Years of pricing judgement, answered in about a minute.
Direct Expedite quoted expedited freight by email. JEV Digital turned the pricing knowledge behind those emails into a rate engine — then into an API, and then into a platform other carriers can run.
Two questions, and whoever answers first .
In expedited freight a shipper contacts several carriers at once, and they are asking the same two things every time.
Can you handle this shipment — and what will it cost? Whoever comes back with a credible answer soonest is usually the one who gets the load.
At Direct Expedite that answer travelled by email. Details in, someone reads them, checks availability, works out a price, writes back. Then the shipper lines the responses up and picks one.
Which raised the question the whole project came from: the pricing judgement being applied to each of those emails was consistent enough to describe. Could it be written down as software?
A rate is not mileage times a number .
If it were, this would have been a spreadsheet. An expedited rate moves with the shipment, the equipment, the lane and the day it happens to be.
Direct Expedite already knew how each of these moved a price. The hard part was never the arithmetic — it was that the knowledge lived with experienced people rather than anywhere a system could reach.
Four steps in front, a pricing engine behind .
The customer answers four screens. Everything that makes the number defensible happens where they never see it.
The same request is priced for every equipment type the shipment could move on — Sprinter through Dry Van, solo or team — so the shipper compares their own options rather than asking for another quote.
Each rate comes back itemised: base total, option cost, and the adjustments that produced the difference, including the fuel surcharge at the price it was actually calculated on.
The pricing engine
The client's methodology, expressed as rules the software applies the same way every time. This is the part that had only ever existed as experience.
Live inputs
A static table would have been stale within a week. The dashed rows are other people's services, kept on the far side of the engine so any one of them can be replaced.
Fuel is the clearest case. Quoting on a fixed figure means being wrong in one direction or the other every week; quoting on the current price at those locations means the surcharge on the quote is the surcharge on the load.
It stopped being one carrier's website feature .
The engine outgrew the page it was built for — first into an admin console the business runs itself, then into an API, then into a platform that is not tied to the original brand.
Speed
Accuracy
Consistency
The business kept the keys.
Automating the quote is only half of it. If every rate change needed a developer, the engine would have been out of date and expensive at the same time.
So the admin console came with it: authorized staff manage the variables the pricing runs on, and the dashboard shows quote volume and average quoted cost without anyone pulling a report.
From a feature to a product.
Once the rates were callable, the engine was no longer limited to people visiting one carrier's site. At one point roughly eight companies were pulling Direct Expedite rates through a 7LFreight integration, generating in the region of 200 quotes a day.
The white-label version separates the technology from the brand it was built for, which is what makes the same engine capable of running for another transportation business.
The valuable part was never the web form. It was understanding how an experienced carrier decided what a load was worth, and writing that down in a way software could repeat.
Transportation softwareIf that sounded like your situation.
Have a process that takes too much time?
Tell us what your team works out by hand today. If it can be written down, it can usually be automated.