Carrier Rate Compare & Selection

The problem this kills

Most warehouses default to "the carrier we always use." It feels efficient. It quietly bleeds money.

Every outbound shipment has a genuinely cheapest compliant option once you account for its weight, dimensions, zone, service level, and the surcharges and dimensional-weight rules baked into your negotiated rate tables. But nobody has time to look that up shipment-by-shipment, so clerks pick from habit. Over a month, the overpayment is real and invisible.

The other half of the problem is trust. Even when someone does shop the rate, there's no record of why a carrier was chosen, no guard against picking a carrier the customer forbade, and no second set of eyes before labels print. One wrong service level on a time-critical order undoes a month of savings.

What you'll build

A small, secure internal web app that does the boring math perfectly and keeps a human firmly in charge:

• Import shipments to rate from a CSV or Google Sheet.
• Store your rate tables and zone matrix per carrier and service.
• Compute the landed cost for every carrier and service level for each shipment, including surcharges and dimensional weight.
• Rank the cheapest compliant option, honoring service-level requirements and any customer-required carrier.
• Show a shipping lead a clean review screen; nothing gets committed until they approve.
• Export an approved ship plan as a CSV, plus a carrier-ready file in the exact columns your downstream system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), which then builds the tool with you step by step.

It opens by interviewing you about your business - your carriers, how your rate tables are actually laid out, your zone logic, your service rules, your volumes, and your messy exceptions - and reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up before it builds anything. That's the difference between a tool that fits your operation and a generic template you have to fight.

From there it walks through the full build: the database, the import, the rating engine, the ranking and compliance rules, the approval gate, and both exports - each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a spreadsheet macro. It's an internal tool built to be trusted:

• Login so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own shipments and rates.
• A complete audit trail - who rated, who approved, which option won, and when.
• A hard human approval gate - the tool drafts a recommendation; a shipping lead reviews and approves; only then is the ship plan committed and exportable.
• Duplicate guards so the same shipment in the same rate run can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

Shipping clerks, logistics coordinators, and cost analysts who own outbound freight cost and are tired of defaulting to one carrier - and who want a defensible, auditable record behind every carrier choice.

You don't need to be a developer. You need your rate tables, a sample shipment export, and an afternoon or a weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the build to your warehouse.