The shapes of brokerage we calibrate against.

Segment 1 — SMB freight brokerages

Shape: 5–25 brokers, 100–2,000 loads per month. Owner-operated or recently institutionalized. The TMS is AscendTMS, Aljex, an in-house spreadsheet, or no TMS at all. Brokers live in Gmail or Outlook. The inbox is the operating system; nobody is paying $50,000/year for McLeod.

Pain Keelway solves: a single broker sees 30–50 carrier replies on every posted load. Reading them, sanity-checking MC numbers in SAFER, copying rates into a sheet, and deciding who to call back is 45–60 minutes of work per load — and that is the part nobody outsourced or automated. Keelway compresses that to under five minutes per load, surfacing the top five carriers with trust score and rate inside Gmail.

Reference deployment: AscendTMS (free or $49/user) as system of record, Keelway AI ($1 per load) for inbox triage, DAT One for the load board, Truckstop ITS for backup capacity. Total monthly software cost for a 10-broker shop running 800 loads: ~$800 + AscendTMS seats. See the cheapest broker stack breakdown.

Alternative deployment: Keelway TMS ($997/month flat, unlimited users) as system of record + Keelway AI bundled. That collapses the stack to a single line item — common for SMB brokerages that have outgrown AscendTMS but not yet at the scale where Tai or Aljex pencils out. See Keelway TMS.

Segment 2 — Mid-market 3PLs

Shape: 25–200 brokers, 2,000–15,000 loads per month. Multiple teams (reefer desk, flatbed desk, intermodal desk, dedicated lanes). Existing TMS investment in Aljex/Descartes, Tai, Rose Rocket, Mercury Gate/Infios, or McLeod. Two-to-five-year contracts, dedicated CSM relationships, deep integration work already done.

Pain Keelway solves: the existing TMS is the system of record but does not read carrier emails, does not score per-reply trust, and does not surface ranked inquiries. Coordinators are still triaging by hand. Adding 5–10 coordinators to keep up with volume costs $997K–$800K / year fully loaded; Keelway covers the same load growth without the headcount.

Reference deployment: Keep the existing TMS as system of record. Run Keelway as an overlay — Gmail-native AI triage, FMCSA trust scoring, rate extraction — with accepted bookings writing back to the TMS via its native API (McLeod LoadMaster, Aljex/Descartes, Tai TMS, Turvo, Revenova on Salesforce). Zero floor disruption. Pricing is custom — modeled on load volume, seat count, and integration scope. See Keelway Enterprise.

Segment 3 — Enterprise multi-brand brokerages

Shape: 200+ brokers, 15,000+ loads per month. Often multi-brand (acquired several smaller brokerages and rolling them up). Mixed TMS estate — different brands on different systems mid-migration. Procurement, security, and finance functions operating at Fortune-1000 process maturity. SAML SSO is table stakes, audit logs are a requirement, signed MSA is the start of conversation.

Pain Keelway solves: the AI productivity question has reached the executive team, but the existing TMS estate cannot be replaced inside the current budget cycle. Procurement will not green-light another two-year rip-and-replace. The board wants measurable broker productivity gain in the current fiscal year.

Reference deployment: Dedicated tenant in a chosen AWS region. SAML SSO via Okta or Entra ID. SCIM provisioning. RBAC mapped to existing employee roles. Audit logs streaming to the customer's SIEM. AI overlay against whichever TMSs each brand runs — multi-TMS support inside a single Keelway tenant is a first-class capability. 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits. Named CSM, named SE, 24/7 incident channel.

Where Keelway is not the right fit

We are not the best tool for every shape. Honest, upfront list of where you should buy something else:

• Pure asset-based carriers (fleets without brokerage operations). Tools like Truckbase or Tailwind TMS are calibrated for asset operations.
• Freight forwarders running primarily ocean and air with no domestic broker book. Magaya, CargoWise, and Descartes forwarder modules fit better; Keelway has a broker focus.
• 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 35 of the 40 replies do not get a human eye.
• Brokerages whose entire book is shipper-side voice relationships and where the carrier-email channel is negligible. Voice-AI tools like Parade CoDriver are the better buy.

How we treat customer references

Most freight brokerages — particularly in SMB and mid-market — strongly prefer not to advertise their software stack to competitors. We respect that. Rather than a logo wall, we offer one-to-one reference calls between qualified prospects and current customers, scheduled after a mutual NDA. That is materially more useful to a serious buyer than a marketing logo, and it is the policy our existing customers asked us to keep.

If you are evaluating Keelway seriously, ask for a reference. We will set it up.