The Loadstar Paywall: How to Read Freight and Shipping News for Free

The Loadstar is a UK-based news site for the freight and logistics industry. It covers container shipping, air cargo, ports, forwarders and the trade routes that connect them, and it is read by shippers, carriers and analysts who need to know why rates on a lane have moved before their competitors do. It is also one of the trade titles our readers paste most often, because its reporting on Hormuz, Suez and the transpacific gets shared well beyond the industry. This guide explains how its paywall works and how to read a full story.

How The Loadstar paywall works

The Loadstar uses a metered paywall with a premium tier on top. Non-subscribers can open a limited number of stories a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. Longer analysis pieces and some market reports are marked premium and locked from the first view. Subscriptions are sold to individuals and to companies, and the prices reflect a professional audience.

The gate is applied in the browser. The site delivers the full article in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks your cookie and hides the text if you are over the limit or the story is premium. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the whole article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers why that distinction matters.

Our tests on 5 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 766-word Loadstar analysis of the Hormuz closure and its effect on Dubai and Abu Dhabi transhipment volumes loaded in full, all 23 paragraphs.
• A 704-word Loadstar report urging shippers to check routings as alliances redraw the Asia to South America trade loaded in full, all 26 paragraphs.
• A 374-word Loadstar story on pressure on India to US trades as Colombo becomes a transhipment hot spot loaded in full, all 13 paragraphs.
• A 373-word Loadstar story on a halted review dealing a blow to Hapag-Lloyd's hopes of taking over Zim loaded in full, all 12 paragraphs.

Loadstar news items are often 350 to 400 words in the original, so a short result on one of those is the whole story rather than a teaser.

Read a Loadstar article in full

• Copy the article link. Loadstar links look like theloadstar.com/headline-slug/, with no section or date in the path.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. The free daily and weekly newsletters carry headlines and summaries with links to the day's stories, and some of those links open the article in full.
• Company subscriptions. Many forwarders and carriers hold corporate subscriptions; if you work in the industry, check whether your employer has one before paying yourself.
• Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it, though premium stories stay locked.
• Podcasts and events. The Loadstar's podcast and conference coverage are free and often cover the same stories as the locked analysis.

How it compares with other trade titles

The Loadstar behaves like the other business-to-business publications we have tested. Skift, the travel industry site, and Law.com, the legal trade press, both meter in the browser and load in full. Lloyd's List, the other big shipping title, enforces its paywall on the server and serves only a short teaser, so it does not work. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Loadstar is a small, independent newsroom covering an industry where accurate, early information has real value. If its reporting feeds your work, a subscription is the right way to keep it going, and a company subscription is usually the cheapest route for a team.