# Marcus Delgado, VP of Operations at Redrock Freight Solutions (DFW, ~40 employees) — read of logistics-cost-optimization-ai, May 20, 2026 > 14 years in freight, running a team of 35 that moves about 3,200 shipments a month. Stack is McLeod TMS, project44 for visibility, and too many carrier portals open in Chrome. Coach my son's 4th-grade flag football team Saturday mornings, which means I am never, ever available Friday afternoons. --- ## How I got here Searched "AI carrier rate optimization tools 2026" after getting blindsided by a 22% rate jump on our Chicago-to-Atlanta lane in March. Didn't catch it until it had been locked in for six weeks. That stings. This came up on page two, below a FreightWaves article and some Transporeon content. Clicked through expecting an actual product with a demo button. --- ## What I clicked first The hero number: "18% Average cost reduction within 90 days." That's the first thing I read on any logistics SaaS. My immediate reaction was: average across what? What shipment sizes? What carrier mix? What baseline? Truckload, LTL, parcel? Because 18% on parcel is a different conversation than 18% on contracted truckload where I'm already negotiating quarterly. The number is doing a lot of work with zero sourcing underneath it. The second line that caught me: "2,400+ Routes analyzed per shipment." I don't know what that means. I ship FTL and LTL across about 80 lanes. I don't have 2,400 routes per shipment. Is this a parcel product? An enterprise play? This number felt like it was picked to sound big. --- ## Where I paused The honest disclosure block near the bottom. Specifically this: "we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." I had to read that twice. This isn't a product. It's an idea kit. The whole page is selling me a $5 dossier and a $99 code starter. I came here looking for software I could put in front of my ops manager next week. This is a different category entirely and I didn't realize it until halfway down the page. That's either a page architecture problem or I'm not the target reader, and I genuinely cannot tell which. --- ## What I distrusted A few things stacked up fast. First, the "Zero Changes to service levels or terms" promise. Anyone who has integrated a rate optimization layer into a live TMS knows that "no process changes" is almost never true. Carriers have to be configured. Contract terms have to be mapped. Someone has to own exceptions. The copy here papers over the actual work. Second, I scrolled to the bottom ICP section expecting to see "freight forwarders and 3PLs" since that's who the hero targets. Instead: "CS leaders and revops at $10M to $100M ARR SaaS with measurable churn problem." That's a completely different buyer. That's not me. That's not anyone at my company. The template copy wasn't swapped out, which means either the page was assembled quickly or nobody checked it against the hero section. Either way it's a flag. Third, the Fermi math is right there on the page: "$-52,400 Year-1 take-home" and "1 in 10 meaningful-success odds." I respect the transparency, but if I'm being asked to evaluate adopting this product, being told upfront it has a 10% chance of working is not a selling point. That's the founder hedging. I understand why they're doing it. It still reads as "we think this probably won't work." --- ## What would convince me If this were a real product and not an idea dossier, I'd want one thing: a screenshot or export showing actual before/after data on a real lane for a real shipper. Not a logo wall. Not a testimonial quote. An actual rate comparison, redacted if needed, showing what the system recommended versus what the shipper was paying. Lane, carrier, rate differential, date range. Something I could hand to my CFO and say "this is what the system found." The contract renegotiation intel feature is actually interesting to me. I need leverage when my annual reviews come up with our top three carriers. If the tool could show me "you're paying 14% above market rate on this lane based on spot benchmarks," that's a conversation I could have. But there's nothing on the page showing what that output actually looks like. --- ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The hero says "built for freight forwarders and 3PLs who ship daily" but the ICP section at the bottom of the page names SaaS companies and churn. Which one are you actually building for, and has the product ever been used in a freight context? 2. What does the TMS integration actually look like for McLeod or MercuryGate? Is this an API pull, a file export, a middleware layer? Because "one-click adoption" and "no process changes" means something very different depending on the answer. 3. The pricing says "you pay only when the system saves you money." How is savings calculated and who audits it? Because if your system recommends a carrier and the shipment damages, does that count against the savings number? --- ## Verdict: dismissive Not because the problem is wrong -- rate sprawl and blind spend are real and I live with them -- but because this isn't a product I can actually use. It's a business idea for sale, and I found out after investing five minutes into reading a page that looked like a product. The ICP copy mismatch at the bottom sealed it: nobody in the freight world read this before it went live. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-20. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*