Custom freight broker software with no per-seat SaaS fees.

They serve different jobs. A TMS, or transportation management system, is built for shippers: companies with their own freight who want to plan routes, tender to carriers, and audit freight bills. Freight broker software is built for the middleman: the broker who takes a shipper's load, finds a carrier, and keeps the margin in between. The broker's software models carrier vetting, rate confirmations, buy-sell margin on every load, and fraud checks. The shipper's TMS models routing and freight spend. Most brokerages need one, not both. If you run a brokerage, buy or build the broker platform. If you run a 3PL that does both brokering and managing a shipper's freight, you may need both, and they should share carrier and accounting data rather than living as two silos. RaftLabs also builds shipper TMS software, so we can map the boundary for you honestly.

Carrier onboarding means answering one question before you hand over a load: is this trucking company legitimate and insured? Today most brokerages do it with a PDF carrier packet emailed back and forth, and an insurance certificate someone eyeballs. In the software, the carrier completes the packet online and the system checks the answers against real data. It looks up the carrier's federal operating license, called an MC number, in FMCSA records to confirm their authority is active and checks how long they have held it. It verifies the insurance certificate is valid and names you as certificate holder. It collects the W-9 for tax reporting. Then it does not stop there. Every time a load is tendered to that carrier later, the checks run again automatically, because authority and insurance lapse all the time. A carrier approved in January with expired insurance in March is a carrier you should not be tendering loads to in March. The software catches that; a spreadsheet does not.

A rate confirmation, or rate con, is the one-page agreement that locks in the price and terms between you and the carrier for a single load: rate, pickup and delivery addresses, dates, and what extra pay applies if things go sideways. Carriers ask real questions before signing, like who the shipper is, who the receiver is, and what the product is, because a bad con costs them money. In the software, the rate con is generated automatically from the accepted quote, with your detention and layover terms (extra pay when a driver waits too long at a dock), accessorial charges, and cancellation policy baked in. The carrier signs digitally from their phone. The signed copy files itself against the load record, and the rate matches the quote exactly, so there is no Word doc with the wrong detention terms going out. When a carrier does ask questions, your agent answers them in the same thread instead of hunting through email.

Double brokering means the carrier you booked quietly hands your load to a different carrier without telling you. You lose control of the freight, the real carrier may not be vetted or insured, and if something goes wrong you are the one the shipper calls. The software fights this with checks at tender time, not after the fact. It flags carriers whose operating authority is suspiciously new, re-verifies authority status and insurance before each tender, and checks your internal watchlist of carriers that have burned you before. It can require GPS or ELD tracking, meaning location data from the truck itself, for the full run, so you can see the truck is actually where the carrier says it is. It can also watch for the same load reappearing on public load boards under a different name, which is the classic tell. Honest framing: no software stops fraud by itself. It raises the flags in seconds that your team would take hours to find, and your team makes the final call on every flagged tender.

Buyers underbudget by ignoring what is not in the license: implementation, carrier EDI onboarding, data migration, training, premium add-ons, peak-season overages. Per-user or flat-rate: which fits your brokerage depends on headcount; the flip point is seat count. Can you start with just a load board? Load boards find capacity fast, but tracking, invoicing, and compliance each need their own system. Factoring gets you paid now instead of waiting on shipper terms: the invoice flow matters as much as the load flow.

Four rituals. One: the rate-con test: does the rate con go out right the first time? Two: the vetting test: authority, insurance, and fraud signals live at tender time, not after the load is gone. FMCSA data is self-reported; hundreds of brokers and carriers can share one UPS-store address. Three: the check-call test: ELD GPS plus geofence alerts, or your team still calling drivers. Four: the parallel cut-over: migration from your current system included, no hard stops. No per-seat SaaS fees; vetting built around your rules; your integrations, not their roadmap.

A focused v1 covers carrier onboarding and vetting, automated rate confirmations, a load matching and dispatch board, and double-broker checks with no external integrations. Adding load board integrations (DAT, Truckstop), factoring connections, and QuickBooks sync is the next tier; a full brokerage platform adds a shipper portal, carrier mobile app, accounting reconciliation, and margin analytics. All builds are fixed price: the quote in the project brief is the final invoice, set after discovery. On the cost comparison: broker SaaS is usually priced per user per month for software you never own. A custom build pays for itself over time, and you stop paying for every new hire.

A focused v1 starts with an operations audit: we map how your agents quote, vet, tender, and settle loads, and you get a fixed-price quote. UI design and architecture, including the vetting rule engine and the rate confirmation templates your operation actually uses, are approved before code is written. Then the agent portal, carrier onboarding flow, and vetting automation are built with QA running alongside. The new platform runs in parallel with your current process on a subset of agents before the full team cuts over. Post-launch monitoring and support are included. Load board and factoring integrations land in v1 when they are in scope, otherwise they follow as expansion modules.

Buy the SaaS when you are a small brokerage with standard workflows, you need to be live next month, and per-seat fees are still small compared to your revenue. Alvys, McLeod, and Tai are mature products with real EDI connections to shippers and carriers, and for many brokerages they are the right answer. A custom build wins when four things are true. First, per-seat fees have outgrown the value: with dozens of agents, per-seat pricing becomes a large yearly cost for software you never own. Second, your vetting rules are your competitive edge: you trust certain carriers, blacklist others, and the SaaS cannot model your rules. Third, your integrations are the workflow: your factoring partner, your load boards, your accounting, all need to behave exactly your way. Fourth, you want fraud checks the vendors do not sell: proprietary double-broker rules tuned to how your carriers actually operate. If two or more of those are true, run the math. It usually favors the build.

Load boards: DAT and Truckstop, for posting loads and pulling carrier capacity, plus email and webhook ingestion of load tenders from shipper customers. Carrier data: FMCSA records for operating authority and insurance verification, plus commercial vetting data feeds where available. Factoring: the partners that buy your invoices so you get paid now instead of waiting 30 days, such as RTS and Triumph, so assignment of invoices and quick-pay move automatically. Accounting: QuickBooks Online and Desktop, Xero, and Sage, so settled loads flow into your books without re-entry. Shipper systems: EDI connections and API ingestion of load tenders where your shipper customers support them. Integration scope is confirmed during discovery before any code is written, and every integration is tested against a staging environment before production cutover.