Three desk sizes, and the number that changes for each.
We are not going to show you a logo wall we have not earned. What we can show you is the arithmetic: what the product costs, how much inbound it absorbs, and how much of your existing stack it makes you replace — at a two-broker shop, at a fifteen-broker shop, and at a multi-desk 3PL. Find the shape that looks like yours.
Find your desk size
Each card leads with the figure that matters most at that shape. Every one of them is a product fact — a published price, a published spec, or an operating figure — not a claimed customer outcome.
The bill does not move when you hire.
A two-person brokerage and a five-person brokerage pay the same thing, because the plan is flat and users are unlimited. Month-to-month, no setup fee, no per-feature upsell inside the core plan. That matters most at this size, where the alternative is a per-seat TMS whose price steps up on your fourth hire.
What you actually get for it: the TMS and the AI carrier-email triage in one plan. AI reads carrier and customer email and creates the load, quote, dispatch, and invoice; a human approves. The 30-day trial is the full product, so this is measurable on your own loads before a dollar moves. See pricing and Keelway TMS.
The inbound nobody has to open.
One posted load draws roughly forty carrier replies. At twenty posted loads a day that is about eight hundred emails, each of which needs a rate pulled out of it and an MC number checked before it means anything. This is the specific work Keelway absorbs: extract the rate, run the FMCSA check, score the carrier, rank the replies, and hand the broker the short list.
The shape at this size is usually AscendTMS, Aljex, a shared spreadsheet, or no TMS at all, with brokers living in Gmail or Outlook. Keelway runs either way — as the inbox layer over what you have, or as the system of record itself. See carrier email automation and the cheapest broker stack.
The overlay pattern: your system of record stays.
At this size the TMS is not the thing you want to change. A nine-year McLeod deployment with custom EDI to your top shippers is not getting ripped out to try an AI feature, and no procurement cycle is going to approve it. So Keelway runs as an overlay: it pulls active load context from your TMS, does the triage and the trust scoring in the inbox brokers already use, and writes accepted bookings back through the native API.
Live integrations: McLeod LoadMaster, Aljex/Descartes, Tai, Turvo, and Revenova on Salesforce. The enterprise posture — dedicated tenant, SAML SSO, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs to your SIEM, 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits — is spelled out on the enterprise page and the security page.
Reefer, flatbed, hazmat, intermodal.
Trust scoring and ranking weights are tuned per mode rather than averaged. Reefer weighs insurance and temperature-violation history; hazmat weighs endorsements and route restrictions; flatbed weighs equipment verification; intermodal weighs chassis and demurrage exposure. See reefer or the verticals index.
- $799/mo, 12h, 99.9% — published product facts. The price is on /pricing, the stale-load threshold on the tracking board page, the SLA on /security.
- ~40 replies per posted load — Keelway operating data, 2026. It is a volume figure for what arrives, not a claim about what any brokerage saved.
- Headcount comparisons are illustrative — and the assumptions are shown wherever we run one. Example: five coordinators at $65,000 fully loaded is $325,000 a year, against $9,588 a year for Keelway billed month-to-month. Swap in your own loaded cost — that is the number that decides it, not ours.
- No metric on this page is attributed to a named customer — because none has approved one yet. The case studies below are labelled composite reference profiles on their own pages, and they say so in their first paragraph.
Reference deployments
These are composite reference profiles, not named customer results. They describe how a brokerage of each shape deploys Keelway — week 1, month 3, month 12 — and the figures below are the modelled outcomes stated in each profile. Read the profile before you quote the number.
Twelve-broker shop retires the spreadsheet →
The profile walks week 1 (Reply address issued, FMCSA backfill on the existing carrier book) through month 12, where the shared quote spreadsheet is gone and load volume has grown without a new hire.
Composite profile · modelled, not a named customer result
A mid-market 3PL keeps McLeod and adds the overlay →
Eight-week phased rollout, desk by desk, in shadow mode first. No McLeod customization touched, no EDI pipeline rebuilt, no broker asked to learn a new dashboard.
Composite profile · modelled, not a named customer result
Multi-brand rollup standardizes across McLeod, Aljex, and Tai →
Five acquired brands, three different systems of record, one Keelway tenant with SAML SSO via Entra ID, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs streaming to corporate Splunk. No brand migrated.
Composite profile · modelled, not a named customer result
Where Keelway is not the right fit
We are not the best tool for every shape. The honest list of where you should buy something else:
- Pure asset-based carriers — fleets with no brokerage operation. Truckbase and Tailwind TMS are calibrated for asset operations.
- Freight forwarders running primarily ocean and air with no domestic broker book. Magaya, CargoWise, and the Descartes forwarder modules fit better.
- Brokerages that have explicitly decided not to automate. If "every quote gets a human eye" is an irreducible business principle, Keelway will not feel right — the whole point of the product is that most of the forty replies do not get a human eye.
- Brokerages whose entire book is shipper-side voice relationships and where the carrier-email channel is negligible. A voice-first tool is the better buy; our own voice agent lives at /solutions/phone-call-ai but it is an add-on, not the core.
- Buyers who need a reference call before they will test. We are early enough that we cannot promise one on demand. If that is a hard requirement, we would rather tell you now than string you along.
How we handle references
Rather than a logo wall, we would rather you verify the product directly: the 30-day trial is the full product, running on your own inbox and your own loads. That is a stronger signal than a logo, and it is available today.
Where an early-customer brokerage has agreed to speak with a prospect, we will arrange a one-to-one reference call under mutual NDA. We will not commit to one before we have asked them, and we will not publish a name or a quote without written approval. When those approvals exist, they will show up on this page with a name attached.
Frequently asked questions
Who uses Keelway today?+
Do you publish a customer logo wall or testimonials?+
What is the smallest brokerage that gets value from Keelway?+
What is the largest brokerage you can serve?+
Does Keelway work for asset-based carriers or just brokers?+
Run it on your own inbox for 30 days.
Related
12 brokers, 900 loads/mo. Spreadsheet triage retired in three months. Composite reference profile.
85 brokers, 7,200 loads/mo. McLeod stays system of record; Keelway runs on top. Composite profile.
240 brokers across three different TMSs, unified in one tenant. Composite reference profile.
The disclosure that governs all three profiles, and how to ask for a named reference.