Company / Platforms

When the website has to do the work, not describe it

A carrier onboarding portal, a freight quote engine, a shipment tracking lookup — software that runs a job your team currently does by hand, built for freight operations and scoped in a paid two-week discovery rather than guessed at on a call.

Website

Describes your operation. Proves authority, ranks for the lanes and services you run, and collects quote requests.

$2,450 flat

Platform

Runs part of it. Onboards carriers, prices a lane, answers "where is my load", and takes driver applications without a person in the loop.

From $9,500

Start a discovery I just need a website

The short answer

Do you need a platform or a website?

A website describes your operation. A platform runs part of it.

If someone on your team currently does a job by hand — chasing a carrier for a certificate that expired last month, answering "where is my load" by opening the TMS and typing a reply, re-keying a quote request that arrived as an email — and you want software to do it instead, you are on the right page.

If what you need is for shippers to find you, believe you, and request a rate, that is a website, it is a flat $2,450, and it is on the logistics website pricing page. Most companies that ask us about a platform need the website first, and we will say so. These are two products on purpose: this page is the operational software; what a logistics website costs is the marketing site.

Three products, named as they actually ship. If you are comparing this page with what a logistics website costs, the split is: the website collects the enquiry; the software below runs the job after you have the work.

What is a carrier onboarding portal?

A carrier onboarding portal is the software a freight brokerage uses to take a carrier from “we found them on a load board” to “they are in the network and can take a load.” The carrier fills in their MC and DOT numbers, uploads a W-9, certificate of insurance and signed carrier packet, and the file lands in your system already checked against FMCSA authority and insurance minimums. Status is visible to your ops team and to the carrier. Document expiry is tracked instead of discovered when a load is already covered.

That is a different product from a brokerage website, which has to prove bond, authority and vetting criteria to a shipper who has not decided to work with you yet. The website collects the enquiry. The portal runs the onboarding after you have said yes. Brokerages that try to do both inside a contact form end up with an inbox full of unsigned packets.

FMCSA authority and insurance verification
Document upload with expiry tracking
Automated packet generation and countersigning
Status visible to ops and to the carrier

What is a freight quote engine?

A freight quote engine is a form that captures origin, destination, equipment, commodity, weight, dimensions and accessorials, then either returns a number from rules you control, or routes a complete request to the right desk with those fields already filled. Which of those two it should be is the first thing discovery settles: some operations can safely publish a rate, most cannot, and guessing wrong on a sales call is how you end up rebuilding the thing.

It is not the quote-request form on a marketing site. That form is designed to turn a stranger into an enquiry — a handful of fields, a human on the other end. A quote engine is designed to price a lane, or to get a complete tender to the person who can. History, re-quote and the rules themselves live in the engine, not in a spreadsheet the pricing clerk keeps on their desktop.

Lane, equipment and accessorial logic
Rules you control without calling us
Quote history and re-quote
Routing to the right desk

What is a shipment tracking lookup?

A shipment tracking lookup is a page where a shipper — or a consignee — enters a PRO number, container number, bill of lading or load reference and sees status, ETA and documents without emailing your dispatcher. The data is pulled from your TMS where the API allows it. Where the vendor will not give us the endpoint, it is pulled from a status field your team already maintains. Either way the page is branded to your operation, not to the TMS vendor’s customer portal.

The lookup can work without a login where that is safe: a unique reference is often enough. Where it is not — customer-specific rates, documents, or a 3PL client dashboard — discovery puts a login on it. The point is the same: “where is my load” should not be a phone call that opens the TMS and types a reply.

Reference-number lookup
Status, ETA and document retrieval
Branded to your operation, not your vendor’s
Works without a login where that is safe

What else we build on a logistics platform

Driver recruiting funnels belong here when the application has to survive a phone at a truck stop: a short form, CDL and endorsement screening, routing into your ATS rather than a shared inbox, and source tracking per ad. Importer or customer portals belong here when a forwarder or customs brokerage needs entry status and document download. If what you are describing is already a module your TMS vendor sells, buy theirs — it will be cheaper than ours and it will not break when they change their schema.

Fit

Which logistics companies actually need a platform

The fit is the job being done by hand, not the size of the company. A five-desk brokerage drowning in carrier packets needs this. A national fleet whose website is not producing enquiries does not — not yet.

Freight brokerages

Carrier onboarding is still an inbox. Packets arrive as PDFs, COIs expire without anyone noticing, and FMCSA authority is checked by whoever has a spare minute. A portal makes the carrier do the filing and makes the status visible to ops.

Trucking companies

Dispatchers spend the day answering “where is my load” and recruiters collect half-finished applications from a desktop form. A tracking lookup and a mobile driver application take both jobs off the phone without buying a new TMS.

3PLs and fulfillment operators

Clients want order status, inventory snapshots and documents without emailing the warehouse. If the WMS already holds the data, a branded lookup or a thin client dashboard is usually enough. If it does not, discovery will say so.

Forwarders and customs brokerages

Importers and overseas agents need entry status, ISF filings and document retrieval. The work is a portal against the system that already runs the file, not a second system of record.

How it starts

How paid discovery for a logistics platform works

Two weeks. You leave with a written specification, a fixed price, and the right to take both somewhere else. The floor is the floor; the number after discovery is the number.

Platforms start at $9,500. That is a floor, not a package. We will not put a second price on this page, because the variable that dominates the quote is what your TMS or WMS vendor will actually let us call — sandbox credentials, rate limits, whether the endpoint we need exists at all — and nobody knows that on the first call, including your vendor’s sales team. A website does not have that problem, which is why a website is a flat $2,450 on thepricing page and a platform is not.

What your systems will actually allow

We read your TMS or WMS API documentation, request sandbox access, and establish what is genuinely reachable. This is the step that most fixed-price platform quotes skip, and it is the single biggest cause of an overrun.

The workflow as it runs today

We sit with whoever does the job — the dispatcher, the onboarding coordinator, the recruiter — and map what they actually do, including the parts that live in a spreadsheet nobody mentions in the kickoff call.

A written specification and a fixed price

You leave discovery with a document: what gets built, what it integrates with, what it costs, and what is explicitly out of scope. The price after discovery does not move.

Yours to take elsewhere

If you decide not to build with us, the specification is yours. It is a real deliverable, not a sales artefact, and it is worth having even if we never write a line of code for you.

The honest reason platforms are not fix-bid off a price list: the cost is dominated by what your existing systems will let us do, and nobody knows that on the first call — including your own vendor's sales team.

Straight answer

When a platform is the wrong call

If your website is not yet producing enquiries, a carrier portal will not fix that, and building one first is the most expensive way to discover it. Get the logistics website right, watch what it produces for a quarter, then decide.

If the manual process you want to automate happens fewer than a handful of times a week, the spreadsheet is winning and you should keep it. We would rather tell you that than take a deposit.

And if your TMS vendor already sells the module you are describing, buy theirs. It will be cheaper than ours and it will not break when they change their schema.

Questions we get

Carrier portals, quote engines and tracking lookups

What is a carrier onboarding portal?

A carrier onboarding portal is software a freight brokerage uses to take a carrier from first contact to an approved, insured network file. The carrier enters MC and DOT numbers, uploads a W-9, certificate of insurance and signed packet, and the file is checked against FMCSA authority and insurance minimums. It replaces the email-and-spreadsheet loop most brokerages still run. It is not a marketing website — a website describes the brokerage; the portal runs the onboarding.

What is a freight quote engine?

A freight quote engine is a form that captures lane, equipment, commodity, weight and accessorials and either returns a number from rules you control, or routes a complete request to the right desk with the fields already filled. Which of those two you need is the first thing discovery settles. It is a different product from the quote request form on a logistics website, which collects an enquiry and stops there.

What is a shipment tracking lookup?

A tracking lookup is a page where a shipper enters a PRO number, container number or load reference and sees status, ETA and documents without emailing dispatch. Status is pulled from your TMS where the API allows it, and from a maintained status field where it does not. It is branded to your operation, not your vendor's, and it can work without a login where that is safe.

How much does a logistics platform cost?

Platforms start at $9,500 and are quoted after a paid two-week discovery rather than off a price list. We work that way because a platform's cost is dominated by what your existing systems will let us do, and neither of us knows that on the first call. A website is a separate, flat $2,450 — if what you need is a website, that is the page you want.

What is the difference between a logistics website and a carrier portal?

A website describes your operation. A platform runs part of it. If a person on your team currently does something by hand — chasing carrier documents, answering "where is my load", re-keying a quote request — and you want software to do it instead, that is a platform. If you want shippers to find you, believe you, and request a rate, that is a logistics website at $2,450 flat. Most companies that ask about a platform need the website first.

Why do you charge for discovery?

Because it is the work, not a sales call. Two weeks of reading your vendor's API documentation, requesting sandbox credentials and mapping how your team actually operates produces a specification you own and can take anywhere. Agencies that give it away for free either pad the build price to cover it or write a shallow scope and raise a change order later.

Do you integrate with my TMS?

Sometimes, and discovery is how we find out honestly. Some transport management systems publish a documented API. Some expose a partial one. Some will sell you access. Some have nothing and the answer is a scheduled export. We will tell you which of those you are in before you commit to a build, rather than discovering it in week six.

Can you build a platform on a site you did not make?

Yes. The platform work is largely independent of what your marketing site runs on. If the existing site is going to fight us we will say so in discovery and price the two paths separately, so the decision stays yours. If the marketing site itself is the problem, that is a website rebuild, not a platform.

Next step

Tell us what your team does by hand.

We will tell you whether it is worth automating, and roughly what it costs, before anyone books a discovery. From $9,500. Websites are a separate, flat $2,450.

Start a discovery I just need a website Or call(661) 666-2416