Freight brokers have heard plenty of automation pitches over the past four years. Most arrived while a downturn that started in April 2022 squeezed margins. Brokers grew wary of any new software line item without a clear payback.
Tabi Connect, an AI-powered pricing platform headquartered in Miami, is betting brokers will trust a calculator more than a sales pitch. The company just launched a free ROI Calculator. It estimates what manual quoting is costing a brokerage before it books a demo.
What the Calculator Actually Does
FreightWaves’ June 2026 State of the Industry report found broker margins remain compressed. That holds even as the market shows early signs of rebalancing.
That leaves brokers being asked to adopt new tools at the exact moment they can least afford an unproven one. What a broker wants to know first is whether the tool pays for itself.
Tabi’s calculator asks for a handful of numbers specific to a brokerage’s own operation. Those include broker headcount, average annual pay, quotes handled per broker per day, current win rate and average revenue per load.
From those inputs, it calculates two outcomes. One is labor cost reclaimed through automation. The other is additional margin generated from an improved win rate.
“Every broker we talk to has already done this math in their head, they just haven’t seen it on paper,” said Ricky Gonzalez, CEO and co-founder of Tabi Connect. “We built a calculator. Plug in your own numbers and get your own answer, not ours.”
A Miami Company Built From a Broker’s Own Frustration
Gonzalez spent more than 20 years in transportation logistics before founding Tabi Connect, including running his own brokerage. He spun the company off in 2023 after co-founding Hubtek, a separate logistics technology firm.
Tabi Connect’s headquarters sits inside a WeWork in Brickell. It is a fitting address. The company was built to serve brokers and shippers working in Miami’s own freight and logistics corridor.
Tabi Connect’s platform now supports bids on more than $29 billion in freight annually. The company says more than 100 customers use it, including several of the top 100 transportation companies in North America.
That customer base gives the ROI calculator something most freight-tech launches lack: an existing track record to point to. The claims are not hypothetical for the brokers already running quotes through the platform every day.
Why a Calculator Instead of a Pitch Deck
Gonzalez said the calculator reflects a broader shift after four years of thin margins in the industry. Brokers no longer take a vendor’s word for a return on investment. They want to see their own numbers first.
“What we’re seeing from early users is that the number is often bigger than they expected…” Gonzalez said. “Once you combine the labor savings and the win-rate gains into one figure.”
The calculator itself takes under a minute to use. It requires no sign-up, a deliberate choice meant to lower the barrier for a skeptical audience.
The Bigger Pitch
Tabi Connect’s underlying platform centralizes quote requests from several sources. Those include shipper transportation management systems, APIs, robotic process automation workflows and email, all funneled into one system.
It replaces manual data entry with AI-driven business rules that brokers can update in plain English, according to the company. A pricing rule that once required a developer ticket can now be rewritten by the broker who owns the account.
The company argues that its scale makes the calculator’s numbers real rather than theoretical. It says the labor and win-rate gains are already happening across its existing customer base, not just in a spreadsheet projection.
Whether that argument convinces a broker who has been burned by automation promises before is a separate question. That answer will depend less on the sales copy and more on what the calculator shows once real numbers go in.