A DAT Alternative
That Starts At Nothing
If you are looking for a DAT alternative, start with the honest part: DAT carries far more freight than we do and has decades of rate history behind it. What we do differently is the commercial model, the board is free to use with no card, the paid tiers are flat monthly fees you cancel in one click, and we never take a percentage of your freight. If what sent you searching was the bill rather than the board, that is the part worth reading.
Where Each Board Actually Wins
Where DAT One is better
- Load volume. DAT is the largest load board in North America and it is not close. On a thin lane on a thin day, that difference is the whole product.
- Rate history. Their analytics are drawn from an enormous base of transactions, which is why brokers quote DAT numbers at each other in negotiations. A new board cannot manufacture twenty years of data.
- Broker familiarity. Almost every brokerage already posts there, and many post there first.
- Depth of tooling. Carrier monitoring, factoring integrations, TMS connections and market analytics that a board our size has not built yet.
Where One Load Board is better
- A free tier you can judge the board on. The whole board, every equipment type and three offers to send, with no card and no clock running. Rates, lane matching and alerts start on Pro.
- No commission, ever. The rate on the board is the rate you invoice. Our only income is the flat subscription.
- Flat pricing with no per-seat surprise: Pro is $49 a month for one truck and Fleet is $120 for up to five, which works out at $24 a truck rather than $49 each.
- Cancel in one click from the dashboard. No notice period, no cancellation fee, no form, no phone call.
- Brokers and shippers post free, permanently. They are the supply this board runs on, so charging them would only thin the freight carriers came for.
- Every equipment type on one account, from cargo van to lowboy, changing what you run never means changing plans.
DAT One Pricing, And Ours
Their figures are read from their own published pricing page, not from a summary. Prices change, check theirs before you decide.
DAT One
- DAT One Standard
- $59 / month
- DAT One Enhanced
- $149 / month
- DAT One Pro
- $169 / month
- DAT One Select
- $259 / month
- DAT One Office
- $339 / month
- No free tier for carrier load board access, the entry plan is the entry price.
- Access is per user, so a dispatcher who needs their own login is another subscription.
- Rate analytics sit on the higher tiers. Check which tier carries the feature you are actually buying it for.
Read from DAT’s pricing page on .
One Load Board
- Free, 3 offers
- $0
- Pro, one truck
- $49 / month
- Fleet
- $120 / month
- Pro, billed yearly
- $350 / year
- Fleet, billed yearly
- $720 / year
- No commission on your freight, on any plan.
- No application fee and no card to see the board.
- Brokers and shippers post free, permanently.
- Cancel in one click, no notice period, no fee.
DAT One vs One Load Board
| Feature | DAT One | One Load Board |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No | Yes, full board, no card |
| Entry paid plan | $59 / month | $49 / month |
| Commission on your freight | None | None |
| Rate visible before you call | Varies by posting | On every posting |
| Cancel | Check your plan terms | One click, no notice period |
| Cost for brokers to post | Paid plans | Free, permanently |
| Load volume | Largest in North America | Smaller, we are new |
| Historical rate analytics | Deep, decades of data | From our own board only |
Load volume is the one row where we lose outright, and it is left in rather than left out. A board that costs nothing and has nothing on your lane has not saved you money.
Who should stay on DAT
If your business depends on being able to find freight on any lane on any day, DAT is still the answer today and pretending otherwise would waste your time. The same is true if you negotiate against brokers using lane rate history, their data set is the reference point the whole industry argues from, and a two-year-old board cannot substitute for it.
That is a genuine recommendation, not a rhetorical one. A load board that costs you nothing and has nothing on your lane has not saved you money.
Who should look at us instead
The people who write to us are usually one of three. Owner-operators paying a monthly subscription in a soft market and struggling to justify it. Drivers running small vehicles, cargo van, sprinter, box truck, who found the big boards priced for a fleet and stocked for a semi. And people who wanted to look at a board before paying to look at a board, and could not.
All three of those are answered by the same thing: the free tier here is the product with a speed limit on it, not a locked door. You get the full board, every equipment type and the rate on every load. What you do not get is the alert the instant a load posts, free accounts receive matches on a delay, and paid ones do not. On the loads worth having, that delay is usually the whole difference, which is an honest reason to upgrade rather than a manufactured one.
The pricing difference is structural, not a discount
Sitting at $49 for Pro is not us undercutting anybody, it is close to the market anchor, deliberately. The difference is what happens on either side of it. Below it, there is a free tier with no card and no expiry date. Above it, Fleet at $120 covers five trucks rather than adding a feature you were previously denied, so the upgrade happens because your business grew rather than because we withheld something.
Our full price list, including the annual rates, is on the pricing page, and there is no tier above Fleet waiting to be quoted.
What we are not claiming
We are not claiming more loads, better rate data, or that DAT is bad. It is a serious product with a serious data set and a lot of carriers use it happily. We are claiming a different commercial arrangement: free access as a permanent tier, flat prices, no commission, no contract, free posting for the brokers and shippers whose freight you came for. Whether that is worth switching for depends entirely on which of those was the problem.