Quick answer: Freight forwarding software in 2026 is sold four ways — per seat, per user, per transaction, and custom enterprise. Among the few vendors that publish at all, per-seat pricing sits in the low hundreds per user per month; CargoWise's published Value Pack examples are about $19.95 per full import container with an inland leg and $9.95 per customs entry; most enterprise vendors quote custom and publish nothing. Zavin publishes $125 per seat per month with every module included. The pricing model matters more than the list price, because it decides whether your bill grows with headcount or with volume.
Ask a freight forwarder what their software costs and you will usually get one of two answers: a number that turns out to be the licence line only, or a shrug. Both are understandable. This is a category where most vendors do not publish rates, quotes arrive after two discovery calls, and the invoice that lands in month fourteen looks nothing like the one you approved.
This guide is the answer to the question buyers actually ask — what does this really cost — rather than the answer vendors prefer to give. It covers the four pricing models and who each one punishes, what every major platform charges as far as anyone can verify, the costs that never appear on a quote, and how to model your own number before you take a sales call.
(Disclosure: Zavin is our product, and we publish our pricing. That is the whole reason we can write this page honestly. Where we do not know a competitor's rate, we say so rather than guess.)
Key takeaways
- Freight forwarding software in 2026 is sold four ways — per seat, per user, per transaction, and custom enterprise — and the model decides whether your bill grows with headcount or with volume.
- Eight of eleven platforms compared here will not tell you what they cost without a sales process.
- Zavin is among the few vendors that publish: $125 per seat per month, every module included, plus usage-based AI processing.
- CargoWise's published Value Pack examples are about $19.95 per full import container with an inland leg and $9.95 per customs entry — WiseTech's own published examples, not our estimates.
- Enterprise TMS migrations run six to eighteen months; lighter SMB systems roughly one to three.
- The labour around each file is usually the larger cost: roughly $26 of labour per file at 45 minutes and a loaded $35 an hour, around $13,000 monthly at 500 files.
The four pricing models, and who each one punishes
Before any list price matters, understand which model you are buying into. Two forwarders with identical headcount and identical volume can pay wildly different amounts on different models — and, more importantly, their bills move in opposite directions as the business grows.
Per-seat and per-user pricing
Per seat. You pay per person who uses the system, usually monthly, usually with everything included. Cost is predictable and moves only when you hire. It punishes headcount growth and rewards volume growth: double your shipments with the same team and your bill does not move.
Per user (legacy variant). Functionally similar, but historically paired with module-based add-ons — you buy the seat, then buy the customs module, then the accounting module. The list price looks lower than per-seat-all-inclusive and frequently is not, once you have added what you actually need.
Per-transaction and custom enterprise pricing
Per transaction. You pay per shipment, per container, per customs entry. Cost tracks volume directly. It punishes growth in freight and rewards lean quarters. This is the model CargoWise moved most of its base onto in December 2025, and it is why that repricing landed so unevenly — high-volume, low-margin forwarders felt it hardest.
Custom enterprise. Quoted deal by deal after discovery. Sometimes genuinely reflects complexity; sometimes reflects what the vendor believes you will pay. You cannot benchmark it, which is the point.
Model your three-year exposure
The single most useful exercise before any purchase: take your shipment volume and headcount as they are today, then as they will be in three years, and run both through each model. The cheapest option at today's numbers is very often the most expensive one at your target numbers. A per-transaction platform that looks reasonable at 200 containers a month is a different proposition at 600.
What each platform actually charges
Here is the honest state of pricing transparency in this category. "Not public" means exactly that — we are not going to invent a number to fill a cell.
| Platform | Model | Public pricing | What is known |
|---|
| Zavin | Per seat | Yes | $125/seat/month, all modules, plus usage-based AI processing |
| CargoWise | Per transaction | Partial | Published Value Pack examples: ~$19.95 per full import container with inland leg, ~$9.95 per customs entry |
| Logitude World | Per user | Yes | Budget cloud tier; published per-user rates |
| Magaya | Per user | Partial | Some tier information published; modules quoted |
| GoFreight | Subscription | Partial | Some information published; quoted by size |
| Descartes | Custom | No | Enterprise quote after discovery |
| Riege Scope | Per user | No | Quoted by seat count and modules |
| Raft | Custom | No | Quoted by document and shipment volume |
| Wisor | Custom | No | Quoted after discovery |
| FreightSuite | Custom | No | Quoted after discovery |
| LogBot | Custom | No | Quoted after discovery |
Pricing changes. Confirm current rates with each vendor. CargoWise figures are WiseTech's own published examples, not our estimates.
The freight software transparency gap
Two things stand out. First, eight of eleven platforms will not tell you what they cost without a sales process. Second, the two models that dominate the category — per transaction and custom — are precisely the two you cannot budget against in advance.
Why so few vendors publish
It is worth being fair about this, because the reflex answer ("they are hiding something") is only sometimes right.
Complexity is real. A forwarder running 40 air shipments a month and a forwarder running 4,000 ocean containers with customs brokerage are not buying the same thing. One published number would mislead both.
Deal-by-deal pricing protects margin. If a vendor learns your volume, your incumbent, and your renewal date before quoting, they can price to your situation. That is commercially rational and rarely in your favour.
A published number is a number a competitor can undercut. Silence is defensive.
Whatever the motive, the effect on you is identical: you cannot shortlist on cost. You have to enter three or four sales cycles to build a comparison that should have taken an afternoon. Budget four to eight weeks for that if pricing is a decision factor — because it will be.
The costs that never appear on the quote
The licence line is the number everyone negotiates and rarely the number that decides total cost.
Implementation, training, and module creep
Implementation and data migration. Enterprise TMS migrations run six to eighteen months; lighter SMB systems roughly one to three. Someone on your team pays for that in hours, whether or not the vendor invoices for it.
Training and the productivity dip. Every migration has a quarter where the desk is slower. Nobody quotes for it and everybody pays it.
Module creep. The base quote covers the base platform. Customs, accounting, EDI connections, the customer portal, the reporting layer — check what is bundled and what arrives as a line item in year two.
Per-transaction exposure. On a per-transaction model, a good year costs more. That is fine if margins hold and painful if they do not.
Annual uplifts. Ask specifically what the contractual increase is and whether it is capped.
The labour cost no invoice shows
And the big one: the labour around the file. This is the cost no invoice shows and it is usually larger than the software. If an operator spends 45 minutes per file reading the thread, hunting rates, re-keying the booking, and chasing the quote, then at a loaded cost of $35 an hour that is roughly $26 of labour per file. At 500 files a month, that is around $13,000 monthly — typically several times the software bill. Our CargoWise cost calculator models this against your own numbers, and the Value Pack pricing guide walks through the December 2025 changes in detail.
The practical implication: a platform with a higher licence fee that removes real handling hours is often the cheaper option in total. Comparing licence lines alone reliably picks the wrong system.
How to model your real cost in five steps
- Count your actual volume. Shipments per month by mode, customs entries, and how those numbers moved over the last three years. Per-transaction quotes are meaningless without this.
- Count your seats — honestly. Not just operations. Pricing desk, sales, management, finance, and the branch that will join next year.
- Get the model, not just the number. Ask each vendor: what triggers a higher bill? Volume, headcount, modules, or storage? That single question separates the options faster than any feature matrix.
- Amortise implementation over three years and add it to the monthly figure. A platform with a $0 licence advantage and a nine-month implementation is not cheaper.
- Price the labour each option leaves in place. Time five real files end to end, multiply by your loaded hourly cost and your monthly volume, and add that to each vendor's total. Most teams underestimate this by roughly half.
Do this and you get one comparable number per option: total monthly cost per shipment. That is the figure worth negotiating on.
What Zavin charges
We publish it, so there is nothing to extract from a sales call.
$125 per seat per month, plus usage-based AI processing billed per document processed and per API call. Every module is included from day one — email automation, quoting, rate intelligence, shipments, tracking, CRM, reporting, and the rest of the twelve. There are no locked tiers and no implementation fee. A ten-seat forwarding team typically lands between $3,500 and $7,000 per month depending on shipment volume and AI usage, and you get a full cost and ROI estimate on the first call based on your actual email and RFQ traffic.
The usage component is the honest complication: because AI processing scales with volume, your bill is not purely per-seat. We would rather explain that here than surprise you in month three. Enterprise adds multi-branch controls, security review, and an SLA — not extra modules.
Time to live, coexistence, and scope
Two other numbers that affect total cost more than the licence: teams go live in under 14 days with no migration and no IT project, so there is no implementation quarter to absorb; and Zavin runs alongside CargoWise and Magaya, so adopting it does not require replacing a system of record you have already paid for.
The honest scope limit, as everywhere on this site: Zavin does not file customs entries and does not run your accounting ledger. If those are your core requirement, price a customs-native platform first and read our TMS comparison for where each option fits.
Bottom line
Freight forwarding software pricing is opaque because most of the category has chosen opacity, not because the question is unanswerable. Three things will get you a real number faster than a feature comparison:
- Ask what triggers a higher bill. Volume, headcount, or modules. The answer tells you your three-year exposure in one sentence.
- Amortise implementation and add it in. A long deployment is a cost, whether or not it appears on an invoice.
- Price the manual work left behind. It is usually the largest line, and it is the one no vendor quotes.
If transparent pricing matters to you as a signal — and for a lot of forwarders it does — the Zavin pricing page has the full breakdown, or bring a live RFQ to a 30-minute walkthrough and we will model the cost against your own traffic.
