Most brokerages don't price out their own quoting workflow. They know the labor is expensive. They feel the lost deals. They don't usually sit down with a spreadsheet and put the per-quote unit cost on paper.
When you do, the number that comes out is uncomfortable. The average manual freight quote takes about 30 minutes of coordinator time. Fully loaded, salary, benefits, software seat, training, management overhead, that's roughly $19 per quote. And 43% of your sales team's day is going into producing that line item.
The hidden cost: unconverted quotes
If you respond to 5,000 RFQs a year and convert 30%, you're paying $19 × 5,000 = $95,000 in labor to produce 1,500 won loads and 3,500 unconverted quotes. The unconverted ones cost you $66,500. Not in lost margin, in fully sunk cost. Money you spent producing quotes that became air.
This is the math that drives most brokers to either (a) get pickier about which RFQs they respond to, or (b) push for portals/forms that compress quoting time. Both are rational. Both have problems. Picking only the "good" RFQs means you stop quoting small shippers, who tend to grow into bigger shippers. Pushing forms drops your response rate because shippers won't fill them out (see our other post on this).
The third option
The third option is to drive the marginal cost per quote toward zero. If a quote costs $1 instead of $19, you can answer every RFQ, including the small ones, including the ones that will never convert, and the unit economics still work. Your coordinators stop doing data entry and start doing the consultative work that actually wins relationships.
At 5,000 quotes a year, the math goes from $95,000 in labor to $5,000 in per-quote fees plus $6,000 in platform cost = $11,000 total. The $84,000 difference goes back into either bottom-line margin or a senior broker hire who works on the deals that genuinely need a human.
What the spreadsheet looks like
For a broker doing 20 RFQs a day, manual quoting runs about $47,500 a year in labor at the 30 minutes per RFQ rate. Status quo also costs you margin: shippers awarding to faster competitors means roughly $156,250 a year in margin you never see.
Simple Freight on the same profile: $6,000 platform + $5,000 in per-quote fees = $11,000 total annual cost. Faster response wins back the $156,250 in margin. Net upside vs. status quo: about $192,750 a year. That works out to 17.5× ROI on the investment, on the default profile.
The math works at five quotes a day. It gets better at twenty. And every shipper who notices that you respond inside a minute is a shipper who sends you the next RFQ first.