Per-Truck TMS Pricing vs. Owning Your TMS: What a 20–100 Truck Fleet Really Pays

Ask ten trucking software vendors what their TMS costs and most will answer with a monthly price per truck or per user. It sounds small: a few dollars a day per truck. But the bill grows every time you add a truck or hire a dispatcher, it never stops, and at the end of it you own nothing.

This article lays out the math so you can compare the two models with your own numbers.

How subscription TMS pricing works

Most TMS products for carriers are priced in one of three ways:

• Per truck (or per asset). Commonly somewhere around $15 to $50 per truck per month, depending on the product and the modules.
• Per user (or seat). A monthly fee for every person who logs in, often $100 or more per user per month for full-featured products.
• A base fee plus extras. A monthly platform fee, with users, integrations or modules such as IFTA, accounting or a driver app on top.

Prices vary a lot, and vendors change them. Use your own quotes in the formula below. The structure matters more than any single number.

The three-year math

Take a simple example: $30 per truck per month, with no per-user fees and no add-ons. That's a mid-range figure, not any particular vendor's price.

• 20 trucks: $600 a month, $7,200 a year, $21,600 over three years.
• 50 trucks: $1,500 a month, $18,000 a year, $54,000 over three years.
• 100 trucks: $3,000 a month, $36,000 a year, $108,000 over three years.

Add a few users at a per-seat price, a fuel or IFTA module and an annual price increase, and the real figure is usually higher. And on the first day of year four, you start paying again.

What owning your TMS costs

Ella is sold differently: you pay once for a system built for your company, and you own it, code and database included. Here's how that adds up:

• $17,000 one time for the base system, which covers dispatch, loads, tracking, fleet, safety, maintenance, fuel and tolls, settlements, documents, reporting and recruiting.
• Running costs on your own card. The database and AI services run on accounts in your company's name and are billed by those providers, not by us. Our illustrative budgets for the database and AI run from about $55 a month for a small fleet to about $450–$650 a month above 100 trucks, depending on fleet size and the AI model and speed. Hosting, maps, email, SMS and connected services are separate.
• Support is optional. The first three months are included. After that, support is $299 a month if you want it, and changes are quoted per request.
• No per-truck and no per-user fees from us, ever. Adding 30 trucks or five dispatchers doesn't change what you pay us.

For a 50-truck fleet, three years of ownership with optional support for the whole period comes to roughly $17,000 + about $3,400 in database and AI + about $9,900 in support, or around $30,300 before hosting and connected services. The same fleet pays $54,000 in the subscription example above. The gap widens with every truck you add and every year you keep the system.

The costs that don't show up on the price list

• Leaving. Many subscriptions make it easy to get in and hard to get out. Ask how you'd export loads, settlements and documents, and in what format.
• Integrations. ELD, fuel card and factoring connections are sometimes priced separately. Ella connects your first ELD and your first factoring company free.
• Workarounds. When the software doesn't fit how you work, people fill the gap with spreadsheets. That's labor you pay for every week.
• Price increases. A subscription price is only fixed until the vendor changes it.

When a subscription is the better choice

Owning isn't right for everyone. A monthly subscription can make more sense if you:

• Run fewer than 20 trucks. Ella is built for fleets of 20 and up, and at smaller sizes the subscription math is often fine.
• Need software next week, not in a month. A custom build takes three months, with the base running in the first 30 days.
• Don't want to make any decisions about how the system works and are happy to adapt to someone else's.

If you're past 20 trucks, growing, and tired of paying more every time you grow, owning your TMS is worth a serious look. See the full pricing, or read how to choose a TMS first.

Frequently asked questions