.

This structure separates advisory judgment from filing authority. It keeps the regulatory posture clean and preserves your ability to change brokers without changing advisors.

Tarsis operates in the same regulatory category as Avalara Cross-Border, Descartes CustomsInfo, Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE, and Big 4 trade practices. None of these firms are licensed customs brokers. All of them provide compliance advisory, decision support software, and program management.

Classification guidance from Tarsis is decision support, not filing authority. When a decision requires broker discretion or a binding ruling from CBP, we say so. We prepare the analysis; your broker files the entry.

This distinction is not just legal cover. It is a working principle. Advisory that is structurally separated from filing authority produces cleaner advice, because the advisor is not incentivized to shape the decision to fit what is easiest to file.

Tarsis publishes pricing. This is unusual for the category. Vendors that price on request tend to price on what a customer will pay, which produces the outcome that companies with larger legal teams pay more for the same work.

Tarsis anchors prices to what work is actually being done — audit engagements to SKU count and complexity, per-entry to entry type, subscription tiers to service volume — not to the customer’s ability to pay. This is a client-favorable posture. It is also a discipline for us, because it forces the operating model to work at published prices rather than at negotiated ones.

The full price list is on the Pricing page →