Load Guardrails is open infrastructure. Any qualified freight broker, 3PL, or logistics platform can run loads on it, and your commercial model stays yours. What changes is that vetting and visibility become properties of the record rather than work your team does by hand; a funded settlement layer is planned as an opt-in capability.
Before you can tender a load to a carrier, the carrier has to clear the checks on file. The decision is deny-by-default: reject on any hard failure, route to review on any soft flag, and only an approved carrier can be tendered.
| Gate | Checks | On failure |
|---|---|---|
| Authority 49 U.S.C. 13902 · SAFER / L&I | Active, authorized for property, entity type is carrier, no out-of-service order, MCS-150 recency | Reject. A carrier holding only broker authority is flagged as double-broker risk. |
| Insurance 49 CFR 387.9 · ACORD 25 | Active auto liability ≥ $1,000,000 and active cargo ≥ $100,000, effective today, evidenced by certificate | Reject, with every reason listed: expired, under limit, no active policy. |
| Packet | W-9, certificate of insurance, signed broker-carrier agreement, authority letter; voided check collected for remittance | Reject until complete. |
| Fraud flags | Authority under 180 days, free-mail domain, no phone on file; identity triangulation across MC, name, phone, email domain, address | Review. No tender until cleared by a person. |
| Carrier | Decision | Reason | Tender |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branville Trucking LLC · usdot:1593734 | Approve | Authority active 800 days, $1M auto + $100k cargo active, full packet | open |
| Redline Expedite | Reject | Auto liability expired day 900 | closed |
| Ghost Logistics | Reject | Entity is a broker, not a carrier (double-broker risk) | closed |
| Brand New Freight | Review | Authority 40 days old; free-email domain | closed |
Example output from the broker vetting gate. Each decision is written to the broker's own field, append-only.
The infrastructure ensures every participant is who they say they are and every event is recorded once; in the planned opt-in funded layer, every settlement executes as specified. What you charge, how you structure fees, and how you run your business remain entirely within your domain.
The broker slice holds the shipper, the carrier, and your margin. The shipper reads its cost; the carrier reads its rate. Your margin is a line on the record for the parties entitled to it, not a secret and not a public number.
In the planned opt-in funded layer, your margin settles at settled from the funds the shipper prefunded before pickup — no quick-pay program to run, no factoring to arrange for carriers, no collections.
The broker-carrier agreement is a signed record between your address and the carrier's: insurance requirements, cargo liability, payment terms, versioned as it changes.
Any qualified freight broker or 3PL can run loads on Load Guardrails, bring its carriers onto Load Guardrails accounts, and keep its own commercial model. Regular brokers that keep their solicitation clauses, third-party agreements, and existing contracts are as welcome as brokers that don't — Load Guardrails governs identity and the record, not your commercial terms. Unbroker is one broker on the network, no different from any other.
When a carrier comes to you, you set it up with a Load Guardrails account — created if it's new to the platform, matched if it already has one. From then on the carrier's account, its loads, and its record live on Load Guardrails whichever brokers it works with, so it never re-files the same packet for the next broker.
When a shipper and a carrier want to go direct, the switch is a recorded, consented novation written to the load with all three consents: the prior broker's margin claim ends and a shipper-to-carrier direct grant is issued. Whether you offer it, on what notice, and at what buyout are your own commercial terms — Load Guardrails takes no position on notice periods, fees, or non-solicitation. The record enforces only that a bound load can't be silently re-brokered and that a margin stays visible to the parties entitled to see it.
Integrating Load Guardrails doesn't mean replacing your TMS. Today the HTTP API lets a broker or platform authenticate as its entity, resolve and look up entities, read the public directory, manage its connections, post freight on behalf of a connected shipper, and create agreements and introductions — every call gated by the same deny-by-default policy the parties are.
Load creation and the deed lifecycle over HTTP are not yet available. The fold-based deed and the lens-gated, per-shipment data model are the platform's architecture, not a live HTTP surface you can call today. See the developer reference for the exact endpoints available now and an honest account of what is not.
Not a live HTTP API today — this is the deny-by-default deed policy the platform is built toward. The endpoints you can call now are on the developer reference.
| From → to | Shipper | Carrier | Receiver | Broker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| created → funded | allowed | denied | denied | denied |
| funded → accepted | denied | allowed | denied | denied |
| accepted → picked_up | denied | allowed | denied | denied |
| picked_up → in_transit | denied | allowed | denied | denied |
| in_transit → delivered | denied | denied | allowed | denied |
| delivered → settled | system, after both releases clear | |||
In the planned deed lifecycle, one object replaces the EDI 204 / 990 / 214 / 210 / 997 loop — tender, accept, track, invoice, and acknowledge become transitions on one record rather than messages to reconcile. Per-entity credentials and the full integration contract are shared ahead of launch.
B) or forwarder (F) authority. It becomes your address.Carriers use Load Guardrails free; brokers and shippers pay for the platform's paid capabilities; pricing is published before those capabilities launch.
Brokers, 3PLs, and platforms: get on the interest list and we'll share the integration contract and the vetting configuration ahead of launch.
Join the interest list