I joined a freight forwarding platform as a product engineer three years ago.
The world has changed enormously since then. The freight tech market, not so much.
The Three Systems That Run Freight Forwarding
Traditionally, the digital tools that actually affect forwarders fall into three categories.
Operational systems — FMS, TMS, WMS — covering everything from B/L and AWB issuance to schedule management, settlement, and EDI. Visibility and tracking services — container and vessel location sharing, integrated data platforms. And digital freight marketplaces — rate quoting, online booking.
That distinction is blurring now.
As AI lowers the barrier to product development, players are emerging that combine all three. Features that used to differentiate a handful of companies are becoming table stakes. “Using technology to transform logistics” is starting to mean, in practice, being a slightly more tech-capable forwarder.
The gap is closing. The question is what comes next.
Why Freight Rates Stay Hidden
This is the structural problem nobody in freight tech talks about directly.
Forwarders hold an enormous information advantage over shippers. They know the real rates, the vessel conditions, the terminal congestion, the surcharge structures. Shippers don’t. That asymmetry generates what economists call an “information rent” — extra margin that exists not because of better service, but because of opacity.
Ambiguity is a competitive advantage in this market.
So what happens if everyone publishes their rates?
In theory, it forces competition on actual service quality rather than information control. Good forwarders earn a legitimate premium. Shippers make rational decisions. The market gets better.
In practice, no one moves first. If every other forwarder publishes their rates but you don’t, you get to see their cards while keeping yours hidden. Non-disclosure is always the individually rational choice. So the market stays opaque, and the structural problem persists.
This is a prisoner’s dilemma. You can’t solve it by asking forwarders to be more transparent. The incentives don’t support it.
How Freightos Worked Around It
The most instructive case study here is Freightos.
They didn’t ask forwarders to publish their rates. They built a back-office rate management tool — WebCargo — that forwarders actually wanted to use for their own operations. Quote management, revenue tracking, schedule coordination. Useful on its own.
Then they made it possible, not mandatory, to publish rates to their marketplace. Forwarders who opted in got a new sales channel. The transparency was a side effect of the utility, not the ask.
It’s a clean solution to the incentive problem. Give people something they want. Then make the behavior you need an option within it.
Worth noting: WebCargo started in air cargo, where digitization runs ahead of ocean freight. The ocean product launched properly in the second half of 2025. Applying this model to ocean freight — with its higher volumes, more complex rate structures, and very different regional dynamics — isn’t straightforward.
What Forwarders Actually Want From Technology
The answer depends heavily on company size.
Small forwarders — ten people or fewer — care most about replacing manual work. With limited headcount, cutting repetitive tasks is directly tied to survival and margin. Faster quoting, schedule checking, settlement processing. Tools that make daily operations less painful.
Mid-sized forwarders have a different problem. As their customer base grows, they face price pressure while trying to retain existing clients and control costs. They need structured account management and data dashboards that track what’s actually happening in the business.
Larger forwarders with IT budgets are investing in changing how they sell and operate. Their quantitative data — revenue, margins, schedules — is reasonably well managed. What isn’t captured is everything else. Rate negotiation context. How to handle a difficult shipper. How a claim was resolved three months ago. That information lives in emails, messaging apps, call logs, and people’s heads.
Existing ERP and FMS systems don’t solve this. It’s one of the clearest openings for LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation in this space — not replacing the operational system, but capturing the unstructured knowledge that sits outside it.
The Question We Haven’t Answered
Should a freight tech platform go deeper on workflow tools, or deeper on data services? Build a better back-office, or build a better market intelligence layer?
I don’t have a clean answer. The honest position is that both matter, resources are finite, and the choice has real consequences either way.
What’s clear is this: the structural problems in freight — opacity, fragmentation, manual work — aren’t going away on their own. Technology can create conditions where better behavior is easier. It can’t force it.
The market rewards the platforms that understand that distinction.
A Note on Engineering Philosophy
Working in freight tech for three years has reinforced something I believed going in.
Impressive technology that doesn’t solve a real user problem is just impressive technology. The best engineering serves user value, not the other way around.
That belief is easy to hold. It’s harder to act on when you’re under pressure to ship, when the market is moving, when every competitor is announcing something new.
But I keep coming back to it. Because the freight forwarders who will still be using your product in five years aren’t the ones you impressed with the demo. They’re the ones for whom the tool actually made their day easier.
That’s the standard worth building toward.