Purchasing Guides / Spot Quote Replies

Spot Quote Replies

A guide to buying an AI workflow that turns freight quote emails into priced replies, using your rates and margins.

Yearly running cost

Assuming 24,000 quote requests a year

By hand
$72K / year
2,400 hours of work
Subscription
$3.6K+ / year
This workflow
$576 / year
Machine usage only; setup, hosting and review are extra.
What should it do with each quote request?

Review every quote before sending, or let routine quotes go out within limits you set.

Prices come only from your rate sources and pricing rules. It never books a load, accepts a tender or commits a carrier.

What is included

Sort quote requests from other email, read lane, equipment, dates, weight and extras, price the lane from your rate sources and rules, and leave a reply draft with the source and margin shown.

Start with your rate data subscriptions, your margin rules by customer, lane and equipment, and a set of past quote emails with the prices your reps sent. The auto-reply option sends low-risk quotes inside limits you set and matches won loads in your transportation system to their quotes.

How accurate should the quotes be?

Set targets for reading lane details correctly and quoting prices that follow your rules.

How these standards are measured

Test on held-out past quote emails from customers not used for setup. Check every lane detail read from the email, recompute each price from the rate source and your rules, and confirm hazardous, refrigerated, oversize and incomplete requests go to a rep. A price without its source counts as a failure.

Targets for your selected standard
What is checkedTarget
Lane details read correctlyCorrect origin, destination, equipment, pickup date, weight and extra services divided by all such details in the test quote emails.≥97%
Prices match your rulesQuotes whose price equals the recomputed result from the named rate source and your pricing rules, divided by all priced test quotes.≥99%
Risky requests heldLabelled hazardous, refrigerated, oversize, multi-stop or incomplete requests held for a rep, divided by all such labelled requests.≥95%
Prices with source shownEvery quote must show the rate source, the lookup used and the pricing rule applied.≥100%

The model reads the email and writes the reply; the price itself is calculated from your rate sources and rules, not chosen by the model. A quote without a source is an error.

How quickly should a priced draft be ready?

Choose how soon after a quote request arrives the priced draft appears. Your rep’s review time is separate.

Timing details

Time from the email arriving to a stored draft, including reading the request, rate source lookups, queueing and retries. Slow rate data services add to this time. Confirm peak volume with your provider.

The target applies to at least 95% of agreed test runs, with 6 in progress at a time.

How much do you want to spend per quote request?

Set the AI processing budget for each quote request.

Cost details

Includes model calls, retries and a shared hosting allocation. Your rate data subscriptions, email service, transportation system and reps’ time are separate. Emails that are not quote requests still cost a small amount to sort.

Reference machine cost: $0.03 – 0.05 per quote request at 2000 quote requests a month. The selected cap is a target to test, not a replacement for this estimate.

Where do you want it to run?

Run it in your cloud or on your own server. Choose whether quote emails may go to an approved AI service.

Data and access details

Runs in a cloud account you control, with access controls and logs.

Quote email text goes to the selected external model for reading and drafting; rate data and margins stay in your systems. Agree access and retention first.

Read only the quote inboxes you approve. Rate data stays in your systems and only the lane details needed for a reply go to the model. Private model only keeps email text on your hardware; the workflow still connects to your inbox and rate data services.

How do you want to use it?

Choose where you want to use it. You can select more than one.

Anything else your provider should know?

Optional. Your choices are included automatically.

Common questions

Do I need this if a hosted quoting product already works for us?

Not necessarily. If a hosted quoting service reads your inbox, supports your rate sources and its price is acceptable, subscribe to it. Buy a workflow when email must stay in your environment, your pricing rules need custom logic or you want to own and change it yourself.

Who decides the price?

Your rules do. The workflow looks up the lane in your rate sources and applies the margins you set. The model reads the request and writes the reply; it does not invent a rate.

Will it send quotes without a rep?

Only with the auto-reply option, and only inside the customers, lanes, equipment and price limits you allow. Everything else waits for a rep.

What about requests with missing details?

They are held with the missing detail named, so your rep can ask the shipper. It does not guess a weight, date or temperature.

Can I run it without an external AI service?

Yes. Choose a private model and supply your own hardware. Measure reading quality and running cost during the pilot.

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