CargoWise repriced. What a small brokerage can actually do about it

If you run a small brokerage on CargoWise, the last few months have probably involved a conversation you did not plan for. The move to the Value Pack licensing model reached the large majority of customers at essentially the same time, and the reported increases have ranged from uncomfortable to genuinely disruptive, with plenty of operators describing jumps well beyond what they had budgeted.

A caveat before anything else: most of the numbers circulating are self-reported by users in forums and trade press. They are directionally useful and not audited. Your own invoice is the only figure that matters, and the first job is to read it properly.

First, work out what actually changed

Before deciding anything, get three numbers on one page.

What you paid per month, before and after. Not the headline licence figure alone. Include the modules you did not previously pay for separately and any usage-based line that moved.

What you pay per entry. Divide the monthly total by the entries you filed last month. This is the number that makes the increase comparable to everything else on this page, and most brokerages have never calculated it.

What the software actually does for you. Be specific. Rate management, accounting, customs filing, tracking, the EDI connections. Write down which of those you would genuinely have to replace.

That third list is usually shorter than people expect, and it is what determines whether any of the options below are realistic.

Option one: migrate off

The honest version of this option is that it is expensive and slow. You are moving years of shipment history, re-establishing EDI connections, retraining people who know the current system's quirks, and absorbing a period where your team is slower. For a brokerage filing a few hundred entries a month, that is a project measured in quarters.

It is the right answer for some firms. It is rarely the right first answer, and it is almost never the fastest way to get the number down.

Option two: negotiate

Worth doing, and worth doing with the per-entry number in hand rather than a general complaint about the increase. Multi-year commitments, module rationalisation and timing against your renewal date are the levers that exist. What you are unlikely to achieve is a return to the previous model, because the pricing change was structural rather than an adjustment aimed at you.

Budget a week, expect a modest result, and do not build a plan around it.

Option three: absorb it and raise your rates

Entirely legitimate, and more common than people admit. The problem is that your customers are under the same cost pressure, and a per-entry fee increase is the most visible thing on an invoice. If you go this way, go deliberately, and know what your gross margin per entry is before and after.

Option four: reduce what the software has to be used for

This is the one that gets skipped, and it is usually the one with the shortest payback.

A large share of what a brokerage pays for is not the filing itself. It is the labour of getting data into the system to be filed. The document packet arrives by email, in a different format from each supplier, and somebody keys 50-plus fields per shipment: importer and consignee, MID, seller, HTS, value, freight, insurance, origin, container references, line items.

Industry figures put that at roughly 45 to 60 minutes per US import entry. US job postings for the role that does it advertise somewhere around 24 to 36 dollars an hour. Multiply that by your monthly entry count and compare it against the increase on your software invoice. For most small brokerages the keying cost is the larger of the two, often by a wide margin, and nobody sends an email about it because it arrives as a salary rather than as a price change.

The uncomfortable comparison

The software repricing is annoying because it was sudden, visible and outside your control. The keying cost is invisible because it has always been there.

But the second number is the one you can move without a migration project. You do not have to change your filing system, retrain your team on a new interface, or move a decade of history. You change what arrives at the keyboard: instead of a packet of four inconsistent PDFs, a structured record already mapped to the fields your entry system expects, with the disagreements between documents flagged for a person to resolve.

That is a smaller change than switching platforms and it addresses a larger line item.

What to do this week

1. Calculate your cost per entry, for software and for labour, separately.
2. Count how many entries in a typical month go through without anyone having to correct anything. That is your real straight-through rate.
3. Ask whoever does the keying which document causes the most trouble. It is usually the packing list or a supplier whose invoice format changes monthly.

Those three numbers tell you whether the repricing is your actual problem or just the one that sent an email.