Under about 25 trucks, most TMS platforms are either too big or too expensive, and almost none of them publish a price. Below are five that genuinely suit small carriers, with real numbers where the vendor publishes them and a plain statement where they don’t.
How this was put together
Numeo makes one of these products, so here is the method. Every price below was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on 28 July 2026 — none is an estimate, and where a vendor publishes nothing the table says exactly that rather than guessing a range. Each entry lists where that product beats Numeo, because for a real chunk of this audience one of them does.
Published pricing, side by side
TMS
Published price
Best for
Numeo One
$10/truck/mo (Basic), $15/truck/mo (Pro). Roughly 30% less annually.
Carriers whose bottleneck is dispatcher hours, not record-keeping.
Small fleets that want flat, predictable billing and straightforward record-keeping.
Truckbase
From $290/month (published minimum, billed annually).
Growing carriers who want a modern system of record with minimal data entry.
AscendTMS
Basic $69/user/mo, Premium $119/user/mo, Pro $149/user/mo. No set-up fees, no contract periods, 30-day free trial.
Fleets with many trucks and few dispatchers — per-user pricing gets cheaper as the fleet grows.
Toro TMS
Not published — demo required. no public price
Small teams running frequent short-haul work.
Where per-truck pricing stops winning
Numeo One bills per truck, so the cost scales with the fleet. Flat-tier products don’t. That crossover is real and worth doing before you pick:
Fleet size
Numeo One Basic
TruckingOffice Basic
2 trucks
$20 / mo
$25 / mo
5 trucks
$50 / mo
$55 / mo
8 trucks
$80 / mo
$90 / mo
15 trucks
$150 / mo
$90 / mo
25 trucks
$250 / mo
$90 / mo
Somewhere around nine trucks, TruckingOffice’s flat tier becomes the cheaper line item and stays that way. If the only question is the monthly invoice, that is the answer. The reason carriers still move is that the two products do different work: one keeps the records, the other reduces the hours a dispatcher spends finding and negotiating the freight in the first place. Compare against a dispatcher’s time, not against $90.
The five in detail
Numeo One
$10/truck/mo (Basic), $15/truck/mo (Pro). Roughly 30% less annually.
Carriers whose bottleneck is dispatcher hours, not record-keeping.
Every module on every plan — dispatch, accounting, fleet, safety. No tier-gating.
Searches 15+ load boards and broker portals in one place, and drafts the rate email
Free Chrome extension to try it inside DAT before paying anything
Layers on top of an existing TMS rather than replacing it
No driver settlements
Per-truck pricing overtakes flat-rate plans as the fleet grows
Cheapest possible monthly bill, 10+ trucks: TruckingOffice. Its flat $90 tier beats per-truck pricing and it publishes every number.
A modern system of record, 25+ trucks: Truckbase. The $290 floor stops mattering at that size and the product is built for carriers.
Dispatcher hours are the constraint: Numeo One. If someone is spending the day on load boards and broker email rather than on paperwork, that is the problem this solves — and the free Chrome extension lets you test the claim before paying.
Short-haul, high-frequency work: Toro TMS is built for that shape, though you will need a demo to get a price.
It depends which problem you are solving. If you need cheap, predictable record-keeping above about 10 trucks, TruckingOffice publishes a flat $90/month Basic tier that is hard to beat on price. If dispatcher hours are the constraint — someone working load boards and broker email all day — Numeo One is built for that and starts at $10/truck/mo. Truckbase is the stronger modern system of record once you are past roughly 25 trucks.
Published rates for carriers under 25 trucks run from about $25/month flat to $290/month minimum, and several vendors publish nothing at all. A 10-truck fleet can reasonably expect $90–$150/month. Be wary of any comparison quoting a specific price for a vendor that does not publish one.
AscendTMS has historically been the free-tier option in this category, though its pricing page now renders client-side so it cannot be verified without visiting directly. Numeo Spot is free permanently — it is a Chrome extension rather than a full TMS, but it is a way to test load search and broker negotiation without paying anything.
A useful test: if your problem is that you cannot find the load or the invoice, you need a TMS. If your problem is that finding and negotiating the freight eats the day, a system of record will not fix it — that is a dispatch-automation problem. Plenty of carriers run both, keeping their existing TMS and layering automation on top.
