What Should a 12-Person Freight Brokerage Actually Pay for Software?
In freight brokerage, headcount barely moves the software bill — load volume and carrier-fraud exposure do. Here's what a 12-person non-asset-based brokerage actually pays, pillar by pillar, and the $1,190/mo that's pure overlap in almost every stack we see.
A 12-person freight brokerage's optimized stack runs $2,834/mo — the typical unoptimized brokerage pays $5,200/mo
For a 12-person non-asset-based freight brokerage running load boards, a broker TMS, carrier vetting, and back-office finance tools.
Most SMBs pay for software roughly in proportion to headcount — more employees, more seats. Freight brokerage doesn't work that way. A 12-person brokerage moving 40 loads a week pays for the same load-board access and the same carrier-vetting layer as one moving 15 loads a week, because those tools are priced against market access and fraud risk, not seats. What actually drives a brokerage's software bill up is simpler and more avoidable: a TMS migration that never fully closed out, a load board kept 'as a backup' after the team settled on a primary, or a carrier-vetting subscription nobody configured after the person who set it up left.
Here's what we actually see, tool by tool and pillar by pillar, for a 12-person non-asset-based brokerage — and the exact math behind the $2,834/mo optimized number above.
Software spend across four pillars for a 12-person freight brokerage.
Sales & Marketing: $950-1,090/mo
DAT Load Board ($150/mo) and Truckstop ($140/mo) cover the identical 2-200 employee band — team size doesn't distinguish them. What does: DAT's own integration list names both Alvys and Truckstop, giving it the widest cross-platform reach in this pillar, which is why a 12-person brokerage's fit score lands on DAT by default. Truckstop is $10/mo cheaper and bundles carrier credit/rating checks directly into its load-search flow — a real advantage only if you aren't already running MyCarrierPortal or Highway for vetting. HubSpot CRM ($800/mo) isn't optional at this price point; it's the only shipper-side CRM in the data, priced for the reality that closing a shipper account is a multi-month relationship sale, not a self-serve signup.
Sales & Marketing: pick one load board
DAT vs. Truckstop
| Load board | DAT | Truckstop |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $150 | $140 |
| Employee range | 2-200 | 2-200 |
| Built-in carrier credit/rating checks | ||
| Connects to Alvys (TMS) | ||
| Lists a direct connection to the other load board |
Questions to ask before picking your primary load board
- Which platform actually has deeper carrier density in your top 5 lanes this quarter — not overall market share?
- Are you already paying for MyCarrierPortal or Highway? If so, Truckstop's built-in credit checks are a feature you're paying for twice.
- Is your TMS's load-board integration actually moving rate confirmations automatically, or is someone still copy-pasting?
- What's the cancellation notice if lane density in your specific lanes turns out to be weak?
Core Operations: $900-1,950/mo — where the TMS and vetting picks decide most of your bill
This pillar swings the total more than any other. Alvys ($600/mo, 3-150 employees) and Turvo ($700/mo, 5-200 employees) both do the core TMS job — load building, carrier booking, rate confirmations, tracking, invoicing — but Alvys's band centers on a smaller brokerage and it's the only one of the two that natively connects to DAT Load Board, which is why it's the higher-fit pick for a 12-person shop. Layer on carrier vetting: MyCarrierPortal ($300/mo) and Highway ($350/mo) cover an identical 2-150 band, so that decision comes down to which risk you're managing — comprehensive onboarding and ongoing safety monitoring (MyCarrierPortal) versus real-time double-brokering and identity-fraud detection specifically (Highway). We cover both decisions in depth elsewhere; the number that matters here is what happens when a brokerage doesn't make either decision and just keeps paying for both sides.
TMS and carrier-vetting picks are the two decisions that move this pillar's cost the most.
Core Operations: one TMS + one vetting tool vs. running all four
Broker TMS, at a glance
| TMS | Alvys | Turvo |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $600 | $700 |
| Employee range | 3-150 | 5-200 |
| Connects to DAT Load Board | ||
| Connects to MyCarrierPortal |
Running both TMS platforms ($1,300/mo combined) plus both vetting tools ($650/mo combined) totals $1,950/mo against a $900/mo optimum — that extra $1,050/mo buys zero incremental capability. It's the single most expensive overlap category in the entire stack.
Questions to ask before finalizing your TMS and vetting combination
- Does your top shipper actually require self-service load tracking, or would proactive updates from your ops team cover it?
- How many new carriers do you onboard in an average month, and how manual is that process today?
- Are you within 20 employees of either platform's upper band edge — 150 for Alvys/MyCarrierPortal/Highway, 200 for Turvo? That changes the multi-year math.
- If you inherited a second TMS through a new hire's prior platform or a merger, what's the actual data-migration completion date — not an open-ended 'eventually'?
Finance: $639/mo
QuickBooks Online Plus ($90/mo) is the general ledger, reconciling load-level margin against the TMS's invoicing export. Gusto Plus ($200/mo) runs payroll for a mixed team of commissioned brokers/agents and salaried back-office staff — misclassifying commissioned agents is a common and expensive mistake as a brokerage grows. Denim ($250/mo) is easy to misread: that $250 is the factoring and quick-pay platform's software fee, not the cost of factoring itself — the actual cash advance carries its own discount rate against invoice value, on top of the subscription. Bill.com ($99/mo) automates approval routing for insurance premiums and office vendor bills. Ramp is functionally free and earns its keep through receipt capture on broker travel and client-entertainment expense tracking alone.
Finance tools by monthly cost
Watch for double-paying here: brokerages that migrate to Gusto but keep an incumbent payroll processor active 'through year-end just in case' are paying for the same job twice — cancel on the actual migration date, not a buffer date nobody circles back to.
Admin & Security: $345/mo
Google Workspace Business Standard ($170/mo) hosts email and shared drives across sales and operations. 1Password Business ($95/mo) stops brokers and ops staff from reusing the same password across DAT, the TMS, and carrier-vetting portals — a broker who reuses a DAT login on their email account turns one phished inbox into load-board and carrier-portal access too. DocuSign ($80/mo) handles e-signature for broker-carrier agreements, shipper contracts, and agent employment paperwork.
Admin & Security tools by monthly cost
What this adds up to
Total monthly stack cost
Even paying for every duplicate tool in this stack ($4,024/mo) falls short of what many brokerages actually spend — sprawl usually isn't just duplicate categories.
Notice that $4,024/mo — the cost of running literally every tool in this vertical's data, including both load boards, both TMS platforms, and both vetting tools — is still lower than the $5,200/mo typical unoptimized spend we use as the baseline for a 12-person brokerage. That gap tells you something: the overspend we see in practice isn't only duplicate categories from this list, it's also legacy or off-list vendor contracts, above-list pricing nobody renegotiated, and tools bought outside any of these five core categories.
Where the extra $1,000-2,300/mo actually goes
- Running two load boards indefinitely instead of picking a primary based on lane density ($140-150/mo pure overlap)
- Keeping both Alvys and Turvo active after a TMS migration that never fully closed out ($600-700/mo pure overlap)
- Paying for both MyCarrierPortal and Highway when one tool actually covers the risk you're managing ($300-350/mo pure overlap)
- Treating Denim's $250/mo platform fee as the full cost of factoring instead of also pricing the advance discount rate
- Never renegotiating HubSpot or TMS per-seat pricing after headcount or load volume changed
The gap isn't from cutting capability you need — it's from running two tools that do the same job, treating a platform fee as the whole cost of a service, and never renegotiating after your load volume changed. Every one of those is fixable without losing anything.
Run the free audit with your actual headcount and current spend to see exactly where your freight brokerage's stack stands.