Comparison
Freitt vs manual freight quoting
Keep the email, rate sheets and commercial judgement your team already relies on. Compare what happens when the repetitive work between them is prepared automatically.
Last reviewed 10 September 2026Sources
Manual quoting gives an experienced forwarder complete flexibility and requires no new subscription. Nothing needs configuring, nothing can be misconfigured, and an unusual request is handled by the person who understands why it is unusual. It also leaves RFQ detection, rate lookup, calculation, formatting and follow-up dependent on individual attention — which is fine on a quiet Tuesday and expensive in a week where three people are travelling.
Freitt is designed for teams that want to keep those existing tools while moving the repeatable steps into a controlled workflow. It reads a forwarded RFQ, prices it from approved rate sheets, applies configured rules and prepares a reply for a person to review and send. The commercial decision does not move; the reading, searching, calculating and typing around it does.
| Dimension | Manual email and sheets | Freitt |
|---|---|---|
| RFQ intake | A person monitors and triages the shared inbox. | Freitt identifies forwarded requests and opens a quote record for each one. |
| Shipment details | Read from the email and re-keyed by hand. | Extracted from the email body and supported attachments — PDF, Excel, Word and images. Anything uncertain is flagged rather than assumed. |
| Rate selection | A person finds the sheet, finds the lane and checks the validity date. | A valid approved rate is selected and linked to the source row it came from. Expired lines are excluded. |
| Margins | Applied from memory, from a note, or from a formula in someone’s workbook. | Applied from your configured rules by lane, mode and customer, with the rule that fired shown on the quote. Rule-based margins are a Growth capability. |
| Approval | An email to a colleague, a conversation, or nothing at all. | Rules can hold high-value or exception quotes for a named approver before anything can be sent. Approval and routing rules are a Growth capability. |
| The reply | Typed, or copied from the last similar quote and edited. | A customer-ready draft in your own format, terms and validity line. A person reviews and sends it — Freitt never sends on its own. |
| Missing rates | Someone remembers to chase the carrier, or the request goes quiet. | The gap is flagged and a carrier inquiry is drafted. No price is invented to fill it. |
| Setup | None. The process knowledge stays with the people who hold it, which is also the risk. | One working session: map a rate sheet, set the margin rules and the quote format, and switch on one forwarding rule. |
| Cost | No subscription. The cost is the hours, and the requests that are answered too late to win. | Starter $55 and Growth $89 per user per month, 15% lower on annual billing. No setup fee and no per-quote charge. |
Where a source does not answer a question, this table says so. Nothing here is recorded as unsupported on the strength of a vendor not mentioning it.
Step
Manual email and sheets
Freitt
01The email lands
Manual email and sheets:It sits in the shared inbox behind nine other things until somebody opens it.
Freitt:It is recognised as an RFQ and a quote record opens against it.
02Reading the request
Manual email and sheets:Someone reads the body, opens the packing list, and writes the numbers on a pad or into a sheet.
Freitt:Lane, mode, pieces, weight, dimensions, dates and Incoterms are extracted from the mail and its attachments.
03A detail is missing
Manual email and sheets:Either a guess goes in, or somebody writes back — and the request restarts from the beginning when the answer comes.
Freitt:One clear clarification email is drafted, and the quote resumes from where it stopped when the customer replies.
04Finding the rate
Manual email and sheets:Open the workbook, find the tab, find the lane, check the validity date, hope it is the current file.
Freitt:The valid line is selected from your mapped sheets and linked to its source row.
05Doing the arithmetic
Manual email and sheets:Chargeable weight, the band, the minimum, the surcharges and the markup, by hand or by formula.
Freitt:Calculated on the mode’s own basis, with the working shown line by line.
06Applying the margin
Manual email and sheets:Whatever this customer usually gets, as far as anyone remembers.
Freitt:The configured rule for that lane, mode and customer, named on the quote.
07Sending it
Manual email and sheets:Reformat into the house template, attach the terms, send, and remember to follow up.
Freitt:Read the draft, change anything you disagree with, send it from your own email.
08Afterwards
Manual email and sheets:The quote exists in a sent-items folder and in somebody’s memory.
Freitt:Sent, answered, won and lost stay on the desk, by lane and by customer.
Reasons not to choose Freitt.
Genuinely bespoke work.
A project move, an out-of-gauge piece, a charter — anything where the price comes from a phone call rather than a sheet. There is no rate line to select, so there is nothing for a rate-driven workflow to do.
Very low volume.
At a handful of quotes a week, the time spent configuring rules will not be repaid by the time they save. The ROI calculator will tell you that plainly if you put your real numbers in.
Rates that are not written down.
If pricing lives in your team’s judgement rather than in a sheet, get it into a sheet first. That is worth doing whether or not you ever buy software.
No appetite for configuration.
Margin rules, approval thresholds and a quote format have to be decided by someone. If nobody can own that this quarter, manual is the honest answer for now.
Nothing is migrated.
Your inbox, mail host, rate sheets, TMS, quote format and terms all stay exactly where they are. Freitt sits beside them.
What actually gets configured.
One or more rate sheets mapped in their existing layout, your margin rules, your quote format, and one forwarding rule on the inbox.
What does not change.
Who signs off on a price, and who presses send. Freitt drafts; a person on your team sends from your own email.
How to test it honestly.
Run real RFQs, not a demo dataset, and measure the same thing before and after — time from request to sent reply is the one that matters.
On pricing
Manual quoting has no subscription line; its cost is entirely in hours and in late replies. Freitt is priced per person who reviews or sends quotes, never per quote. Current figures are on the pricing page rather than repeated here.
Questions buyers actually ask
That is the failure mode to test for, and it is exactly what the "drafts sent with no pricing edit" measure exists to expose. Run real RFQs during the pilot and watch that number — if your team is rewriting every draft, the rate mapping or the margin rules are wrong, and that is fixable.
No. A template still needs a person to read the request, find the rate, do the arithmetic and apply the margin. Those four steps are the ones being prepared here; the formatting is the easy part.
It says so. Missing or expired rates are flagged and a carrier inquiry is drafted; the quote waits rather than going out with an invented number.
No. The sheets are the input. They are mapped in the layout you already keep them in rather than re-keyed into a new one.
Where every claim came from
Last reviewed 10 September 2026. Every row in the table above carries its own check date in the page source.
See it live
See the same RFQ handled both ways
One request, walked from the inbox to the sent reply. Bring one rate request and the matching rate sheet — we will show you how Freitt reads it, prices it and drafts the reply.
30 minutes · no deck · your rates stay private