Resources

Guides for modern freight brokers

Cargavo publishes free, practical resources for freight brokers and forwarders: 5 guide categories, a road-freight glossary, pricing calculators and TMS comparisons. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers that turns your own carrier rate grids into instant buy and sell prices, from 49 €/month with a 14-day trial.

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What topics do these freight broker guides cover?

Five topics, each with its own head guide: quoting automation, rate grids and pricing, carriers and onboarding, choosing a TMS, and the customer portal. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, so every category maps to something the software actually does — no theory, no vendor-neutral filler.

Start here

Which guide should a freight broker read first?

Start with the four pillar guides: digital freight quoting, carrier rate grid management, carrier integration without an API, and choosing a TMS as a small brokerage. Each one is a complete answer on its own, and each links down to the shorter guides in its category.

  1. Pillar guide

    Digital Freight Quoting: The Complete Guide to Automating Freight Quote Requests

    Digital freight quoting replaces manual price lookups — Excel tabs, carrier emails, mental math — with software that turns your carrier rate grids into instant, margin-safe quotes. You (or your customer, through a self-service portal) enter origin, destination and shipment details; the software compares every configured carrier and returns a sell price in seconds, with your margin applied automatically on the server. A tool like Cargavo supports the four rate grid models used in road freight — weight-zone, per-pallet, linear-meter (LDM/MPL) brackets and hybrid — and starts at €49 per month, so a two-person brokerage can quote as fast as a large 3PL. This guide explains what digital quoting is, why speed wins loads, and how to digitize your quoting process step by step.

    11 min read Read the guide

  2. Pillar guide

    Carrier Rate Grid Management: How to Digitize and Automate Freight Tariffs

    Carrier rate grid management means converting the tariff sheets your carriers send you — usually Excel files — into structured pricing data, so every quote is computed instead of looked up by hand. Almost every road freight tariff fits one of four grid models: weight-zone (a rate per 100 kg by zone), per-pallet, linear-meter (LDM/MPL) brackets, or hybrid (a flat fee below a weight threshold, per-100 kg rates above it). A TMS like Cargavo stores grids in exactly those four structures, applies your margin per customer, per grid or per bracket on the server, and returns a margin-safe sell price in seconds — while buy rates and margins stay invisible to your customers. Plans start at €49/month, so this is no longer enterprise-only technology.

    9 min read Read the guide

  3. Pillar guide

    Carrier Integration for Freight Brokers: How to Onboard Any Carrier Into Your TMS

    To integrate a carrier into a TMS you have three options: a real-time API connection, an EDI message exchange, or a rate grid built from the carrier’s tariff. APIs and EDI only work with large carriers that run their own IT — most regional road carriers offer neither. That is why grid-based integration is the standard for freight brokers: you take the carrier’s existing Excel or CSV rate sheet, enter it as a structured grid (weight-zone, per-pallet, linear-meter or hybrid), and the carrier becomes instantly quotable. In Cargavo this takes about an hour per carrier, needs nothing from the carrier’s side, and is included in every plan from €49 per month.

    12 min read Read the guide

  4. Pillar guide

    TMS for Small Freight Brokers: The Complete Buyer’s Guide

    The best TMS for a small freight brokerage (roughly 2–25 people) is not the platform with the most modules — it is the one you can set up yourself in days, at a public monthly price. Enterprise systems like Alpega TMS or Transporeon are powerful, but they are built for shippers and large 3PLs: custom quotes, yearly contracts, implementations measured in months. A right-sized broker TMS covers five things in one subscription: carrier rate grids, instant margin-safe quoting, a branded customer portal, shipment tracking and messaging. Cargavo does exactly that, from €49 per month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card.

    10 min read Read the guide

By format

What other free resources does Cargavo publish?

Three more sections, free and open: a glossary of road-freight terms as the pricing engine implements them, calculators for taxable weight, linear metres and margin, and comparison pages built only from publicly verifiable competitor facts. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers; none of these pages needs an account.

What Cargavo is and what it is not

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, not a marketplace. It has no carrier API and no EDI connection: it prices from the Excel or CSV rate sheets you already hold. Stating this plainly matters more than a feature list — it tells you in one line whether the rest is relevant.

What Cargavo is

  • Multi-tenant TMS for freight brokers
  • Pricing engine on 4 grid models
  • Customer portal (white-label on Scale)
  • 4 languages · 7 currencies from Growth
  • 49 € / 149 € / 399 € per month

What Cargavo is not

  • No carrier API, no EDI
  • Not a freight exchange or load board
  • Not a fleet management system
  • Not a tendering marketplace
  • Not an accounting package

All guides

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