There is a graveyard of customer portals in this industry. Every TMS launched in the last decade shipped one. Most are still on the marketing site. Almost none of them get used by the actual shipper paying for the load.
The reason isn't engineering. The portals work fine. The reason is that the shipper's job is not to log into your portal. The shipper's job is to move freight. Their workflow lives in Outlook, in Gmail, in a thread with three people CC'd. The moment you ask them to leave that workflow and authenticate into a separate system to fill out a form, you've added friction to the part of their day they care about least.
What the data says
Surveys of mid-market shippers consistently find the same thing: 60–70% of RFQs go out via email, even when a portal is available. The portal usage rate among shippers who have one provisioned is often under 15%. The remaining 85% revert to "just email it to my broker."
The brokers who win the load aren't the ones who push hardest on the portal. They're the ones who reply quickly to the email.
The middleware bet
If you accept that email is the durable interface, the question becomes: how do you serve a structured quoting workflow on top of an unstructured input medium? That's the bet Simple Freight makes. Not "convince shippers to change." Not "build a better portal." Just "meet them where they already are, and translate."
There's a quieter benefit, too. The brokers we've worked with stopped sending the awkward "please use our portal" follow-ups. The relationship gets less transactional, not more. The shipper experiences a faster, cleaner response to their existing workflow, which is, again, what they actually wanted in the first place.
"Meet them where they are" in practice
It means parsing the kind of email that reads "2 plts @ 500lbs each, residential drop, need it Friday" and turning that into a structured quote request without anyone manually re-keying it. It means writing back when something's missing, "happy to quote that, can you confirm the destination zip?" in plain professional language, without a portal link in sight.
Portals were a bet on shippers changing. That bet hasn't paid off in 15 years. Time to take a different one.