Built for the cargo the marketplaces will not quote.
Instant freight pricing solved standard boxes on well-traded lanes. It solved nothing for hazardous, bulk, out-of-gauge or regulated cargo, where the routing is a judgment call and the price is whatever someone tells you. That is the market we are building for.
Three things we believe, and one we are testing.
Freight pricing is efficient where it is visible and terrible where it is not.
Standard containers on well-traded lanes are close to a commodity market, with several platforms competing to shave the margin. Move one step off that path, into hazardous, bulk, out-of-gauge or regulated cargo, and the visibility disappears. There is no published rate, no benchmark, and no way for a mid-size exporter to know whether the number in front of them is good.
The gap is a compliance problem wearing a freight costume.
What makes this cargo hard is not drawing a line between two ports. It is hazard classification, import registration regimes, permit sequencing, packaging law, inspection risk and screening, and the fact that these differ on every routing you could pick. That is why the marketplaces will not quote it, and why a lookup cannot answer it.
The route options matter more than the rate.
Ask a forwarder for a price and you get a price for the route they run. The saving that matters is usually in a routing nobody offered you: a different port, a land leg across a border, a mode split, a chokepoint avoided. Those options can be generated and scored from public data. The prices for them cannot, which is why we do both.
Neutrality is the product, not a marketing line.
The moment we take a commission from a forwarder, our recommendation is worth nothing and everyone reading it knows. So we do not. It costs us the larger revenue line and buys us the only thing that makes the report worth paying for.
Whether a mid-size industrial exporter will pay real money, before shipping, to see every way their cargo can move, what each way risks, and what the market charges for it. Everything else is downstream of that one question, and we would rather answer it in eight weeks with paying customers than in eighteen months without.
Too complex for self-service. Too small for a procurement team.
Our customer ships enough that freight is a real line in the margin, and not enough to employ people whose whole job is buying it. The owner or the export manager does it personally, usually at night, usually by email, usually to the same three forwarders.
They are in Türkiye, the Gulf, North Africa and Southeast Asia. They move chemicals, minerals, metals and industrial raw materials. They are opening markets they have not served before, or running lanes nobody has re-tested in years.
If that is not you, we will say so. We are not useful on standard containers over well-traded lanes and we would rather tell you than take the fee.
Talk to us before you brief anything.
If you are not sure whether your cargo is a fit, a fifteen minute call will settle it faster than this website will.
Founding cohort
Qualifying industrial exporters get the first report free while we build the rate library. We ask for thirty minutes of honest reaction in exchange.
Start a reportEverything else
Partnerships, forwarder enquiries, press, or a question this site did not answer.
hello@routeworld.ai
Route World is at prototype stage. This site describes the service we are testing, not a live operation, and the email address above is illustrative.