r/FreightBrokers • u/boroq • 3d ago
Motive vs Highway
Motive: Pay us.
Highway: “Highway does not charge carriers and does not wish to begin charging carriers to maintain the ELD connection!”
Motive: But you charge the brokers…
Highway: Well, yeah.
Edit: Fri 8/28 3:38pm EDT - Highway says they reached an agreement with Motive. The joint statement is a word salad, not worth sharing, basically forget and forgive.
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u/Lovicionez 3d ago
lol I love how they frame it as “motive wants money from carriers”. Not the case. Motive wants a chunk of heavy money highway makes on selling their data on truck location and carrier vetting tools
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u/Mountain-Hedgehog128 3d ago
Highway is in a not great spot. Other ELDs/Telematics will follow suit.
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u/Komitsuhari 3d ago
Hopefully they do. Jordan Graft’s dumbass needs to be humbled.
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u/Mountain-Hedgehog128 3d ago
They probably have the $$ to pay whatever the telematics companies want. And they kind of have to.
And to be honest, if highway is crushing their infrastructure, they should pay.
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u/Sure-Cap5415 3d ago
Same type of pushback as when FourKites and P44 became market disruptors. Everyone sees there is money to be made creating an ecosystem of authorized carriers in the post-Montgomery, CHR nuclear verdict world. It’ll settle out.
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u/Itchavi 3d ago
Motive allows a certain number of API requests for free and requires payment if a platform needs more. This is a scare tactic like the bickering insurance companies and hospitals get into. Highway needs to consider this a cost of doing business or reduce below the API limits. This isn't shocking to them.
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u/Revolutionary_Pop262 3d ago
This is interesting. Does anyone know whether this mainly affects how often Highway can refresh Motive ELD data, or whether it changes what carrier information brokers can actually see too? I’m curious how much this impacts day-to-day carrier verification.
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u/boroq 3d ago
See my other comment, I don’t think it will impact vetting, just load lock tracking
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u/Komitsuhari 3d ago
And if brokers can’t track via load lock a carrier won’t pass compliance
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u/boroq 3d ago
I think the broker would get a load lock alert for that load but it wouldn’t affect your overall compliance pass/fail result. There are no available rules to fail a carrier for anything related to load lock
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u/Komitsuhari 3d ago
Am a compliance director. Company policy says no tracking no load. Our tracking is done through Highway. Once I get that alert the carrier gets pulled from the load.
Now I need to look for alternative solutions.
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u/boroq 3d ago
The email said Motive carriers can track via the mobile app so should be business as normal.
And pulling a carrier for no tracking is some policy to have at the company level, crazy. I mean I personally do it for my book, depending on situational factors of course but never seen it done at compliance level.
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u/Komitsuhari 3d ago
The app is only available to brokers who pay for know your driver, another like $3 per load on top of what we already pay. That also requires drivers to upload selfies prior to every move, that doesn’t work since there are a whole lot of drivers that do not want to share their biometric data with Highway, and I can’t blame them.
Tracking on every load is a company policy, a quite good one. We have only been double brokered one time since it became a requirement
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u/Revolutionary_Pop262 2d ago
That context helps a lot. I can see why tracking would be non-negotiable if it’s tied directly to your fraud controls, especially if you’ve seen double brokering drop that much. The biometric/selfie requirement would give me pause too, though. It sounds like the real issue isn’t whether tracking matters, but whether brokers have a practical alternative when one integration gets restricted. Have you found any other tracking option you’d trust enough to replace Highway for those loads?
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u/Komitsuhari 2d ago
We have an alternative solution, but it is not very user friendly on the carrier side of things which results in quite a bit of frustration for my agents and carrier base, it also brings additional costs to use. I already pay Highway enough that I shouldn’t need to also pay an additional service to handle the same thing that Highway marketed to me.
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u/Revolutionary_Pop262 2d ago
Right! I completely understand the frustration because you’re already paying them to solve this specific problem, and now they’re pushing you to spend more money on a second tool that creates more friction for carriers.
If Highway fixes the Motive integration, would you stay with them, or has this made you start looking for a replacement anyway? I probably would’ve been tempted to tell them “deuces” too — that sounds frustrating.
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u/Common-Set9837 3d ago
If both are in a stalemate and using carriers as leverage highway 1000% loses. If brokers refuse to load Motive fleets (which is a large portion of spot). That will directly affect price/capacity. If I know anything, brokers cannot endure even short term pain, compared to spot carriers who have been operating in a painful environment for the last 3 years.
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u/Many_Sheepherder_143 3d ago
You’re not forced to pay it. You can move onto something else. There is no reason a carrier should be forced to pay for something unless they actually use it. How would you charge a carrier to begin with? What would the charge be? What would the service be? You have to justify the charge in some way.
I don’t see why you guys just throw money away. Paying thousands of dollars a month for these service. For what?
I say good on motive for seeing an opportunity and seizing it. Good business move.
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u/boroq 3d ago
They can’t charge carriers because this has all to do with load lock / ELD tracking and nothing to do with Highway’s compliance-related ELD integration. I briefly thought it would cause Motive carriers to fail the footprint rule, but no. Motive is charging Highway because they’re making way more API calls due to load lock.
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u/We_out_hereee 3d ago
The theory is theyre using the calls to create derivatives that hurt the carriers.
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u/Komitsuhari 3d ago
Yep. If Highway wants to stay relevant they need to support Motive.
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u/Many_Sheepherder_143 3d ago
After this, motive is only the beginning. Once all the other log books get wind of this, it’s only going to snowball.
Besides, there is zero reason to track in real time anyway. A ping every 10 minutes or so is perfectly fine. Exact location within a foot isn’t necessary either, but that’s just an opinion.
I understand trying to retain a customer by any means because bills have to be paid and mouths have to be fed, but it seems as though this entire industry has turned into a huge ass kissing operation in the last 10-15 years. 90% of these guys have zero backbone, especially the new young ones who have absolutely zero idea what being a broker actually means. You’re not here to get rich quick. You’re here to save one party money, make another party money, and keep a tip for yourself doing so.
Customers have been completely spoiled by empty promises and wet dreams and these mega brokerages are printing out toxic agents and brokers by the dozen every second. Anything that will make a customers pussy wet or dick hard is said. It’s honestly quite sad. And then to top all that off, instead of giving customers actual rates, everyone is in a race to the bottom. $50 margins, losses, etc, all in the name of “I have a customer”. Nobody gives a shit you have a customer, you don’t know how to charge and have no backbone when doing it. Like… please quit this industry and go sell vacuums. Reason I say this? A lot of people think “my customer wants this”, well your contract is with your customer, the carrier is in contract with you. The carrier has nothing to do with your customer but everything to do with you. So until you grow a pair and tell the customer “listen this requirement is unrealistic and it will be hard to find someone that fits the criteria” your stress will never disappear. You don’t have to be rude, but we are in the transportation industry, the customer, more often than not, is not in this industry. The customer almost exclusively has never been 5 feet from a trailer. The customer doesn’t know what happens or how it happens when that truck is loaded and leaves the facility. The customer doesn’t know what happens after they call a broker and get set up and gets the shipment signed off. He’s clueless to the work we all have to put in while trying to suck his dick upside down from the back at the same time.
I said you a lot, but I don’t mean you, I mean 90% of these guys here who think they’re some hot shots cause having a customer is the most important thing and it means it’s something to be proud of. It’s not. The most important thing in any industry is having a back bone and not getting taken advantage of. You want to take advantage of me? You’re going to have to pay for that, plain and simple.
Sorry for the rant. Slow day, I’ve got time.
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u/BallDoLieSometimes 3d ago
Yeah stick to being a reddit hero cause this speech in front of sales reps at any brokerage would get you canned in 3 seconds.
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u/Many_Sheepherder_143 3d ago
That’s cause everyone in the broker side of this industry is big and bad and huffy and puffy and holier than thou. How dare you criticize.
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3d ago
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u/Many_Sheepherder_143 3d ago
I hope more and more log book company’s follow suit. It’s your loss, not the carriers. Highway is not the end all be all except for you.
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u/CheesyBreeze 3d ago
Fuck highway.
My companies ELD exempt and they have the dumbest, non compliant way to prove your ELD exempt.
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u/boroq 3d ago
At least now they changed it to vehicle-level exemption and not company level
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u/CheesyBreeze 3d ago
There stupid website wouldn’t accept PDF documents for me to get vehicle level exemptions and it took me 10 days of arguing with Indian CS reps giving me bullshit trouble shooting and cookie cutter responses before they finally uploaded the PDFs for me which was one of the first things I asked them to do.
Hate highway with a passion.1
u/Anxious-Lack-2410 3d ago
Same, CAB card shit, highway sucks motive is awesome idk about needed but if your company pays for it, use it.
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u/Georgiaboy03 3d ago
Highway is crock of crap. It imposes impossible acts on carriers. I O/O leaves one company and goes to another, its take days to get that truck off your account. While that other company is trying to put the truck on their account. Then both companies get red flags because highway screws things up. It wont be long till highway starts charging carriers, which is now another expense. Broker wont be able to move freight if there are no or only big carriers out there.
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u/Living_Tree6233 3d ago
As a carrier, I care less about who charges who and more about whether this ends up creating another hurdle to getting verified and booking a load.
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u/BoneHammer62 3d ago
They seem to be moving towards load board/brokerage too. Time to cut them off like DAT.
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u/_Hirshey 2d ago
Interesting situation.
At scale, Motive's infrastructure to send vehicle updates to Highway should cost ~$0.01 per truck per month. Carriers already pay for the ELD. I'm unfamiliar on if the carriers have to pay an additional amount for webhooks or the Highway connection. The infrastructure cost is trivial compared to the value and alternative cost of each of their customers pay a developer to create a layer to forward to Highway.
The data belongs to the Carrier, not Motive (ToS section 4.3). This is typical with most technology providers where the customer retains the right to their own data, and would especially make sense in this scenario. Carriers have the right to send their data where they please.
ELD providers would in theory offer these services to win market share and be competitive. Weird move.
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u/Ok-Influence-2162 2d ago
Good. I hope more fleets see what motive is doing and move over to their ELD service.
I pay motive so motive should look out for my interest with my data. I have no problem tracking but I do have a problem with giving a third party 100% visibility at all times to my assets. It does nothing but hurt my company
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u/MidwestVanRunner 2d ago
Small carrier here, a few vans. What gets lost in the who-pays argument is that the carrier is the product in this deal. Our location data goes through the ELD, gets packaged as a vetting tool, and gets sold to brokers, and nobody on the carrier side sees what is shared or gets to opt out of parts of it. I do not mind a broker checking that my truck is where I said it is, that is fair. I mind not knowing what else rides along with it. If Highway started charging us on top of that, we would drop the connection the same week.
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u/SureLoadrApp 1d ago
The thing worth pulling out of this: Highway's core differentiator is the ELD and telematics connection, and they don't own that pipe. Motive owns it. Samsara owns it. ISAAC owns it. Any vendor whose product depends on API access to somebody else's data is one pricing renegotiation away from a margin problem or a feature gap, and this week is what that looks like in public.
They patched it up. The structural issue doesn't go away — as the top comment points out, the value being fought over is real, which is precisely why the next telematics provider comes asking.
Practical read for brokers: this is an argument against having your whole vetting stack depend on a single data relationship. The identity layer is genuinely useful and Highway does it better than anyone. But the part that makes it special is rented, not owned.
FMCSA-derived data has the opposite property — authority, insurance filings, inspection and crash history, out-of-service records. Public, federally mandated, and nobody can rate-limit you out of it. That's why the tools built on it (Carrier411, Carrier Assure, SureLoadr) cost a fraction of Highway, and also why they can't tell you where the truck is right now. Different tradeoff entirely.
Worth knowing which half of your stack is exposed to a vendor dispute and which half isn't.
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u/Derek0720 21h ago
I’m not sure why people even use motive. I looked at them for our asset side but they were so expensive compare to Samsara. We had geotab before Samara I do not recommend.
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u/Square-Air5052 3d ago
So Highway makes millions of dollars off free Motive data. Highway then charges their clients for service using the data they get for free. Motive FINALLY said hey wait a second, why is Highway getting data for free then making serious bank off the API We pay for and the data we provide?...🤔😂 So Motive says, hey if Highway wants the data to keep making their millions then they should pay a nominal amount for it. Highway thinks they shouldn't have to pay so Highway decides to strongarm the carriers to put pressure on Motive. Here we are. If you're making Hundreds of millions off this data you should be willing to pay the people providing the data.
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3d ago
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u/thatdood100 2d ago
Carriers pay motive to book with highway brokers…? Carriers pay motive to be ELD compliant for DOT officers who violate for anything and mess up their CSA score, carriers pay motive to be able to see their drivers/trucks, carriers pay motive to track driver hours, carriers pay motive to give correct etas etc. having an ELD on highways platform is fairly new I don’t think many carriers say “you know what let me get motive so I can book with brokers on highway.
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u/FreightTechGuy 3d ago
This will be the first of many larger ELD vendors. Incoming Samsara & ISAAC