Every freight manager has a spreadsheet. Usually several.
There's the RFQ tracker. The vendor list. The quote comparison template. The shipment status log. The freight spend report. Each maintained manually, each a source of errors, each invisible to anyone not in the same inbox.
Spreadsheets seem free. They are not.
The Hidden Costs of Spreadsheet-Based Freight Management
1. Labour time
The most significant cost is the one nobody calculates.
Consider a mid-sized importer who runs 15 RFQs per month. Each RFQ cycle involves:
- 20 minutes drafting and sending the RFQ (individually to each vendor)
- 45 minutes waiting for, chasing, and consolidating quotes into a comparison sheet
- 15 minutes updating the shipment status log after acceptance
That's ~80 minutes per RFQ in manual data work. At 15 RFQs/month, that's 20 hours/month — half a working week — spent on tasks that freight software completes automatically.
At a fully-loaded staff cost of $40/hour, that's $800/month in labour, every month.
2. Quote comparison errors
When quotes arrive in different formats — PDFs, emails, WhatsApp messages — manual consolidation introduces errors. A misplaced decimal, a currency conversion forgotten, an all-in rate compared against an ex-works rate.
These errors don't just waste time to correct — they result in wrong vendor selections. Even a single bad quote acceptance on a $15,000 FCL shipment, where you selected the wrong vendor because the comparison was wrong, can cost several hundred dollars.
3. Response rate collapse
When freight forwarders receive informal requests (email, WhatsApp), they deprioritise them. A vendor who receives a properly structured RFQ via a digital platform — with a visible deadline, specific cargo details, and clear scope — responds faster and more thoroughly.
Shippers who move from informal quoting to structured RFQ software typically see vendor response rates increase from 40–60% to 80–95%. More responses mean more competitive tension, which means lower prices.
4. No institutional memory
When your freight coordinator leaves, their vendor relationships, historical rates, and process knowledge go with them. In a spreadsheet-based operation, that knowledge is in their personal email account and their head.
With freight management software, every RFQ, every quote, every vendor conversation, and every accepted rate is stored centrally, searchable, and visible to their successor on day one.
5. Compliance exposure
Customs documentation — Bill of Lading, Certificate of Origin, packing lists — lives in inboxes and shared drives. There's no system of record. No way to confirm which version was submitted to customs. No audit trail if a dispute arises.
What Does Freight Management Software Actually Cost?
SaaS platforms (subscription model)
Enterprise TMS (Transportation Management System) platforms — SAP TM, Oracle TMS, Infor Nexus — are priced for large enterprises. Think $5,000–$50,000/year.
Mid-market freight SaaS — Freightos, Flexport — typically bundle freight booking with their own marketplace, charging either subscription fees or margin on your freight spend.
One-time licence model (Logwo)
Logwo operates on a fundamentally different pricing model: a one-time licence fee, with no monthly subscription. You pay once and own it.
| Plan | One-time fee | Users | RFQs/month | |------|-------------|-------|------------| | Free | $0 | 1 | 3 | | Starter | $299 | 2 | 30 | | Business | $699 | 5 | Unlimited | | Enterprise | $1,499 | 20 | Unlimited |
Optional cloud hosting (fully managed) from ~$5/month based on usage.
The Real Comparison Over 3 Years
For a team of 3 running ~15 RFQs per month:
| | Spreadsheets | Logwo Business | |---|---|---| | Software cost (3 years) | $0 | $699 one-time | | Labour cost (20 hrs/mo × $40/hr × 36 mo) | $28,800 | ~$7,200 (75% reduction) | | Quote errors and vendor selection mistakes | Unquantified | Minimal (AI outlier detection) | | Estimated total cost | ~$28,800+ | ~$8,000 |
The $699 licence pays for itself in the first month of labour savings.
What You Get That Spreadsheets Can Never Provide
Beyond cost, freight software provides capabilities that simply don't exist in a spreadsheet:
AI quote analysis — Logwo flags statistical outliers in your quote inbox, explaining in plain language why a particular quote is unexpectedly high or low. Spreadsheets can apply a formula, but they can't interpret context.
Live carrier tracking — UPS, FedEx, DHL and Aramex push status updates directly into your shipment timeline. Your spreadsheet doesn't know when the vessel departed.
Vendor performance benchmarks — after 20 RFQs, you can see which forwarder has the best response rate, best pricing, and fewest exceptions. In a spreadsheet, this requires building a separate analytics model.
PDF → RFQ extraction — upload a cargo PDF from your supplier and AI fills the RFQ form. No retyping.
When Spreadsheets Are Still Okay
To be fair: if you run fewer than 4–5 RFQs per month, work with a single forwarder you trust completely, and have no ambition to build freight spend visibility across your organisation — a spreadsheet is fine.
But the moment your team grows, your vendor base expands, or you need to explain freight decisions to management or finance, a spreadsheet becomes a liability.
Compare the full feature set and pricing at logwo.com/pricing. Or see a live demo of how the RFQ workflow works — no signup needed.