TMS Pricing in 2026: What a TMS Really Costs a Small Brokerage

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, and it sits in the first of three price bands that a brokerage of 2 to 25 people will meet while shopping. The bands are far apart — the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive published plan in this category is roughly 100× — and the spread is not a quality gradient. It reflects what is inside the box.

• Self-service subscription (49 € to 399 € per month). You configure the product yourself, carriers are onboarded by rebuilding their rate sheets, and there is no implementation project to pay for.
• Mid-market subscription (149 $ to 749 € per month). Seats and shipment volumes are metered, onboarding is guided, and connectors may be extra.
• Enterprise platform (995 $ to 7,925 $ per month published, higher on request). The price carries a large inventory of live carrier and load-board integrations, EDI mappings, and a services team to run the rollout.

The decisive question is not "which band is cheapest" but "am I paying for the integration inventory". A brokerage whose prices come from its own negotiated carrier tariffs — a weight_zone table, a pallet grid, an mpl_bracket table, a hybrid_weight tariff — gets no value from 100 pre-built carrier APIs, because the rate never travels over an API. It sits in an Excel file the carrier emailed. That single fact moves most small brokerages from the third band to the first.

Two further cost drivers are invisible on a pricing page: how long the rollout takes before the tool earns anything, covered in our TMS implementation timeline guide, and whether you are buying software at all or simply outgrowing a spreadsheet, examined in when a brokerage outgrows spreadsheets. Both sit in the choosing a TMS category, alongside the buyer's guide at TMS for small freight brokers.

Before comparing two numbers, check that they are the same kind of number. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, is sold as a tiered flat plan; several of the products a broker will shortlist alongside it are not.

Two of these models tax growth directly. Per-seat pricing means the finance case for hiring a second operator now includes a software line. Per-shipment bands mean a good quarter pushes you into a band whose price you were never shown. Tiered flat plans move the risk elsewhere: your bill is stable until you cross a capacity limit — team members, customers, quotes per month, rate grids — at which point you change plan deliberately rather than being metered.

A hybrid worth naming separately: plans that meter your customers rather than your staff. Tai TMS publishes "10 client logins" on its 995 $/month Growth plan, which means a broker onboarding shippers to a portal is buying capacity twice. If a customer portal is central to how you sell, price that dimension explicitly before signing.

The table and the tier ladders below reproduce only figures printed on each vendor's own pricing page. No estimate, no analyst range, no "typically around" — where a vendor shows nothing, the row says so. Prices are shown in the currency the vendor publishes; no conversion is applied, because a converted price is a price nobody quoted.

Two of those vendors publish a full ladder rather than a single figure, which is where the upper bound of this category becomes visible. Tai TMS prints Growth 995 $/month (2 staff logins, 10 client logins, 200 included shipments), Premium 2,465 $/month (6 staff logins, 600 shipments), Premium+ 4,595 $/month (12 staff logins, 1,200 shipments) and Pro 7,925 $/month (25 staff logins, 2,500 shipments), with Enterprise on request — source tai-software.com/pricing. Cargoson prints Basic 199 €/month annual (249 € monthly, 2 users, 100 shipments), Standard 399 €/month annual (499 € monthly, 5 users, 1,000 shipments), Advanced 599 €/month annual (749 € monthly, 10 users, 3,000 shipments) and Enterprise from 1,000 €/month annual — source cargoson.com/en/pricing. Those two ladders are where the 749 € and 7,925 $ figures quoted elsewhere in this guide come from.

Publishing nothing at all, as captured: Transporeon, Alpega TMS, Descartes, Magaya, Dashdoc, Akanea, Alvys, Cargofive, Wisor.ai, TIMOCOM, Teleroute, Trans.eu, Wtransnet and ShipVista. Several state a philosophy without a figure — Alvys describes "load-based" pricing with "no sneaky fees", Teleroute describes "monthly packages, with a fixed fee and no implementation cost" — but no amount appears on either site.

Two practical consequences. First, opacity is the category norm, so a vendor asking for a discovery call before naming a price is behaving normally, not hiding something exceptional. Second, you cannot build a shortlist by price alone, because most of the market refuses to be on the axis. Ask every unpriced vendor for a written figure with the capacity limits attached, and re-verify every number in this table against the vendor's own page before you rely on it — pricing pages change without notice.

This is the one comparison a brokerage can do arithmetically, without a demo. Take the published per-seat rates and multiply.

The per-user columns use AscendTMS's three published rates. The flat column uses Cargavo Growth, which includes 10 team members. Currencies are not converted; read each column on its own terms. What the table shows regardless of currency is the shape: a per-seat curve is a straight line through the origin, a flat plan is a horizontal line that steps only when you change plan.

The operational consequence is subtler than the money. Under per-seat pricing, brokerages ration logins. The night dispatcher shares an account, the accountant looks over someone's shoulder, the new hire waits until month end. Every one of those workarounds destroys the audit trail — you can no longer tell who quoted Q-2026-0148 at what margin. Under a flat plan, giving everyone their own login costs nothing, so the record stays intact.

Where per-seat pricing genuinely wins: a one-person brokerage. One seat at 69 $ per month beats most flat plans, and if you expect to stay at one seat, buy accordingly. The crossover arrives with the second or third hire, which for most brokerages is a matter of quarters, and a mid-contract migration costs far more than the difference. Price the team you will have in eighteen months, not the team you have today.

The advertised price is the part the vendor controls. The rest is the part the vendor scopes after you commit. Send this list, verbatim, to every vendor on your shortlist and ask for figures in writing.

1. Ask what the one-off implementation or setup fee is, in the currency of the contract.
2. Ask who loads the carrier rate sheets, how many are included, and what an extra grid costs.
3. Ask how many training days are included and what a further day costs per person.
4. Ask the price of each carrier, EDI or load-board connection, and whether it recurs annually.
5. Ask what historical data migration costs and what format the export must be in.
6. Ask how many customer or client logins the plan includes and the price of the next one.
7. Ask the per-unit overage charge once you exceed the plan's shipment or quote allowance.
8. Ask the minimum contract term, the notice period, and the renewal price increase cap.

Item 4 is the one that most often doubles a budget, and it is worth noting that it is not universal. Tai TMS publishes "Direct carrier and load-board integrations are built in. No per-connection fees" — a vendor that includes connectivity says so plainly, so silence on the question is informative. The deeper point for a broker pricing off negotiated tariffs is that connections may be a cost you do not need at all: see API vs EDI vs rate grid integration for when each is actually required.

Items 6 and 7 are where flat plans stop being flat. Tai's Growth plan includes 200 shipments; Cargoson's Basic plan includes 100 shipments per month for 2 users. Neither is a criticism — metered capacity is a legitimate model — but a broker doing 300 shipments a month is not on a 995 $ plan, they are on the plan above it. Compute your bill at your real volume, then at 150 % of it.

Cargavo's answer to this list is short and published: no setup fee, self-service grid build on every plan, assisted onboarding included from Growth upward, monthly cancellation, and a 14-day free trial with no credit card. The full capacity limits are on the pricing page.

Use one formula and fill it for every shortlisted vendor: year one = (monthly price × 12) + setup + training + connectors + migration + expected overage. Here are two vendors priced with it. Vendor A is a flat self-service plan; Vendor B is a constructed example built to show how ordinary, individually reasonable fees compound. The Vendor B figures are illustrative, not quoted from any company.

Vendor B's sticker price is 1.67× Vendor A's. Its first-year cost is 5.0× — and its effective monthly rate is 2.99× what its own pricing page advertises. Year two narrows the gap to 2,988 € against 1,788 €, which is exactly why vendors with large setup fees emphasise the three-year view. Run both horizons before deciding.

Then convert the winner into a unit cost you can defend internally. A brokerage issuing 400 quotes and 120 shipments a month on Cargavo Growth at 149 € pays 0.37 € per quote and 1.24 € per shipment. Compare that against the gross margin you make on one average shipment — if you are unsure how to state that figure correctly, the distinction between margin and markup is in the markup vs margin definition. A tool costing about one euro per shipment is not a budget decision; it is a rounding error against a single load's margin, which is why the model choice in the previous sections matters more than the headline price.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires of roughly 2 to 25 people. Plans are capacity-based, so the price changes when your volume changes, not when you hire.

Every plan includes the same pricing engine — the four grid models weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket and hybrid_weight, taxable weight with an LDM floor and a configurable volumetric ratio, configurable rounding, indexed fuel surcharge and options such as tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance and timed delivery. Margins are applied server-side, as a percentage using p/(1-m) or as an absolute amount, per customer, per grid or per bracket, and the buy price and margin are never sent to the customer. Every plan also includes the branded customer portal, gridless quote requests for lanes no tariff covers, and the quote-to-shipment chain from Q-YYYY-NNNN to S-YYYY-NNNN. The interface runs in English, French, Spanish and German, and billing supports EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD and PLN. Growth adds assisted onboarding, where the Cargavo team rebuilds your grids for you; Scale adds a white-label portal and dedicated support. If you want to check a loading-metre figure before modelling a bracket table, the LDM calculator is free and needs no account.

What Cargavo is not, because it changes the cost comparison: it ships no carrier API or EDI connectivity — carriers are onboarded by rebuilding their existing Excel or CSV rate sheet. It is not a load board or freight exchange, not a fleet management or dispatch system, not a tendering marketplace, and not accounting software. If your requirement list includes live load-board rates or EDI status messages, a platform in the third price band is the honest answer, and you should budget accordingly.