The obvious question
Why not just book your own loads?
Plenty of carriers should. Here is the honest version of the comparison, written by a dispatch service, which you should factor in.
Booking it yourself
- You keep 100% of the linehaul.
- Nobody knows your truck better than you do.
- Total control over what you take and when.
- Load board subscriptions come out of your pocket.
- Two to four hours a day searching and negotiating, usually after you have already driven eleven.
- Broker setup packets, carrier packets and invoicing are all yours.
- You are negotiating against people who do it full time.
- Nobody answers the phone for you at 2 AM.
Using a dispatch service
- Your driving hours stay driving hours.
- Someone negotiates for a living, on your behalf.
- Broker setups and paperwork handled.
- Round trips planned, so deadhead comes down.
- Somebody picks up when something goes wrong at 2 AM.
- A percentage of the linehaul, every load.
- You are trusting someone else's judgement on rates.
- A bad dispatcher is worse than no dispatcher.
If you already have direct shipper relationships, you enjoy negotiating, and you have the hours for it — book your own freight. Genuinely.
A dispatch service earns its percentage at exactly one point: when finding and negotiating loads is costing you more in time and deadhead than the fee costs you in money. Below that line you are paying for something you were doing better yourself.
So work out where your line is before you call anybody, including us.
Do not take our word for it
Put a real load through the profit calculator twice — once with a dispatch fee, once without. The gap is what our work has to be worth to you.
The fee costs $171 and buys back roughly four hours of searching and negotiating. So the question is not whether 8% is a lot. It is whether your hour is worth more than $43. If it is, dispatch pays. If it is not, book your own freight.
The 8% and the four hours are both assumptions, not quotes. Put your own into the calculator — that is the whole point of this page.
Still deciding? Ask us the hard questions.
Call and ask what happens at 2 AM, who works your truck, and what the percentage depends on.
A dispatcher answers, not a call centre. Nights and weekends included.