Pricing — DeadheadDesk

The whole rate sheet

Four numbers. That's all of them.

DEADHEADDESK · RATE CONFIRMATION · FORM DD-03 ANNOTATED · NOTHING HIDDEN

30-day paid pilot [1]

One inbox, one lane set. Shadow mode first, then live with every send gated by your reps. Ends in a go/no-go on hard before/after metrics. The fee is credited against setup if you continue.

$2,500

Setup & integration [2]

Email wiring, TMS connector, rate-feed hookup (DAT / Greenscreens), your margin rules encoded, eval harness stood up against your real email corpus. One-time.

$7,500

Monthly retainer [3]

Includes 500 processed items, nightly regression tests, drift alarms, silent-failure alerting, all maintenance, the weekly dollar report, and the founder's cell number. Month to month.

$2,000/MO

Per additional item [4]

Past the included 500 each month. The meter only counts real work — quote requests actually worked, loads actually tracked. You can cap it.

$1.50

[1] CREDITED: THE $2,500 APPLIES AGAINST THE $7,500 SETUP IF YOU CONTINUE. WALK AWAY AFTER 30 DAYS AND THE PILOT FEE IS ALL YOU EVER PAID US. [2] $7,500 COVERS ALJEX, TAI, McLEOD, TURVO, AND ASCEND. IF YOUR TMS NEEDS CUSTOM CONNECTOR WORK, SETUP RUNS $10–15K — WE TELL YOU THE NUMBER BEFORE YOU SIGN, NOT AFTER. [3] THE RETAINER IS A MANAGED SERVICE, NOT SOFTWARE RENT: MONITORING, EVALS, AND MAINTENANCE ARE IN THE $2,000 — NOT A SUPPORT TIER. [4] ONE ITEM = ONE QUOTE REQUEST WORKED END-TO-END (DRAFTED, ESCALATED, OR CORRECTLY DECLINED), OR ONE LOAD TRACKED FOR ITS FULL LIFECYCLE. SPAM AND MISFIRES DON'T BILL.

Meter math, long-hand

Your bill, computed in front of you

Drag the volumes. The left column is what we'd invoice. The right column is what the same work costs in rep hours — edit the hourly assumption if ours is wrong. Every line of arithmetic is shown.

METERED-PRICING CALCULATOR Illustrative model

Quote requests / month

600

Tracked loads / month

400

A · The desk's invoice

—

B · Same work, by hand

$ / rep hour

Min / quote

Min / tracked load

—

B − A · labor saved per month

$—

Payback on $7,500 setup · labor savings alone

—

ILLUSTRATIVE: REP-MINUTE AND HOURLY-COST DEFAULTS ARE OUR ASSUMPTIONS — EDIT THEM. THE INVOICE COLUMN IS NOT AN ASSUMPTION; IT'S THE PUBLISHED METER. REVENUE UPSIDE (FASTER QUOTES WINNING MORE LOADS) IS COUNTED SEPARATELY BELOW, NOT HERE.

The payback claim, shown long-hand

Where "60–120 days" comes from

We quote a 60–120 day payback. Here is the actual formula behind it, with the three assumptions that drive it left editable so you can break it. It uses the quote volume you set in the calculator above and counts only revenue recovery — the labor savings up there would stack on top.

PAYBACK WALKTHROUGH · REVENUE SIDE ONLY Illustrative model

Avg margin / load ($)

Current reply latency (hrs)

4.0 hrs

After-hours miss rate (%)

15%

The formula

RECOVERY% = min( LATENCY × 0.5%/HR , 3% ) + MISS% × 10% EXTRA WINS = QUOTES/MO × RECOVERY% ADDED $/MO = EXTRA WINS × MARGIN PER LOAD NET $/MO = ADDED $/MO − DESK BILL (FROM CALCULATOR ABOVE) PAYBACK = $7,500 SETUP ÷ ( NET $/MO ÷ 30 DAYS )

With your numbers

—

Estimated payback

—

ILLUSTRATIVE MODEL. THE 0.5%/HR AND 10% RECAPTURE COEFFICIENTS ARE OUR CONSERVATIVE PRIORS, NOT MEASURED CLIENT DATA — WE'RE PRE-LAUNCH AND WE SAY SO. THE PILOT EXISTS TO REPLACE THIS PAGE'S MODEL WITH YOUR ACTUAL BEFORE/AFTER NUMBERS.

Pilot vs. ongoing

What each dollar actually buys

INCLUSIONS MATRIXNO HIDDEN TIERS

Line item	30-day pilot · $2,500	Ongoing · $2,000/mo
TMS integration	One inbox, full connector — read-only first, then gated writes	Connector maintained forever; format and API changes patched on us
Monitoring & evals	Full harness from day one: nightly regressions on your real emails, drift alarms	Same harness; test corpus keeps growing with your traffic
Maintenance	Included	Included — carrier format changes, TMS breakage, model upgrades. Never a change order
Weekly dollar reports	Every Friday — what the desk did, in loads and dollars	Every Friday, plus the monthly meter statement
Founder direct line	Jacob's cell and email	Same. Monitoring pages him at 2 AM, not you
After-hours coverage	Drafts queue overnight for morning rep approval	Same gate; earned auto-send on routine lanes, months in, only if you turn it on

THE PILOT IS THE SERVICE AT FULL STRENGTH ON A NARROW SLICE — NOT A DEMO TIER. THE ONLY THING "ONGOING" ADDS IS TIME, VOLUME, AND THE TRUST LADDER.

Slow-market clause

When freight slows down, so does your bill.

Freight is cyclical. Everyone in it knows that; most software pricing pretends otherwise. Seat licenses cost the same in a rate war as in a capacity crunch — which is how brokerages end up paying full freight on tools nobody's using while they're cutting staff.

The meter runs the other way. Fewer quote requests and fewer loads means fewer processed items means a smaller invoice — automatically, with no renegotiation call. The honest fine print: the $2,000 base doesn't flex, because that's what pays for nightly evals, drift alarms, and a human on call whether you run 80 items or 800. Everything above the base scales with your actual month.

METER AT FOUR VOLUMESITEMS → INVOICE

Month looks like	Items	Invoice
Deep slowdown	280	$2,000
Soft market	500	$2,000
Normal month	1,000	$2,750
Produce season	1,800	$3,950

$2,000 + MAX(0, ITEMS − 500) × $1.50. SAME FORMULA AS THE CALCULATOR. NO SEAT COUNT TO LAY OFF.

Pricing FAQ

The questions a careful buyer should ask

How long is the contract?

The pilot is 30 days, paid up front. After that, the service is month-to-month with 30 days' written notice. No annual lock-in, no auto-renewing term. If the weekly dollar reports stop justifying the retainer, you should leave — and the reports make that obvious either way.

What happens if I cancel?

Give 30 days' notice. During that window we hand over a full export of everything the desk produced (quotes, tracking logs, eval results), disconnect the email and TMS integrations cleanly, and document the margin rules we encoded so a future vendor — or your own team — can pick up where we left off. No termination fee, no data hostage-taking.

What exactly counts as a "processed item"?

One inbound quote request the agent works end-to-end — drafted for approval, escalated to a rep, or correctly declined — counts as one item. One load tracked for its full lifecycle (all scheduled check-ins, reply parsing, TMS updates, any escalation) counts as one item, no matter how many check-in messages that takes. Spam, duplicates, and misclassified noise the agent filters out do not bill. The monthly statement lists every item so you can audit the meter.

Can I cap the meter so I never get a surprise bill?

Yes. Set a monthly cap in dollars or items. We alert you at 80% of the included 500 and again at the cap. At the cap you choose the behavior in advance: pause overage processing (the agents keep triaging and escalating to your reps, they just stop drafting), or keep running. The default is "alert and keep running," but it's your switch.

What about volume spikes — produce season, a new customer?

The weekly report shows your run-rate against the included 500, so a spike never sneaks up on you. When we see volume trending past your normal band we flag it proactively and you can pre-approve a higher cap for the season. Spikes are good news — it means the desk is catching demand you used to miss — but you'll always see them coming on paper before you see them on an invoice.

Will you ever price on outcomes instead of items?

Eventually, for clients who want it — a share of the fee tied to quotes won rather than items processed. It unlocks after roughly two quarters together, because honest outcome pricing needs a measured baseline and clean attribution data from your TMS, and we won't have either on day one. Anyone offering you outcome-based AI pricing before they've measured your baseline is guessing with your money.

Rate confirmed

You've seen every number we charge.

The pilot is $2,500, it's credited against setup, and it ends in a go/no-go on your own before/after metrics. If the math on this page doesn't hold up on your freight, you'll know in 30 days — and so will we.

Start a 30-day pilot — $2,500 How the pilot runs

WE QUALIFY HARD. IF YOUR VOLUME OR TMS MAKES THIS A BAD DEAL FOR YOU, WE'LL SAY SO ON THE FIRST CALL.