Carrier email automation, ranked along the keel.
A typical posted load pulls ~40 carrier replies. Reading them is an hour of work before you have any idea who to call back. Keelway reads every reply, pulls the offered rate, scores the trust signal from FMCSA + email metadata, and lines up the top five along a single visual keel. You decide. Keelway handles the triage.
The actual problem with carrier email
Freight brokers do not have a sourcing problem. The inbox proves it — 40 carriers respond to a standard dry-van load within two hours of posting. What brokers have is a triage problem. Four of those 40 are genuine, licensed, well-priced carriers you would happily book. Three are double-brokers. Six are out-of-authority. The rest are noise — old relationships, poorly-priced dispatchers, and bots.
Finding the four good offers inside the 40 is the expensive part of the job, and it is the part no existing tool does well. Load boards deliver volume, not judgment. TMSs track outcomes, not signals. Voice-AI tools (Parade CoDriver, Happy Robot) handle the outbound leg but leave the inbound reply stream to a human. Keelway exists to close that gap.
What Keelway does on every carrier email
Pull the rate out of the thread
Trust score against FMCSA
Top five along the keel
Catch double-brokers and domain spoofs
Why Gmail-native matters
Most freight-broker tools assume you will live inside their UI. You will not. Brokers live in Gmail. Every workflow that tries to pull brokers out of Gmail loses to the workflow that meets them there. Keelway connects to Gmail via Google OAuth, labels carrier emails as it triages them, and surfaces the ranked list in a side panel + a web dashboard. The broker's reply-all muscle memory does not change.
That's the same reason our Tai TMS integration does not try to replace Tai's order-entry screens — it just writes the accepted carrier + rate back once you've confirmed.
How Keelway compares to other broker AI
There are a handful of freight-broker AI tools on the market. They solve different slices:
- Parade.ai (CoDriver): outbound voice calls to carriers, capacity management dashboard. Does not triage email replies or produce per-load trust scores. Parade is closer to a digital BDR than a triage layer.
- Highway: carrier identity verification at onboarding. Highway owns the "know your carrier" category but does not read email or surface per-load rates.
- Greenscreens (now Triumph Intelligence): rate intelligence for enterprise brokers. Excellent for shipper-negotiation benchmarks. Does not touch the inbox.
- Drumkit: inbox automation — the closest adjacent product. Drumkit does not surface trust scoring on a per-email basis and does not publish a load-aware ranking.
- Keelway: inbox-native, per-load ranking, FMCSA trust scoring, rate extraction. The triage layer the other four tools assume somebody else will do.
If you are specifically evaluating Parade for your brokerage, see our Parade alternative page.
What deploying Keelway looks like
- Week 1 — Connect. Google OAuth into the broker inbox. One label gets created (
Keelway/triaged). We start reading new carrier replies within the hour. - Week 2 — Calibrate. We watch which quotes you accept, counter, or decline and tune the ranking weights to your actual brokerage. A reefer broker and a flatbed broker should not see the same top five for a given load — and won't.
- Week 3 — TMS write-back. Accepted carriers and rates flow back into your TMS (Tai, McLeod, Aljex day one). No double entry.
- Week 4 — Fraud guardrails tune. Your first weeks of flagged emails get labeled so Keelway's double-brokering detector learns the shape of your book. Typical brokerage sees 3–7% of inbound carriers flagged as fraud-adjacent after tuning.
Pricing posture
Per-broker seat, no per-email charges, no long-term commit. Carriers do not get charged — it is a broker-side tool. We publish pricing on the landing page and share firm numbers in the first demo call. There is no enterprise-only pricing wall; small brokerages are our ICP.
Frequently asked questions
What does Keelway actually do with my carrier emails?+
Keelway watches your load-posting inbox. When a carrier replies to a posted load, Keelway extracts the offered rate, verifies the MC/DOT against FMCSA, scores the trust signal, and ranks the reply against the other 40-odd carriers responding to the same load. You see the top five ordered by trust × rate — no reading threads, no copy/pasting rates into a sheet.
Is Keelway a separate inbox or does it live in Gmail?+
It lives in Gmail. Keelway connects via Google OAuth, labels carrier emails as it triages them, and surfaces the ranked list in a side panel and a web dashboard. Your reply-all flow does not change.
How is this different from Parade or Drumkit?+
Parade is mostly voice (CoDriver) and capacity management. Drumkit automates inbox actions but does not surface a per-load trust score or rate percentile. Keelway is specifically carrier-email triage with price extraction and trust scoring as first-class outputs. See our Parade comparison.
How accurate is the rate extraction?+
On real broker inboxes we measure >95% extraction accuracy for numeric offers when carriers quote a number in the body of the email. Carriers who respond with a range get both endpoints captured. Carriers who say 'call me' are flagged as no-rate and dropped below quoted offers.
What signals feed the trust score?+
FMCSA operating authority status, insurance on file, safety rating, out-of-service history, crash counts, and domain-level email signals (does the sender's domain match the carrier's registered contact?). We do not share per-carrier scoring rules publicly because bad actors optimize against them.
Which TMSs does Keelway integrate with?+
Gmail on day one, then Tai TMS, McLeod, and Aljex. We push load context into Keelway so ranking is load-aware, and we can write the accepted carrier + rate back into the TMS. If your TMS is not listed, Keelway still works standalone against Gmail.