A dispatch service for owner operators that gives you back the board hours
You already know how to find a load. You refresh the board at a fuel island, call three brokers, get two voicemails and one lowball, and do it again tomorrow. That's not a skill problem. It's a time problem, and it lands on the one person who also has to drive, sleep and keep the truck running.
Our dispatch service for owner operators takes the searching, the broker calls and the counters off your plate. You keep the part that matters: every load comes to you first, and you say yes or no. Saying no costs you nothing.
- 5% of gross, 1 truck
- 7% MC under 6 months
- No setup fee
- Cancel with 30 days notice
OWNER-OPERATOR 1 TRUCK YOUR MC
What changes, and what doesn't
Changes: who sits on the board and who argues with the broker. Doesn't change: your lanes, your home time, your floor rate, and your yes or no on every load. The rate confirmation still comes straight to you.
you keep the last word
Put a price on the hours you spend on the board
Most owner-operators never count the hours. Searching between drops, calling on postings that are already covered, waiting on callbacks, checking whether a broker is real. Add it up for a week and it's often a part-time job on top of driving.
Use the calculator to put your own numbers on it. It shows what the dispatch fee comes to in dollars, what that works out to for each hour you hand off, and how much your average rate per mile would need to move to keep the same money after the fee.
That last number is the honest one. It's your break-even. We won't tell you we'll beat it on every load, because nobody controls the market. What we can tell you is where the time goes, and that the counter on every load starts from your floor, not from whatever the broker posted.
If you'd rather run the full comparison with your board subscription and costs, use the load board vs dispatcher cost comparison. The fee breakdown shows every tier in dollars and cents per mile.
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Your truck, your lanes, your rules
The fear with any owner operator dispatch service is losing control of your own business. A dispatcher who books loads you never agreed to, sends you somewhere you didn't want to go, or keeps you out three weeks when you said two. We built the desk around the opposite.
Every load
Nothing goes on your truck without your yes. We send the lane, miles, rate, stops, times and terms. Turn it down and you owe nothing. Say yes and the broker sends the rate confirmation to you to sign.
Your lanes
Tell us where you like to run and where you won't go. If you never want to see the Northeast in winter, it stays off your card. We plan the reload before you deliver, inside the lanes you gave us.
Home time
Out Monday, home Friday? Two weeks out, four days home? We plan backward from the day you want to be home, so the last load of the run points you toward the house instead of away from it.
Your floor rate
You give us the lowest all-in rate per mile you'll run, empty miles counted. We counter above it. When a market is too soft to reach it, we tell you straight instead of quietly booking under it.
You also keep your own authority, your own broker relationships and your own load board account if you want it. Some carriers keep a subscription to watch the market. That's fine with us, and it makes it easy to check our work.
Everything between the posting and the delivery receipt
Here's the full list of what our owner operator dispatch services cover. It's the same list for every truck we dispatch, and none of it costs extra.
- Searching the major load boards and working our direct broker and shipper contacts for your lanes.
- Checking every broker before we counter: operating authority and registration on FMCSA's public records, payment terms, and the usual double-brokering warning signs.
- Negotiating the rate on every load, starting from your floor, never from the posted number.
- Setting up your carrier packets with brokers, so your MC, insurance and W-9 are on file before a load is ready.
- Planning the next load before you deliver, so you spend less time empty and less time waiting.
- Check calls and delivery confirmations with the broker, so your phone isn't ringing while you're backing into a dock.
- Detention and layover claims, filed with the broker when the clock runs past the free time.
- A weekly report of loads, gross, our fee and your empty miles.
- Dispatchers on the desk nights and weekends, because freight doesn't stop on Friday at five.
What we don't do is just as plain. We don't sign rate confirmations for you. We don't collect your freight money. We don't take a margin on the load. Brokers pay you, or your factoring company if you factor, and we're paid our percentage of what you haul.
How we decide which loads are worth sending you
A posting that looks good on the screen still has to pass a few checks before it reaches your phone. This is the order we read it in, and it's the same order a careful owner-operator would use if they had the time.
- All-in rate, not posted rate. We divide the offer by loaded miles plus the empty miles to the pickup. A $3.00/mi posting with 200 miles of deadhead can be a $2.20/mi load.
- Where it leaves you. A good rate into a dead market can cost you the next two days. We look at what reloads near the delivery before we counter, and sometimes a slightly lower rate into a strong market is the better week.
- Time, not just miles. Appointment windows, live unload or drop, how long the shipper is known to hold trucks. A short load that eats a whole day isn't a short load.
- The broker. Authority and registration on FMCSA's public records, payment terms, and whether anything about the posting smells like double brokering.
- Your rules. Your lanes, your home date, your floor rate, and anything you told us you won't haul. If it breaks one, it doesn't reach you.
When a load clears all five, we counter and then send it to you with what we found. When the best we can get is under your floor, you hear that too, along with why, so you can decide whether to take it, wait or reposition. You're never guessing what's behind the number.
What a week looks like from your side
Here's an EXAMPLE week for a single dry van running out of Dallas with home time on weekends. The loads are made up. The routine is real.
- EXAMPLE
SUNDAY NIGHT
We send Monday's first load. You read the lane, rate, stops and terms and reply yes. The broker emails you the rate con, you sign it.
- EXAMPLE
MONDAY
While you're loaded, we're already working the reload near the delivery. Check calls to the broker come from our desk, not your phone.
- EXAMPLE
WEDNESDAY
Shipper holds you four hours past the free time. We log it and file the detention claim with the broker the same day.
- EXAMPLE
THURSDAY
We send two options for the last load. One pays more but leaves you 300 miles from home. You pick the one that gets you home Friday.
- EXAMPLE
FRIDAY
You're home. Your weekly report lands: loads, gross, empty miles and our fee, so you can check every number.
- EXAMPLE
THE WEEK YOU TAKE OFF
You tell us you're off. We stop searching. You pay nothing, because nothing was hauled.
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What the fee looks like on a real week
For an owner-operator with authority 6 months or older, it's 5% of the gross on loads you haul. If your MC is under 6 months old, or you run a 26 ft box truck or a hotshot, it's 7%. If you add a second truck, the fleet rate is 4% while it lasts.
No setup fee. No monthly minimum. Month-to-month, and you can cancel with 30 days notice. A week you don't haul costs you nothing.
People ask whether a percentage tempts a dispatcher to book cheap freight. It does the opposite. A cheap load pays us less too, so the only way we do well is when your loads pay well. And you hold the floor rate, so a cheap load never gets past you without your say.
"I can find my own loads." You can. Here's the real question.
Most owner-operators who call us have been booking their own freight for years. They're good at it. The question isn't whether you can find a load. It's whether the hours you spend finding it are worth more on the board or behind the wheel, asleep, or at home.
Run the calculator above with your honest hours. If the fee per hour back is more than your time is worth to you, keep booking your own freight, and use our free tools to do it. If it's less, that's the case for a dispatcher. Either way, it's your numbers making the call, not a sales pitch.
There's a second question too: who's in your corner when a broker drags their feet on a detention claim, or a load gets cancelled at the dock? On your own, that's another phone call between drives. With a dispatcher, it's somebody else's job.
We'll also tell you when a dispatcher probably isn't the right call. If you run one dedicated customer who fills your truck every week, you don't need us searching boards. If you only haul on weekends or a few days a month, the setup is more work than it saves. And if you genuinely enjoy the haggling and have the hours for it, a good self-dispatcher with clean records and a few loyal brokers is hard to beat. Plenty of carriers like that use our free calculators and never apply, and that's fine.
Where a dispatch service for owner operators earns its fee is the in-between: running your own authority, mostly on spot freight, juggling the board between drives, and losing either sleep or loads because you can't do both at once. That's most of the people who call us.
If you want to compare the two in more detail, read self-dispatch vs a dispatcher. It covers the costs on both sides, including the ones people forget, like the loads you miss while you're driving.
And if cash flow is the bigger pain than finding loads, factoring for owner-operators explains how getting paid on delivery works and what it costs.
Owner operator dispatch services: questions we get
Can I keep my own load board account?
Do you work with owner-operators who factor?
Can leased-on owner-operators use a dispatcher?
What does a dispatcher do for an owner-operator?
How fast can I start?
Is a dispatcher worth it for one truck?
What if I want to run only certain lanes?
Tear a tab. Get your hours back.
You say yes or no to every load. The rate con comes to you. No setup fee. Month-to-month, cancel with 30 days notice.