What a transport may cost

A should-cost is not a price but a question

The model does not say what a transport costs. It says what it ought to cost if the assumptions entered hold – and thereby shows where a quote departs from those assumptions. The value of the method lies in the deviation, not in the figure.

Whoever carries the model value to the table as a demand gets either a worse quote or none at all. Whoever comes with the deviation gets an answer.

Why there is no bargain below cost

A quote below cost is not a cheap purchase but an open bill. It is settled later: through tours cancelled in peak season, through additional claims, through a provider who is no longer there next year. That is why the model marks this line explicitly.

The empty leg decides half the bill

As long as no return load is fixed, your shipment carries the way back. Whoever leaves it out of the model calculates a floor price nobody can drive – and afterwards considers every serious quote too expensive.

The same figure is the subject of a page of its own, and you are better off deriving the cost per kilometre from your own numbers than from the suggested value here.

Empty-run rate calculator Cost per kilometre

What AI speeds up in this process

The calculation itself takes milliseconds. What costs time comes before it: digging eight figures out of an offer e-mail and typing them in. At twenty offers a week that is the actual process, not the formula.

That is exactly where the model comes in. A search pattern finds “900 km” and “EUR 2,050”. It fails on “all-in”, “excluding tolls” or “three hours free, then per effort” — the very wordings that make a price comparable. That is why the page reads the text itself first and only lets the model improve on it: if the model is down, the calculator still works.

What the model does not do: it names no price, sets no margin and decides nothing. It fills fields that are visibly marked and that you overwrite. And the questions for the carrier that appear below, derived from the deviation, come about without a model — they follow from the calculation, not from a wording.

The model knows its own accuracy

If a quote lies less than ten per cent away from the floor price, the calculator names neither a winner nor a demand. A model with round assumptions cannot resolve that gap, and a figure that pretends to be more precise than its inputs is the most dangerous kind of result.

The calculator runs entirely in the browser: your figures, the calculation and the result are neither transmitted nor stored. There is one single exception, and it starts with your click: the text you paste above is sent to our model provider to be read — that text only, without the figures of the calculation, and it is not stored. If you would rather not, fill in the fields by hand as before.