Carrier onboarding for small freight brokers

B2BWeb1 monthNext.jsPostgresFMCSA APIStripe

The idea

Small freight brokers onboard carriers through email attachments, a manual FMCSA website lookup, and hope. With double-brokering fraud now an existential threat, sloppy vetting is how a small brokerage loses a 30k load and its reputation in the same week. The incumbents, MyCarrierPackets and Highway, solve this well but charge setup fees plus per-carrier pricing that a broker moving 20 loads a week openly resents.

The wedge is flat pricing plus an opinionated automated vetting pass. The MC-number-first flow that pre-fills the packet from FMCSA data is the moment the product sells itself: the carrier does less typing and the broker gets a scorecard instead of a folder of PDFs.

Who pays

The broker pays a flat 99 dollars a month, unlimited carriers, which undercuts incumbent per-carrier pricing for exactly the sub-50-loads-per-week segment the incumbents price out. The buyer is the owner or the ops manager doing onboarding themselves. Distribution: freight broker Facebook groups, r/FreightBrokers, broker training communities (the freight broker course ecosystem is large and constantly minting new one-person brokerages that need this on day one).

MVP scope

  • Hosted carrier packet: W-9, insurance upload, banking/factoring, e-signed agreement
  • FMCSA auto-pull by MC number with immutable snapshots
  • Automated vetting scorecard against broker-set insurance minimums
  • Nightly authority and insurance lapse monitoring with email digest
  • Skip for v1: TMS integrations, load boards, fraud-network data sharing between brokers, carrier-side accounts
// Build prompt — paste into Cursor / Claude Code / Lovable / Bolt
Build PacketDock, carrier onboarding software for small freight brokers. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Postgres via Prisma, the FMCSA QCMobile API for safety data, Stripe for subscriptions.

Core flow: a broker sends a carrier an onboarding link at /onboard/[broker-slug]. The carrier enters their MC number first; the app immediately pulls FMCSA data (legal name, authority status, safety rating, out-of-service flags) and pre-fills the packet. The carrier then completes: W-9 fields, insurance certificate upload with producer contact and expiry dates, banking or factoring details, and e-signature of the broker's carrier agreement (render the PDF, capture a drawn or typed signature, stamp name/IP/timestamp into the final document). Submission runs an automated vetting pass: authority active, no out-of-service order, insurance meets the broker's configured minimums (default 1M auto liability, 100k cargo), MC age over a broker-set threshold. Result is a red/yellow/green scorecard.

Pages: broker /dashboard (pending packets, flagged carriers), /carriers (searchable list with vetting status), /carriers/[id] (full packet, documents, FMCSA snapshot with re-check button), /settings (agreement upload, insurance minimums, branding), public /onboard/[broker-slug] as a multi-step wizard that saves progress per step.

Implementation details: nightly job re-checks authority and insurance expiry for all active carriers and emails the broker a lapse digest; store each FMCSA response as an immutable snapshot so the broker can prove what the data said on onboarding day.

Pricing: flat 99 dollars/month, unlimited carriers, aimed at brokers under 50 loads/week. Stripe checkout, 14-day trial.

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