What Freight Audit Really Costs: 3 Pricing Models

Freight audit is sold three ways: a percentage of what the auditor recovers, a fee per invoice or document processed, or a flat subscription for software. That is the whole market. What almost nobody will tell you before a sales call is the number attached to any of them.

We went looking. Cass’s freight audit and payment page publishes no pricing, no fee structure, and no pricing model. A buyer’s guide from ShipperGuide names all three models correctly and then discloses no figures for any of them. The third-party numbers that do circulate contradict each other by a factor of four, which we will get to.

This post lays out what each model is, what incentive it creates, and what each costs annually at 200, 500, and 1,000 loads a month, with every assumption stated so you can swap in your own. We sell one of these models. We also sell a version of another, and we will point out where contingency beats us.

The three models, and what each one is actually charging you for

Contingency: a percentage of recoveries

The auditor reviews your bills, files the disputes or short-pays, and keeps a cut of the money that comes back. If nothing comes back, you pay nothing.

There are two variants that get quoted the same way and are not the same thing. Percentage of recoveries is a cut of dollars actually recovered. Percentage of spend is a cut of the freight spend under management, which does not depend on findings at all. When a vendor says “we work on savings,” ask which one, in writing.

Per invoice or per document

A fixed fee for every invoice processed, sometimes tiered by volume, sometimes bundled with freight payment (the vendor holds funds and pays your carriers). This is the traditional freight audit and payment model, and the two halves can be bought separately. Bundled pay services may also make money on float, the gap between when your cash leaves and the carrier’s arrives, so ask who earns interest on money in transit.

Flat subscription software

A fixed monthly price for a tool that reconciles your bills and hands you the exceptions. You file the disputes. You keep 100 percent of what comes back. That is what we sell, and our prices are on our pricing page rather than behind a demo: $149 a month for 400 documents, $399 for 1,500, $799 for 5,000 plus API access.

What each model does to the vendor’s incentives

No model is neutral. Each one quietly tells the vendor what to optimize.

Contingency rewards finding big things and ignoring small ones. A $40 residential surcharge error is not worth an auditor’s time at any percentage. A $1,180 duplicate invoice is. That is rational, and it means the long tail of small recurring errors, the residential fees and the fuel surcharge computed off the wrong DOE week, tends to survive a contingency audit. Contingency also rewards recovery over prevention. A vendor paid on recoveries has no financial reason to tell your carrier to stop making the error, because the error is the revenue.

Per invoice rewards throughput. The fee lands whether the invoice was clean or not. That is honest in one sense (you are paying for a process, not a lottery ticket) and it removes the incentive distortion around small findings. It also means the vendor’s cost to you rises with volume regardless of error rate, and a clean carrier base costs the same as a chaotic one.

Flat software rewards retention, which means it has to keep finding things. The misalignment is real and worth naming: we get paid the same whether we find you $200 or $20,000 this month. What stops that from being a problem is that you can cancel, and you will if the exceptions dry up. That is a weaker guarantee than “we only get paid if you get paid.” If you do not trust a vendor to keep working after the contract is signed, contingency structurally protects you and a subscription does not.

The published contingency ranges contradict each other, badly

Here is where we have to be careful, because the honest answer is that nobody knows the real number.

Senvo states that third-party freight audit firms commonly take 30 to 50 percent contingency on recoveries, and works an example where a 40 percent contingency costs a 3 million euro shipper 72,000 euros. Senvo is a vendor and its post is positioned against contingency pricing, so read the number with that in mind.

Darrigo Consulting says contingency is the norm in freight audit and puts net savings to the shipper, after provider fees, at 50 to 75 percent of total recovery. Work backwards and that implies a provider share of 25 to 50 percent, roughly consistent with Senvo. Darrigo is a consultant, not a vendor, which is a different bias but still a bias.

Against that, a materially lower range circulates widely in search results and vendor comparison content: roughly 6 to 12 percent of audit savings. We could not trace that range to any source we were able to fetch and verify, so we are not going to link a citation we cannot stand behind. We are telling you it exists because pretending it does not would be the more dishonest choice.

Both ranges can be true at once, and probably are, because they are not measuring the same thing:

• Scope. Audit-only engagements (find the errors, hand them over) price differently from full audit-and-pay (find the errors, hold the funds, pay the carriers, produce the accruals). A bundled service has more revenue lines and can take less on the contingency line.
• Basis. A percentage of recoveries on a small recovery base is a very different dollar figure from a percentage of spend or of total savings including negotiated rate improvements. The same vendor can quote 10 percent of spend-based savings and 40 percent of hard recoveries.
• What counts as a finding. Some contracts apply the percentage to everything the vendor touches, including credits your own AP team already flagged. Others apply it only to net-new findings.
• Volume. A 200-load shipper and a 20,000-load shipper are not getting the same rate card, and neither one is published.

Do not let anyone, including us, resolve this conflict with a single number. Get the percentage, the basis, and the definition of a qualifying recovery in the contract.

Where contingency is genuinely the right answer

We sell flat software, so take this in the spirit it is offered: contingency has real advantages that a subscription cannot match.

• No fixed cost. It never shows up as a line item you have to defend in a budget review. For a controller who cannot get a new SaaS line approved, that is not a small thing.
• The vendor carries the risk. If your bills are clean, you spend nothing. A subscription bills you either way.
• It is the right tool for a one-time historical sweep. If you want the last 18 months reviewed for overcharges you already paid and can still claim back, a contingency engagement is a clean fit. You are buying a project with a defined end, not a process. The statutory windows for that work, including the 180-day contest window and the 18-month limitations period, are hard deadlines, so a look-back has a real expiration date.
• Low volume changes the math. Under roughly 200 loads a month, a fixed monthly fee is a large percentage of a small recovery pool. Contingency scales down to zero. Flat pricing does not.

We offer a contingency option ourselves for exactly this reason: $0 a month plus 25 percent of verified recoveries, converting to flat pricing whenever you want. That number sits inside the range Darrigo implies, and we are not going to claim it is uniquely virtuous.

The worked comparison, with every assumption stated

These are assumptions, not findings. Change them and the answer changes, which is the point of showing them.

• Assumption: average all-in cost of $1,800 per load, mixed truckload and LTL. Annual spend is loads x 12 x $1,800.
• Assumption: one carrier invoice per load, three documents per load (invoice, rate confirmation, POD).
• Assumption: recoveries equal 1 percent of annual freight spend. That is the low end of the 1 to 3 percent truckload recovery benchmark published by Darrigo Consulting, which also gives 3 to 8 percent for LTL and 2 to 5 percent for parcel. We used the low end deliberately, because a high recovery assumption makes contingency look worse and we did not want the model to flatter us.
• Assumption: contingency modeled at both 12 percent (the low circulating figure we could not verify) and 30 percent (the low end of the Senvo range).
• Assumption: per-invoice fee of $2.00. No vendor publishes this, so it is a placeholder. Multiply proportionally for your own quote.
• Our prices are not assumptions. They are our published list prices, billed monthly.

Read the 200-load row honestly. At 12 percent contingency, the annual cost is $5,184 against $4,788 for a flat subscription. That is a difference of $396 a year, which is noise, and the contingency vendor is carrying all the risk. At that volume the models are a coin flip on price, and the tiebreaker should be whether you want someone else doing the dispute work.

The divergence is structural, not clever. Contingency cost scales with recoveries. Per-invoice cost scales with volume. Subscription cost scales in steps and then flattens.

Two caveats on our own column. If your recoveries land nearer 3 percent of spend than 1 percent, contingency costs more in absolute dollars but you also net far more, and “expensive” stops being the right frame. And our column assumes you file the disputes yourself. Budget 10 to 20 minutes per exception for a drafted dispute you review and send. If that labor is not available in your shop, a service model is worth paying for.

The questions a pricing page will not answer

Whichever model you pick, these are the terms that decide what it actually costs. Get every answer in the contract, not the deck.

1. What exactly is the percentage applied to? Recoveries, savings, or spend? Gross or net of the vendor’s own fees? Does a rate renegotiation count as a “saving”?
2. Does the percentage apply to findings you would have caught yourself? If your AP clerk flags a duplicate invoice and the vendor’s report also lists it, who gets paid? Ask for a carve-out for exceptions you identify first.
3. Is there a minimum, a floor, or a monthly commitment? Many contingency contracts carry a monthly minimum that turns “no recovery, no fee” into a fixed cost in quiet months.
4. What is the term, and what is the auto-renewal notice window? A 36-month term with a 90-day cancellation notice is a very different product from the same price month to month.
5. Who owns the data at the end? Your invoices, your extracted line items, your recovery history, your carrier performance record. Get the export format and the deletion commitment in writing.
6. What happens at cancellation to recoveries in flight? Disputes filed before the end date but paid after it. Contingency contracts frequently claim a tail on these. Know how long the tail runs.
7. Does the vendor touch your money? If freight payment is bundled, ask who holds the float, for how long, and who earns interest on it.
8. Who talks to your carriers? Some vendors dispute in your name. That has a relationship cost you, not they, will pay.
9. What is the escalation path when the carrier denies? A finding is not a recovery. Ask what percentage of flagged exceptions actually get paid back, and whether the vendor reports on that or only on findings.

Which model fits which operation

Under 200 loads a month: contingency, or nothing yet. A flat fee is a large share of a small recovery pool, and the honest advice is that the math for subscription software is thin down here. Our own FAQ says the same thing.

A one-time historical look-back: contingency, almost always. You want a project, not a process, and you want the vendor’s risk appetite rather than your own.

200 to 1,000 loads a month with in-house AP capacity: flat software is usually the cheaper answer, and the gap widens every year, because the subscription does not grow with the recoveries. You need someone who will actually work the exception queue and send the disputes. If nobody owns that job, do not buy software, buy a service.

200 to 1,000 loads with no AP bandwidth: a per-invoice service, or contingency. Paying a percentage of money you would otherwise never have seen is a good trade. Paying a percentage of money your own team already identified is not.

Above 1,000 loads with complex settlement, especially brokers: look hard at per-invoice with audit and payment bundled, and price the float. Broker settlement has its own failure mode, the rate confirmation that does not match the carrier invoice, and volume there is high enough that a per-invoice fee can beat a percentage of a large recovery base.

Any operation with a documented, recurring error type: whichever model you pick, fix the source. A carrier that bills detention without in and out times will keep doing it until you make the evidence standard part of the conversation. Recovery is the consolation prize. Prevention is the actual win, and no pricing model on this page is designed to get you there on its own.

The one thing every model shares is that you cannot evaluate it without knowing your own error rate. Run the numbers on your last 60 days before you take a single sales call, because the vendor’s percentage is meaningless until you know what it is a percentage of.

Sources

• Cass Information Systems, Freight Audit and Payment (no published pricing or fee structure)
• ShipperGuide, How to choose a freight audit provider (names the three pricing models, discloses no figures)
• Senvo, Freight audit and payment (30 to 50 percent contingency; vendor-authored and positioned against contingency pricing)
• Darrigo Consulting, Shipping audit and freight audit guide (net savings of 50 to 75 percent of total recovery; recovery benchmarks of 1 to 3 percent truckload, 3 to 8 percent LTL, 2 to 5 percent parcel; consultant-authored)
• 49 CFR 378.8 (60-day resolution clock on a written overcharge claim)
• 49 U.S.C. 13710 (180-day window to contest a freight bill)