Freight pricing was built for a world where a truck is either yours or someone else's. You look up the lane, check the rate table, add a fuel surcharge and send a quote.
That model has nothing to say about the truck that is already driving to Houston with half its trailer empty. The truck is going anyway. The diesel is already burning. The real question is what it costs to add your freight to that trip, right now, without putting any delivery already on board at risk. That is the question Juno answers.
What a price has to know
When Juno prices a partial load, it is answering four questions at the same time:
- Where is the space? Which trucks have open positions on a route that passes near the pickup and the delivery.
- What does the stop cost? The extra miles, the extra minutes and the cost of running the truck for that time.
- Does the schedule survive? Whether every delivery already on board still lands inside its window.
- Will both sides say yes? What the shipper would pay anywhere else, and what makes the stop worth it to the carrier.
A broker answers those by calling around, which takes hours. Juno answers them in seconds, from live data.
The five signals
Live signals
- Capacity open space, position, route
- Identity authority, insurance, equipment
- Demand lanes, pallets, weight, handling
- Market quotes, bookings, acceptances
- Operation schedules, hours, dock windows
Juno
- Finds trucks with open positions
- Checks every delivery window holds
- Prices the detour and the stop
Outputs
- Price including the detour
- Plan vehicle and stop order
- Action booked, or sent for approval
Oway. Signals are read with each operation's permission.
Juno works from five groups of live signals:
| Signal | What Juno reads |
|---|---|
| Capacity | Open space, position and route of every vehicle on the network |
| Identity | Operating authority, insurance and equipment for every carrier and vehicle |
| Demand | Origin, destination, pallets, weight, class and handling requirements |
| Market | Real quotes, bookings and acceptances across the network |
| Operation | Schedules, facility hours and dock windows, with permission |
Out the other side come three things. A price that includes the cost of the detour. A plan that says which truck takes the freight and in what stop order. And an action: the booking itself, made directly or sent to a person for approval.
An example
Take a 53-foot dry van rolling south from Dallas to Houston with 13 of its 26 pallet positions open. By pallet positions, that is a load factor of 50%, close to the American average for a loaded truck.
A plant near the route needs 13 pallets moved the same direction. Juno checks the carrier's authority, insurance and ELD connection, confirms that the weight and the space fit, and works out the detour: about six miles and eleven minutes off the route, with the Houston delivery still on time.
Before: 13 of 26 positions full
After: 26 of 26
A 53-foot dry van from Dallas to Houston with 13 of 26 pallet positions full picks up 13 more pallets for a 6.2 mile, 11 minute detour. The Houston delivery stays on time, the shipper pays 33 percent below market and the carrier earns 20 percent more on the lane.
Illustrative example based on a typical Oway Rideshare move.
Because the truck was making the trip anyway, the shipper pays well below market and the carrier earns revenue on space that would otherwise have run empty. In our illustrative version of this trip, that comes out to a shipper rate 33% below market and 20% more revenue on the lane for the carrier. Juno prices, checks and books it in seconds, and the truck's load factor goes from 50% to 100%.
Guardrails come first
A fast price is only useful if it is safe to act on. Juno adds a stop only when the existing delivery windows hold. Every action runs inside the scopes the operation's owner grants. Anything that commits money or changes a plan can require a person's approval, and every decision is logged with what Juno saw and what it did. We would rather lose a quote than cause a missed dock appointment.
How we measure it
We hold Juno to four measures:
- Price accuracy. The gap between Juno's price and the real cost of the work.
- Win rate. How often a price is accepted, by lane and by how long the lane has been active.
- Latency. The time from request to price.
- Plan quality. On-time performance and added distance for every inserted stop.
Building this taught us that a good price depends most on knowing where the trucks are and how much room they have, minute by minute. For most of trucking history nobody had that information. Then a federal regulation put a connected device in nearly every cab in America. That story is next. You can read more about Juno on its platform page.
