TMS for New Freight Brokers Under $100 a Month (2026)

If you just got your authority, the software bill is the one that stings. Most TMS pricing pages start at $150 a user, add a setup fee, and want a sales call before they show you the number. You have two loads a week and a dispatcher who is also your cousin. You do not need a system built for a 40-person brokerage.

This is a straight answer to a question new brokers ask constantly: what can you actually run a brokerage on for under $100 a month, and what do you give up at that price. We make one of the options (Haulan, $70 a month). We will say so where it matters and be honest about the rest.

What "under $100" has to include, or it is not a TMS

Cheap software that makes you do the dangerous parts by hand is not cheap. At any price, a broker TMS has to do these five things, because each one is a real way to lose money:

1. Carrier vetting on the live FMCSA record. Authority status, out-of-service flags, insurance on file, and whether the "carrier" is actually a broker. Double brokering is the number one way a new broker eats a $5,000 loss in month two.
2. Rate confirmations the carrier signs from a phone. Not a PDF you email and hope comes back.
3. BOLs and invoices generated from the load. Typing the same pickup address into three documents is how mistakes happen.
4. Carrier onboarding packets. W-9, insurance certificate, authority letter, your broker-carrier agreement, signed. Chasing these by email is a part-time job.
5. Documents attached to the load. The signed POD has to be findable when you invoice, not buried in a text thread.

If a tool under $100 skips any of these, you will pay the difference in time or in one bad load.

The four ways brokers run under $100

1. Spreadsheets plus a load board

Cost: $0 plus your load board subscription. Google Sheets for loads, Word templates for rate cons and BOLs, email for packets, and the FMCSA website open in another tab for vetting.

It works for your first handful of loads. It stops working the first week you have four loads moving at once, because nothing checks anything. Nobody tells you the carrier's insurance lapsed. Nobody notices the MC you typed belongs to a broker. You are the safety system, at 11 PM, tired.

Best for: someone testing whether they even want to broker, before the first real customer.

2. The basic TMS bundled with your load board

Cost: usually folded into a load board tier, so under $100 on paper. DAT and Truckstop both offer light load management alongside their boards.

These are fine for posting and tracking a load, and they are already in a tab you have open. The gap is everything after the load is booked: onboarding packets, e-signed rate cons, BOLs and invoices with your branding, and document storage per load are thin or missing. You end up back in email and Word for the paperwork, which is where the errors live.

Best for: brokers who mostly need posting and a place to list loads, and are fine doing paperwork elsewhere.

3. Pay-per-load tools

Cost: a few dollars per load, so under $100 at low volume. Some newer tools charge per shipment instead of per month.

The math is great at five loads a month and flips on you at fifty. Read the per-load rate carefully and multiply by where you expect to be in six months, not where you are today. Also check whether carrier packets and insurance pulls are included or billed on top.

Best for: very low, very steady volume, or brokers who want zero fixed cost while they find their first shippers.

4. A flat monthly TMS built for solo brokers

Cost: $70 to $99 a month. This is the category Haulan's Starter plan is in, so here is exactly what $70 gets you there, since that is the honest way to describe it:

Carrier vetting on the live FMCSA record that blocks revoked and broker-only carriers before you tender. Loads, rate cons the carrier e-signs from a phone, BOLs and invoices with your logo. 25 carrier onboarding packets and 25 insurance pulls a month. One user, no setup fee, no contract, cancel anytime. The whole thing works from a phone, and you can text an AI assistant to look up a load or a carrier while you drive.

What you do not get at $70: more than one login, owner reports, profit by customer, and 1099 reporting. Those live on the $150 and $250 plans, and they are for the point where you have a team. Most brokers should not start there.

Best for: a solo broker or a two-person shop that wants the paperwork and the vetting handled from day one without paying for team features.

What you give up under $100, honestly

At this price nobody gives you EDI with big shippers, multi-branch accounting, or a dedicated onboarding manager. You also will not get unlimited users. If your brokerage has a sales team and a billing department, you are shopping in the wrong price range and that is fine.

What you should never give up, even at $70, is vetting on live data and signed paperwork. Those are the two things that stand between you and a loss bigger than a year of software.

Five questions to ask before you pay anyone

1. Does it check FMCSA live, or does it store what I typed in?
2. Are carrier packets and insurance pulls included, and how many?
3. Can the carrier sign the rate con on a phone without an account?
4. Is there a setup fee or a contract?
5. Can I do all of it from my phone?

If a sales rep has to "check on that" for question one, move on.

The ten-minute test

Whatever you pick, do this before you pay: type in the MC of a carrier you know, and see whether the software pulls their real authority and insurance or just saves the number. Then build one load, generate the rate con, and send it to your own phone. If both take longer than ten minutes, that tool is going to cost you far more than its price every single week.

You can run that test on Haulan with a demo account, no card needed, just ask for one from the site. Or run it on anyone else. Either way, do not sign up for $250 of software to move $3,000 of freight a week. Start under $100, get your first ten customers, then upgrade when a bigger plan is a rounding error.