Highway alternative for freight brokers: when each makes sense

May 20, 2026 · 11 min read

TL;DR

Highway is the enterprise-grade carrier identity and fraud detection platform. It solves a real problem and solves it well. VettedHaul is a litigation-defense documentation tool priced for small and mid-size brokers. Different jobs, different price points, and surprisingly often you want both. Here is when each makes sense, where they overlap, and what the migration or addition looks like.

What each tool actually does

Highway built its reputation on carrier identity verification and fraud detection. The pitch: stop double-brokering, catch fake carriers using stolen identities, and verify that the carrier on your rate confirmation is actually the carrier hauling your load. Highway has raised more than $100M and serves a heavy enterprise broker book. The product surfaces include identity verification, fraud signals, carrier scoring, and a network effect from shared broker intelligence.

VettedHaul exists to document carrier vetting in a way that survives a deposition. Post Montgomery v. Caribe Transport, every broker can be sued for negligent hiring of a carrier. The broker who can produce a signed, timestamped, subpoena-ready record of FMCSA safety rating, CSA scores, insurance currency, and operating authority at the moment of booking is in a different legal category than the broker who cannot. VettedHaul captures and locks that record for every load.

These are not the same job. Highway is about which carriers you let through the door. VettedHaul is about what you can prove you checked when one of them caused a wreck.

Where Highway wins

Identity fraud and double-brokering. Highway's proprietary identity-verification network is genuinely difficult to replicate. If fraud is your biggest exposure, Highway is the right call.
Enterprise broker books. If you book 5,000+ loads per month with a dedicated compliance team, Highway's deeper workflow and integrations earn the price tag.
Network intelligence. Highway aggregates signals across many brokers. A carrier flagged by Broker A surfaces for Broker B. That is real value at scale.
Carrier scoring beyond FMCSA data. Behavioral signals, performance data, and proprietary risk indicators that go beyond what is publicly available.
TMS integrations. Highway plays cleanly with enterprise TMS stacks. If you run McLeod, MercuryGate, or BrokerWare, the integration depth matters.

Where VettedHaul wins

Litigation-defense documentation as the headline feature. No competitor sells this explicitly. Highway, RMIS, MyCarrierPortal, and Carrier Assure all sell efficiency. VettedHaul sells the evidence pack you produce when a demand letter arrives.
Price point. $99/month Defender, $249/month Defender Pro. Highway's sales-led pricing for a comparable feature set runs an order of magnitude higher. Small and mid-size brokers struggle to justify Highway's number until they have already had a claim.
Audit trail signed at booking. VettedHaul captures FMCSA data, insurance certificate, and authority status at the moment of booking and locks the record cryptographically. A spreadsheet row or a screenshot in a Google Drive folder is not the same artifact in front of a jury.
Underwriter-aligned. Contingent auto liability underwriters increasingly ask brokers to document their vetting process. VettedHaul produces that document by default.
Solo and small-team friendly. No long sales cycle, no required onboarding professional services, no enterprise contracting. Sign up, capture your first carrier record in 10 minutes.

An honest comparison

Feature	Highway	VettedHaul
Carrier identity verification	Best in class	FMCSA-data baseline
Fraud / double-brokering detection	Proprietary network	Out of scope
FMCSA + CSA + insurance + authority snapshot at booking	Yes	Yes
Continuous carrier monitoring	Yes	Yes (weekly)
Cryptographically locked per-load audit trail	No	Yes
Subpoena-ready PDF + JSON evidence pack	No	Yes
Self-serve signup	No (sales-led)	Yes
Entry price	$1,500-$2,500/mo typical	$99/mo
Enterprise TMS integrations	Deep	Defender Pro tier
Network intelligence across brokers	Yes	No (single-broker scope)

The case for using both

For brokers above ~3,000 loads per month with material exposure to identity fraud, the right answer is often Highway plus VettedHaul, not Highway or VettedHaul. They solve different problems.

Highway prevents the bad carrier from getting through your door. VettedHaul documents that you checked the carrier before you opened the door. The first is a control. The second is the evidence the control was in place.

Highway will tell a defense lawyer how you vetted the carrier. VettedHaul will hand the defense lawyer a stamped PDF the same day the demand letter arrives, with the FMCSA snapshot, CSA scores, insurance certificate, and authority status as they stood at the moment of booking. Those are complementary artifacts.

The case for VettedHaul instead of Highway

If you are a broker with fewer than 1,000 loads per month, no in-house compliance team, no enterprise TMS, and your fraud exposure is low because you book a known carrier roster repeatedly, Highway is over-engineered for you. The price tag does not pay back on the work it does for your specific risk.

Your real exposure post Montgomery is not double-brokering. It is a single tractor-trailer crash on Interstate 70, a plaintiff's lawyer subpoenaing your vetting records, and you producing a spreadsheet a junior at the firm tears apart in two pages of cross-examination.

VettedHaul at $99 a month captures the record that prevents that outcome. That is the right tool for the job at that scale.

The case for Highway instead of VettedHaul

If you are losing material money to double-brokering and identity fraud, and your defense is mostly "we know our carriers" rather than "we have documentation," Highway is the right call. Identity fraud is an immediate, recurring, out-of-pocket loss. Litigation exposure from negligent hiring is a tail risk. Both are real. Address whichever is bleeding faster first.

Most brokers above $50M in annual gross revenue land on Highway for this reason. The fraud savings alone usually justify the spend. VettedHaul can layer in later for the documentation problem.

What switching or adding actually looks like

Migrating from Highway to VettedHaul, or running them together, is straightforward in practice.

Decide which question is bigger. Fraud loss per quarter versus litigation exposure per claim. If your insurer is asking pointed questions about your vetting documentation, that is a signal litigation is the bigger question for you right now.
Map your current carrier list. Export from Highway, or from your TMS, or from a spreadsheet. Active carriers in the last 12 months are the priority list.
Start capturing new loads in VettedHaul day one. Every new booking creates a locked record. You do not have to backfill historical loads.
Decide on continuous monitoring overlap. If you keep Highway for fraud, let it continue monitoring. VettedHaul monitors weekly for the four litigation-defense data points. Redundancy is fine; the two systems answer different questions.
Update your carrier vetting process document. The one you will hand to your insurance underwriter. Reference both tools and what each provides. Underwriters reward documented process over tool-name dropping.

Pricing reality check

Highway does not publish pricing. Reported deal sizes in 2025-2026 for small-to-mid brokers run $1,500-$2,500 per month for the core product, with enterprise contracts substantially higher. The wholesale-broker network has indicated quotes climb when fraud signals or specific load classes are added.

VettedHaul prices are public. Free tier (5 carrier vets per month, lookup only, no audit-trail export). Defender at $99 per month (unlimited vets, continuous monitoring, PDF audit-trail export, weekly compliance digest). Defender Pro at $249 per month (everything plus API and TMS hooks, multi-user RBAC, white-label legal evidence pack).

At founding-customer pricing, the math is simple. One avoided legal-defense hour at $400-$600 covers a month or two of VettedHaul. One avoided fraud loss at $200,000 covers Highway for years. Both can pay back; the question is which loss type you are actually exposed to today.

The bottom line

Highway is good at what it does. It is not a competitor to VettedHaul in the strict sense; it solves a different problem at a different price point for a different buyer.

If you are a small or mid-size broker who has not built a defensible carrier vetting record yet, the question is not Highway or VettedHaul. The question is whether you have any documented vetting at all, and whether what you have would survive a deposition. VettedHaul exists to make that answer yes. Join the waitlist to lock in founding-customer pricing.