The cost question is the one most brokerage owners want answered before they take a demo. The honest answer is "it depends on the pricing model," because the AI freight platform category has split into three structurally different ways of charging — and they are not comparable on a per-month basis the way SaaS tools used to be.
The three pricing models
Model 1: Platform fee plus usage (per-seat, per-minute, per-token)
The default SaaS-style model. A flat monthly platform fee, plus metered charges for voice minutes, inference, or API calls. Common at most "AI for logistics" platforms today.
Why vendors like it: predictable revenue, scales with usage, looks familiar to a CFO.
Why it is a bad fit for broker work: the vendor gets paid whether the AI books anything or not. Margin discipline on the AI side is not anyone's problem. If the voice agent runs for 12 minutes and books nothing, you still pay for the 12 minutes.
For a 30-operator brokerage running this model, all-in costs typically land in the $5,000 to $15,000 per month range depending on voice intensity and integrations. That is the cost of running the platform — not a guarantee of any result on the other side.
Model 2: Per-load pricing
Vendor charges a fixed fee for every booked load.
Why it is better than Model 1: it ties the bill to actual freight moving. The vendor at least has to deliver bookings to bill.
Why it still is not ideal: a booked load is not necessarily a good booked load. The pricing does not punish a vendor for booking at a bad rate, missing a check call window, or losing a margin point in negotiation. The vendor is rewarded for volume, not for outcomes that matter to your P&L.
Model 3: Outcome-based pricing (per result)
The vendor gets paid only when a specific defined result happens. The result is locked in during onboarding and ties directly to the brokerage's P&L — examples: a qualified lead, a load booked above margin floor, a check call resolved without escalation, a fraud signal caught before payment.
Why this is the right model: vendor incentives are fully aligned with the brokerage's. If the AI does not move freight, the vendor does not get paid.
This is how Ten8 prices. No platform fee, no per-token fee, no per-seat fee, no per-minute fee, and no upfront cost. You pay when the AI delivers a result your team would have paid an operator to deliver. The result definition is specific to the workflow we deploy on — and it is documented before anything goes live, so both sides know what is being counted.
What "per result" looks like in practice
A worked example. Suppose Ten8 deploys to handle inbound carrier calls plus outbound coverage on one lane. During onboarding, we agree the priced results are:
- Qualified carrier added to rotation — carrier passes MC check, fraud screen, and an initial cold-call qualification.
- Load covered inside the defined rate parameters for that lane — at or below the rate floor/ceiling the brokerage sets per load.
- Fraud signal caught before payment release on a load.
Each result has a defined unit price. If Ten8 generates zero qualified carriers in a month, Ten8 bills zero. If Ten8 covers 200 loads above the margin floor, the bill is the unit price times 200. The brokerage knows in advance what each result costs and what it is worth to them. There is no surprise on either side.
The other thing this model does, which the platform-plus-usage model does not: it forces the vendor to actually be good at the workflow. A vendor billing per result has to make their AI work well enough to deliver results consistently, or they go out of business. A vendor billing per seat does not.
Hidden costs to ask about (regardless of model)
Vendors do not lie about pricing. They just do not volunteer the line items that show up later. Ask about:
- Onboarding — is it free, or is there a one-time fee in the $5,000–$25,000 range? Ten8 onboarding is included.
- Integration — most platforms include standard TMS and load board integrations; custom integrations can run $5,000–$30,000 one-time elsewhere.
- Number portability — if you eventually leave, do you keep the phone numbers used for outbound and inbound? Some vendors lock these.
- Recording and transcription storage — voice deployments generate audio. Some vendors charge for storage over a baseline.
- After-hours premium — a few platform-plus-usage vendors charge higher per-minute rates outside business hours.
- Annual escalators — multi-year contracts with platform-plus-usage models often have CPI-linked increases. Negotiate caps.
How to think about value under outcome pricing
Under outcome-based pricing, there isn't really an "investment to recoup" — you only pay when the AI delivers a defined result. So the question isn't "how long until payback?" — the question is "what is each result worth on our P&L, and how many of them are we leaving on the table today?"
Three lenses for that calculation.
1. Volume the team would otherwise need to hire for
You are growing volume but want to hold operator headcount flat. The AI absorbs the growth instead of you adding heads to keep up. Outcome pricing keeps the bill tied directly to the work actually delivered.
2. Margin and coverage gains
Your team is not short on headcount — they are short on coverage hours and consistency. The clearest version of this is what we saw at Fura Freight: inbound carrier calls went from 60% answered to 100%, and average response time went from 3 minutes to 3 seconds. (Full case study: ten8.ai/case-study/fura.)
That kind of coverage delta translates directly into loads you would have lost to a faster broker, and into margin on negotiations a tired operator at 5 p.m. would have left on the table. The pricing question becomes: what is a recovered load worth, and how many of them are you missing today?
3. After-hours coverage that the team couldn't sustainably staff
Most mid-market brokerages can't sustainably staff a 24/7 night desk. An AI Coworker covers the same window and never sleeps. The freight that used to die on Friday nights starts converting on Monday mornings.
Timelines
Two timelines matter to a CFO.
Time to live. From contract signature to the AI handling its first real interaction on production traffic. Ten8 runs this in about two weeks. Most platform-plus-usage vendors run 30–90 days.
Time to first results. Inside the first month. Fura saw measurable changes in week three. This is also the cleanest test of whether the deployment is real — if there are no results to count by day 30, something is broken.
What you should not do
Three patterns we see brokerage owners fall into.
Comparing platform fees only. Vendor A quotes $4,000 per month. Vendor B quotes $8,000 per month. Vendor A looks cheaper until you find out the bill triples once voice usage scales. Build the all-in projection at your actual volume before comparing.
Underestimating voice usage in metered models. If you assume voice usage based on a small pilot, you will be surprised at scale. Voice doubles when you add inbound carrier call automation. It doubles again when you add check calls every four hours.
Treating outcome-based and platform-based pricing as equivalent. They are not. Under platform-plus-usage, you pay regardless of result. Under outcome-based, you pay because there is a result. The risk distribution is fundamentally different.
The question that filters good vendors fast
If you want to test how confident a vendor is in their product, ask: "If we run a 60-day pilot and the AI delivers zero of the agreed-upon results, what do we pay?"
A real outcome-based vendor answers "zero." That is the whole pitch. A platform-plus-usage vendor will not answer this cleanly, because their bill is not tied to results.
How Ten8 prices
Outcome-based. Pay per result. No platform fee, no per-seat fee, no per-token fee, no upfront cost.
Ten8 is built for US brokerages doing 100+ loads per week and $20M+ in revenue, and live results show up inside the first month. You can read about what that looks like in production on the Fura Freight case study.
If you want a result-by-result cost model for your specific volume and workflow mix, book a demo and we will build the projection on your numbers, not ours.
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