AI dispatch software · Keyboard-native · Owner-operator welcome

Run 30 trucks. Manage your crew. Keyboard-only.

Keelway is dispatch software for the person actually moving loads at 6:14 a.m. — not the IT director writing the RFP. Drivers, trucks, trailers, HOS, lane templates, and your back-office crew live on one surface. Owner-operators run the same product as 30-truck dispatchers, in less ceremony. No modal soup. No separate HR tool. No rip-and-replace.

Book dispatcher demo See both modes

~6 hrs

per-dispatcher day eliminated on data entry

Keelway carrier cohort, Q1 2026

~58 min

avg. time per load in legacy workflows

Keelway estimate — manual triage baseline

>95%

rate & lane extraction accuracy from inbound emails

Keelway production data, 2026

Two audiences. Same product. Different mode.

The enterprise TMS market is built for 200+ truck fleets. Spreadsheets and group texts work until about 10 trucks. Everyone between those two poles — 1 truck up to 100 — runs a different shape of the same business. Keelway is built for that middle.

Dispatchers running 20–30 trucks. You manage drivers, power units, trailer pool, HOS, the dispatch calendar — and your own back-office crew of settlement clerks, A/R, and safety. You need one identity model and one permissions model across both sides. You don't need a separate HR tool.
Owner-operators running 1–5 trucks. You're the dispatcher, the driver, and the bookkeeper. Sometimes all in the same hour. Same product, less ceremony — fewer rows on the dashboard, the same lane templates, the same keyboard paths.

The difference is mode, not pricing tier. Nothing is gated behind a fleet-size minimum.

What you actually do all day

Dispatch happens in 15-second decisions, not in deck reviews. Every path is a keystroke.

Assign

Slot driver to truck to load — one row

Pull up Truck 207, slot R. Estrada as the driver, drop the Newark NJ → Miami FL run on the calendar. HOS clock shows 8h 14m drive remaining, pre-trip is green, trailer 4421 is hooked. One keystroke confirms, the driver app pings within the second.

HOS

Hours-of-service before the assignment

Drive remaining, on-duty remaining, 70-hour clock — live on every driver row, pulled from Samsara, Motive, Geotab, Omnitracs, or Verizon Connect. Hard violations are blocked at assignment time. Soft margins go amber, not red.

Trucks

Every power unit, on one screen

Hover Truck 207 — see its driver, last load, current location, next available time, fuel-card balance, plate expiration, last DOT inspection. Trailer pool sits in the same view. The 30 units fit in one operational dashboard, not five tabs.

Lanes

Recurring runs as templates

Build the lane once — shipper, equipment, accessorials, appointment windows, expected rate band. Every time it repeats, Keelway pre-fills the load and proposes the most likely truck. Owner-op on 2 dedicated lanes uses the same template engine as a dispatcher on 18 weekly lanes.

Crew

Your office staff is in the product

Dispatcher, settlement, A/R, safety — each gets a role with scoped permissions. Settlement sees pay sheets, not the dispatch board. Safety sees DQ files and inspections, not the A/R aging. One audit log per person. No bolt-on HR or compliance tool.

Broker-out

Over-capacity loads, same app

Hybrid carrier-brokers flip an over-capacity load into a broker-out queue with one keystroke. Carrier emails, FMCSA trust scoring, rate extraction, rate confirmations — all inside Keelway. You stop running two products.

A real assignment, top to bottom

A Newark NJ → Miami FL run comes in on a dedicated lane. The lane template pre-fills: shipper, equipment (53ft van), expected rate ($3,200), appointment window. Keelway proposes Truck 207 — driver R. Estrada, HOS 8h 14m drive remaining, currently in Bridgewater NJ on PM-delivery. Pre-trip is clean. Trailer 4421 sits empty at the yard. One keystroke confirms the assignment. Estrada gets the load in the driver app, BOL template attached, pre-trip checklist armed for the morning pickup. The settlement clerk sees the run land in this week's pay sheet under Estrada's rate. The A/R clerk sees the invoice scheduled to fire on POD. The dispatcher moves on to the next row.

No one re-typed anything. The driver app, the operational dashboard, the settlement sheet, and the A/R queue are reading off the same record.

Your crew, scoped — not bolted on

Most fleet apps treat your back-office staff as an afterthought. A dispatcher seat costs $X. Settlement runs in QuickBooks. A/R lives in a spreadsheet. Safety happens in a folder labeled "Compliance 2026" on someone's desktop. Keelway collapses that. The four functions below run inside the same product, with role-scoped permissions:

Dispatcher — full read/write on dispatch calendar, load management, and driver management.
Settlement clerk — pay sheets, driver settlements, deductions, advances, ACH runs. No dispatch board access by default.
A/R clerk — invoicing, aging, factoring handoff, remittance matching. No HR data, no driver pay.
Safety / compliance — DQ files, inspections, DOT compliance, drug-and-alcohol clearinghouse, accident records. No financial surface.

Where Keelway fits the dispatch software market

Enterprise TMS (McLeod LoadMaster, MercuryGate, TMW Suite). Built for 200+ truck fleets with a dedicated IT team and a six-month implementation. Powerful, expensive, slow to change. Wrong fit for 30 trucks, very wrong fit for an owner-operator.
Spreadsheets + group texts. Works until ~10 trucks. Falls over the moment you add a back-office crew, a second dispatcher, or HOS oversight. Common starting point — not a destination.
Point-solution dispatcher apps. Most modern dispatch apps are siloed from settlement, A/R, and safety. You re-key everything into QuickBooks and a folder. That's the 6-hour-a-day data-entry tax Keelway eliminates.
Keelway. One keyboard-native surface for 1 to 100 trucks, with the back-office crew first-class, the broker-out queue inside the app, and ELD integrations built in.

The numbers above are deliberately not comparative — we don't fake competitor metrics on a marketing page. The fit difference is structural, not a percentage.

The broker-out tab — for hybrid carrier-brokers

A growing share of asset carriers also broker out over-capacity loads. Keelway treats this as one product, not two. The same dispatch board surfaces the broker-out queue. The same Keelway carrier-email triage that the brokers page covers in detail runs on your inbound carrier replies — rate extraction, FMCSA trust scoring, per-load ranking. The rate confirmation generates from the same product that books your own trucks. One identity, one audit log, one tax return.

Owner-operator mode — same product, less ceremony

An owner-operator running 1 truck and 2 dedicated lanes does not need 30 rows of dashboard. Owner-op mode collapses the surface: one truck row, the active load, the next load, this week's settlement, the upcoming invoice, the HOS clock. The lane template engine works the same. The driver app works the same — except the driver and the dispatcher are the same person.

The intent: you scale from 1 truck to 5 to 15 to 30 without switching products. The mode shifts. The data and the muscle memory don't.

Connects to the ELD you already run

Samsara, Motive (formerly KeepTruckin), Geotab, Omnitracs, Verizon Connect. OAuth in, HOS clocks and GPS pings flow into the operational dashboard within minutes. We don't require you to replace the ELD. We don't sell an ELD.

What setup actually looks like

Hour 1 — Drivers and trucks loaded. CSV upload or manual entry. Owner-operators usually skip the CSV — 1 truck and 1 driver is two minutes.
Hour 2 — ELD connected. OAuth to Samsara, Motive, Geotab, Omnitracs, or Verizon Connect. HOS clocks start populating immediately.
Day 1 — Lane templates built. Walk your recurring dedicated lanes into the template engine. Most fleets have 6–18 templates worth building.
Day 2–3 — Crew added. Settlement, A/R, safety users get invited with scoped roles. First payroll run is end of this week, not next month.
Day 5–7 — Live. The full board is running. Driver app is on every driver's phone. The settlement clerk stopped opening QuickBooks.

Pricing posture

Per active truck, not per seat. The dispatcher, the settlement clerk, the A/R clerk, the safety officer, and the driver all sit on the same truck-fee. Owner-operator (1 truck) is the floor. The curve flattens past 5 trucks. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Does Keelway work for a 5-truck fleet — or only mid-size carriers?+

Both. The same product runs a 30-truck dispatcher and a 3-truck owner-operator. The difference is mode, not pricing tier. A small fleet uses fewer screens — usually the operational dashboard, lane templates, and settlement. A 30-truck dispatcher uses the whole surface. Nothing is gated behind a fleet-size minimum.

I'm an owner-operator. Is the pricing built for me?+

Yes. Owner-operators pay per active truck, not per seat. If you're a 1-truck operator who also does your own books and dispatch, you pay one truck-fee, not a dispatcher seat + a back-office seat + a driver seat. The cap structure flattens past 5 trucks. See the pricing page for the full curve.

How does this integrate with ELDs and HOS?+

Keelway pulls hours-of-service status from Samsara, Motive (formerly KeepTruckin), Geotab, Omnitracs, and Verizon Connect. The dispatch calendar shows live HOS clocks per driver — drive remaining, on-duty remaining, 70-hr remaining — next to the truck assignment row. Hard violations are blocked from assignment; soft margins are flagged in amber.

Is there a driver app?+

Yes. Drivers get a lightweight iOS and Android app for load assignment, BOL/POD capture, pre-trip inspections, fuel receipts, and chat with dispatch. The app is intentionally small — no in-app forums, no gamification, no telemetry your driver didn't opt into.

We're a hybrid — we own trucks AND broker over-capacity loads. Does that work?+

That's the whole point. When a load comes in and you don't have an asset to cover it, one keystroke flips it into a broker-out queue. Carrier emails, FMCSA trust scoring, rate-extraction, and TMS write-back all run in the same app. You stop juggling a dispatch tool and a broker tool. See the brokers page for the full broker-side detail.

What about back-office staff — settlement clerks, A/R, safety?+

Your office crew lives in the same product as your drivers. Roles and permissions are first-class — a settlement clerk sees pay sheets and remittance, not the dispatch board; safety sees DQ files and inspections, not the A/R aging. One identity per person, one audit log, no separate HR or compliance bolt-on.

Can lane templates handle dedicated lanes that repeat weekly?+

Yes — that's the cleanest use case. Build the lane once (shipper, equipment, accessorials, appt windows, expected rate band). When the load drops in, Keelway pre-fills the record and slots the most likely truck. Owner-operators running 2 dedicated lanes use the exact same template engine as a 30-truck dispatcher running 18 weekly lanes.

How long does setup take?+

A 5-truck owner-operator is live in an afternoon — drivers added, trucks loaded, ELD connected via OAuth. A 30-truck dispatcher with a back-office crew is typically live in 5–7 business days: drivers and trucks loaded from a CSV, ELD connection, settlement rules captured, permissions assigned to the crew. No professional-services contract required.

Does Keelway replace our TMS?+

If you don't have one, Keelway is your TMS. If you already run McLeod, TMW, Aljex, or Tai for the brokerage side, Keelway runs the dispatch side and writes back to your TMS where it makes sense. We don't force a rip-and-replace; the integration page lists the pre-built connectors.

What's actually different from the enterprise TMS market?+

Enterprise TMS products (McLeod LoadMaster, MercuryGate, TMW Suite) are built for 200+ truck fleets with a full IT team and a 6-month implementation. Spreadsheets + text messages work until ~10 trucks. Keelway is the missing middle — built for 1 to 100 trucks, keyboard-native, no implementation team, owner-operators welcome.

One product · 1 truck to 100 · Crew included