DrayMaster

DrayMaster PRO is a B2B SaaS platform for drayage and intermodal trucking companies, the logistics operators who move shipping containers between ocean ports, rail terminals, and inland destinations. Drayage sits at the intersection of maritime shipping, rail freight, and over-the-road transport, and its pricing is unusually complex: rates depend on service territory, mileage bands, point-to-point flat rates, fuel surcharges, accessorial charges, and terminal-specific surcharges, all varying by metro area and by terminal. A single carrier may operate across dozens of metros, each with multiple ports and rail yards from operators like CSX, NS, BNSF, CN Rail, and others.

The platform centralizes the workflows that drayage carriers and freight brokers perform daily: managing tariffs, configuring terminal pricing, responding to competitive bids, and quoting time-sensitive spot loads. Before DrayMaster, these workflows lived in disconnected spreadsheets, phone calls, and email chains, with no shared record of pricing and no structured way to compare quotes. The project existed to replace that fragmented ecosystem with a single pricing intelligence platform that could hold the real-world complexity of drayage operations while staying usable for the people running them.

Drayage carriers and freight brokers work inside a fragmented, labor-intensive pricing ecosystem, and four connected problems defined the work:

The core tension was holding genuine operational complexity, dozens of territories, hundreds of lane pairs, multi-line-item pricing, without pushing that complexity onto pricing analysts, operations managers, and brokers already working under deadline pressure.

The solution was a single pricing intelligence platform built from four integrated modules that cover the full lifecycle of drayage pricing, from tariff setup to competitive bid submission to real-time spot quoting. Rather than treat pricing, bidding, and quoting as separate tools, the design connected them around a shared, territory-first model that mirrors how drayage operations are physically organized.

Manage Sell Rate is a terminal pricing assignment tool. Operators select terminals by geography (city, state, zip, or radius) and assign pricing tiers, terminal surcharges, fuel surcharges, and accessorial groups, then bulk-edit many terminal assignments at once. Tariff Management is a comprehensive tariff creation and viewing system organized by service territory: carriers create and edit tariffs with mileage-banded rates, define point-to-point flat-rate overrides for specific city or ZIP destinations, set active date ranges and pricing tiers, upload bulk rate data by spreadsheet, and view all tariffs across territories with status, active dates, and rate summaries.

Match the product's structure to the operation's structure. Drayage pricing looked overwhelming until it was organized the way the business physically works, by service territory and terminal. Committing to a territory-first architecture early meant that configuring pricing, mapping lanes, and managing tariffs across dozens of metros all shared one coherent mental model, and the domain complexity stopped fighting the interface. The lesson was that in a deeply specialized domain, the fastest way to legibility is to mirror how practitioners already think, not to impose a cleaner but unfamiliar abstraction.

Decision support beats data entry on high-stakes surfaces. The Assign Rates view could have been a plain form, but the real problem was not entering rates, it was deciding them well under competitive pressure. Surfacing statistical context at the moment of pricing changed the tool from a place to record a number into a place to make a defensible call. On surfaces where the user's decision carries real money, showing the context behind the decision is worth more than streamlining the input.