A TMS built for freight brokers, not for enterprises

A freight brokerage buys capacity from carriers on negotiated rate sheets and resells it to its own customers with a margin. Both sides of that trade are arithmetic: taxable weight, a bracket, a zone, a fuel surcharge, a few options. The arithmetic is not hard. Keeping two copies of it consistent — across dozens of rate sheets, in a workbook three people edit — is.

In practice the buy price lives in one file and the sell price in another. A carrier updates a bracket; one file gets the update, the other does not. The quote goes out at a margin nobody chose. It is noticed when the carrier invoice arrives, weeks later.

Software that solves this properly does exist, but it is scoped and priced for carriers, 3PLs and shippers with an IT department. A brokerage of two to twenty-five people asks for a quoting tool and is offered an implementation project. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers of that size, with prices published on the site — 49 €/month, 149 €/month and 399 €/month — and a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card.

You rebuild your own carrier rate sheets as structured grids, starting from the Excel or CSV file the carrier already sent you: you pick the grid type, declare the zones and brackets, and enter the cells once. Cargavo ships no rates: the grids are yours, they stay yours, and nobody outside your organization sees them. Four generic grid types cover the road freight pricing structures brokers actually receive:

Grid type	Priced on	Typical use
weight_zone	Zone × weight bracket	Groupage, parcel-style tariffs
pallet	Zone × pallet count	Pallet networks
mpl_bracket	Zone × loading metres (LDM)	Part loads, volumetric freight
hybrid_weight	Flat fee below a threshold, rate above	Full loads, long distance

Around the grid sit the things that make a real quote: taxable weight (loading-metre floor, volumetric weight at a ratio you configure), configurable rounding, an indexed fuel surcharge, and options such as tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance and booked delivery slots. Margins are applied as a percentage using p / (1 − m), or as an absolute amount per bracket.

Your customers get a self-service portal — white-labelled to your own brand on the Scale plan: a price simulator, a quote request that works even on a lane you have no grid for, booking, history and messaging. Quotes are referenced Q-YYYY-NNNN and shipments S-YYYY-NNNN. The portal never exposes a buy price or a margin — that separation is enforced on the server, not in the interface. Cargavo runs in English, French, Spanish and German, and prices in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD and PLN.

Stating the limits is part of describing the product. A tool that appears to do everything cannot be evaluated, and an evaluation that ends in a surprise costs more than a lost sale.

• No carrier API or EDI integration. Cargavo prices from the grids you build yourself, not from a carrier web service. We will not promise connectors we have not built.
• Not a freight exchange or load board. Cargavo does not find you carriers, and it does not find carriers freight. It prices the relationships you already have.
• Not a fleet management system. No vehicles, no drivers, no telematics, no driving-hours compliance. Cargavo is for brokers, who do not own the trucks.
• Not a tender marketplace. No public bidding, no reverse auctions.
• Not an accounting package. Cargavo computes what you buy and what you sell; your accounting system keeps the ledger.

• One pricing engine. The buy price and the sell price call the same function — the sell price is the buy price with margins applied, never a second implementation. Two implementations always diverge, and the divergence stays invisible until it reaches an invoice.
• The server decides the price. The interface can simulate instantly, but the number that becomes a quote is recomputed server-side. A price the browser sends and the server does not verify is not a price.
• Margins stay on the broker side. Buy prices and margins are stored apart from anything a customer session can read. Your customer sees their price; they never see yours.
• Strict isolation per organization. Every record belongs to exactly one brokerage. Access is denied by default and granted only by explicit rules — no shared tables, no cross-tenant queries.
• Published prices. The three plans, their limits and the 14-day trial are on the pricing page. No "contact us for pricing", no negotiated list price for the same product.

Cargavo runs on Google Cloud infrastructure (Firebase): managed authentication, a document database with per-organization access rules, and server-side functions that hold the pricing authority. Secrets live in a secret manager, never in the codebase.

• A named author. Every guide carries a byline linking to this page. There are no unsigned "team" articles and no ghost-written filler.
• A visible date. Each guide shows when it was last reviewed, and the same date appears in its structured data. If a page has not been reviewed in a long time, you can see that.
• No invented numbers. If a figure cannot be sourced, it is left out. You will not find customer counts, testimonials or unsourced market statistics anywhere on this site.
• Competitors described from public sources. Feature and pricing claims about other tools come from the vendor’s own website, and we state when we checked it. Vendors change their pages; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
• Product claims limited to shipped behaviour. When Cargavo does not do something, the guide says so — see the limits above rather than a roadmap.

Corrections are welcome at contact@cargavo.com. A guide that was wrong and got corrected is worth more than a guide vague enough never to be wrong.