About

Tariff intelligence for the importers who pay attention.

The mission

Mid-market importers and small customs brokers are competing against enterprise trade-compliance shops that spend six figures a year on Bloomberg Trade, Descartes, and dedicated tariff staff. TariffDesk exists to close that gap. We monitor every US tariff authority — the Federal Register, USTR, USITC, CBP CSMS, and presidential actions — and surface the rate changes that matter for your specific HTS codes, in the inbox of the people who actually book the freight.

The product is narrow on purpose: real-time tariff monitoring, dollar-impact alerts, audit-defensible rate computation. We do not file entries, manage classifications, or replace a licensed customs broker. We make sure you never get blindsided by a rate change you could have planned for.

Chase Pontikes

Chase founded TariffDesk in 2026 after spending a year embedded with mid-market importers and customs brokers, mapping the workflows that collapse when tariff policy moves faster than a quarterly briefing can keep up. He wrote the original pipeline that ingests the Federal Register, USTR, USITC, and CBP CSMS into a single source of truth; the Stack Visualizer; the AD/CVD screener; and the broker dashboard that powers TariffDesk’s broker-distribution channel.

Before TariffDesk, Chase shipped products in heavily regulated domains where wrong information is worse than no information. That mindset is the reason every rate on the site links back to a government primary source — and the reason we publish a full methodology page that explains exactly how every number is computed.

Why TariffDesk exists

The 2025–2026 tariff regime broke the trade-compliance assumption that rates change quarterly and brokers can keep up through email newsletters. Section 122 stood up a 10% global baseline in February 2026. Section 232 expanded to copper and pharmaceuticals. The $800 de minimis went away. The Section 301 four-year-review modifications layered another 25–50 points onto a list of HTS codes that nobody was watching. Importers were getting hit with five- and six-figure surprise duty bills because the rate changed between purchase order and entry.

TariffDesk was built to fix exactly that problem. Subscribe an HTS code, get notified when the rate moves, see the dollar impact in context, and click through to the underlying Federal Register notice to verify it yourself. No newsletter delay, no broker round-trip, no enterprise contract. Read the methodology if you want the technical detail, or jump straight to the HTS lookup to see live rates for any code.