How Cargoplex's No-Daily-Cap Free Tier Works
How Cargoplex's No-Daily-Cap Free Tier Works
The freight marketplace category has a dirty secret. Almost every "free tier" is one of three things in disguise:
1. A 30-day trial with auto-billing the moment the trial ends. 2. A daily cap ("8 routes per day") that throttles the moment you actually need it. 3. A feature gate where the basic features are useless and the unlock is paywalled.
We didn't want to ship that. So Cargoplex has a free tier that is actually free, forever, with no daily route cap, no auto-conversion, no feature gate on core matching. This post explains how that works in practice and how we make the unit economics close.
What the free tier covers
If you are a carrier, broker, shipper, or agent on Cargoplex, the free tier gives you:
- Full marketplace access: post loads, browse loads, contact counterparties.
- No daily cap on browses, posts, or matches. Run as much as you want.
- Standard support (community + ticket queue, 24-48h response).
- Standard SLA on data freshness (~15 min refresh on lane data).
The Pro and Priority tiers add things that genuinely cost us money to deliver: real-time DAT integration, priority support, exclusive premium loads, and the broker-spread workflow tooling. Those tiers are the ones that pay for the platform. The free tier is the ground floor — and the ground floor stays free.
Why "free" is a real product strategy, not a marketing trick
We made the call that the floor of Cargoplex should not be a wall. There are two reasons for that.
First, the freight market got harder for owner-operators every year from 2020 to 2025. Lane rates compressed. Detention pay got slower. Insurance climbed. The last thing a small carrier needs is another tool that says "you can't post your fifth load today, please upgrade." A platform that gates the basics during a downturn is a platform that loses goodwill exactly when goodwill matters.
Second, the network effect on a freight marketplace is supply-side. If we want shippers to post good loads, we need a deep, fast carrier pool. The fastest way to a deep carrier pool is to make the entry-level free, no friction, no surprise bill.
So free is not a customer-acquisition trick. Free is the structural commitment that keeps the network alive.
The unit economics
Here is roughly how the math works. (Numbers rounded, not investor-grade — we are still small.)
- A free-tier user costs us roughly $0.18/month in compute, storage, and data costs amortized.
- A Pro subscriber pays ~$24/month and costs us ~$1.10/month to serve. Net contribution ~$23.
- A Priority subscriber pays $99/month and costs us ~$3.50/month. Net contribution ~$95.
- The free-to-paid conversion target is 4–6% over 12 months.
- At 4% conversion, every 100 free users produce 4 Pro and ~0.3 Priority subscribers, contributing about $120/month against ~$18/month cost. Net positive at the 4% conversion rate.
The math says: as long as we keep conversion above ~1% over 12 months, the free tier is profitable to run. We expect well above that, because the free-tier user is already a freight professional — they are not a casual signup, they need this every week.
What we will never do to the free tier
We've seen too many platforms erode the free tier over time. A list of things that we are publicly committing not to do:
- We will never add a daily route cap to the free tier.
- We will never auto-convert a free-tier user to paid without explicit, in-app consent.
- We will never gate core matching, posting, or browsing on the free tier.
- We will never sell free-tier data to third parties.
- We will never charge a per-driver upcharge on the Pro or Fleet tiers.
If we ever break one of those, you have a rant license to write it up publicly. We will not dispute it.
How to use the free tier well
If you are a small carrier or single-truck owner-operator, the free tier covers a lot of what you actually do day-to-day. The Pro upgrade makes sense when you start hitting the workflow features — broker spread tracking, DAT live rates, multi-driver dispatcher, agent commission dashboards. If you are not using those, you do not need to upgrade.
We tell the truth about that, even though it is bad short-term sales advice, because we want the platform to last.
How to sign up
Go to sultanfreight.com/cargoplex (Cargoplex marketplace UI rolling out in stages; if the carrier portal is not yet live in your region, the marketplace API is available for partner integrations). Email is enough. Magic-link login. No credit card.
— Ramses Lara, founder, TruckerProfit Inc., a Sultan Freight Logistics company