U.S. less-than-truckload rates are climbing again after two soft years. Carrier attrition, tightening capacity and regulatory pressure on driver supply have flipped the market back toward carriers. Shippers who spent 2023 and 2024 enjoying a buyer's market are walking into a rate environment with less leverage and less information than they’ve had in years. The industry's answer cannot be more opacity.

A freight network has a peculiar property that most industries do not share. Every additional pallet routed through a crossdock fills a truck that would have left anyway. Every additional shipper on a lane makes it denser, and denser lanes are fundamentally cheaper to operate than thin ones. This is a cost curve that compounds. The more freight that moves through shared infrastructure, the less each unit of freight costs to move. The industry hasn’t been structured to let shippers feel it, but the compounding value exists.

In traditional freight, carriers and brokers absorb efficiency gains as margin. When a lane gets denser and cheaper to operate, automation reduces handling costs, or routing improves and trucks fill up, the operator keeps the savings. The shipper sees a rate card, not a cost structure, and has no way to know what changed or why. The compounding value of the network flows upstream into carrier margin rather than downstream into shipper savings.

This is why "we've gotten more efficient" rarely shows up as a lower invoice. The efficiency is real. The beneficiary is structural. And the structure compounds in a second way: Proprietary portals, custom integrations, and opaque pricing create switching costs, so shippers stay even when the model stops serving them. The longer you stay, the harder it is to leave.

There’s a model that inverts this, and freight doesn’t have to invent it, because software already did. In open source, quality improves as more people contribute, and costs go down because no one extracts rent. Linux runs most of the internet because thousands of organizations contribute to the same kernel, and all of them benefit. Llama and other open-weight artificial intelligence models are reshaping their industry because the collective investment in open infrastructure pays off for every participant, not just the host. Opening a network creates value faster than closing one can protect margin.

Open source freight is the same principle applied to logistics. The economics are open: a network structured so the compounding value of more freight, more lanes and more density flows back to the shippers who created it, rather than being captured as a widening spread between cost and rate. A rising tide, in a properly structured freight network, lifts every shipper on it. The more shippers that participate, the cheaper the network becomes for everyone. And in a network run on open economics, a shipper can watch that happen in real time on its own invoices.

This isn’t an arrangement most incumbent carriers can offer, even if they wanted to. Legacy cost structures, thousands of existing bilateral rate agreements, and public-market earnings pressure make pass-through economics commercially impossible for most of the LTL industry. A publicly traded carrier whose margins tighten as its network improves would face immediate shareholder consequences. The rising-tide model is only available to networks built from scratch on automation-native infrastructure, with shareholders patient enough to underwrite long-term commitments that public carriers cannot.

The obvious objection is the one every shipper eventually asks about any platform: What happens when it gains market power? Amazon began as a marketplace for everyone, then built a private-label business on top of its sellers. OpenAI started as a non-profit committed to open research, then became one of the most guarded labs in AI. Build on open principles, gain share, close the gates: a freight network structured on shared density doesn’t have this exit. Closing the network would destroy the density that makes it cheap. The openness is structural, not philosophical, because the economics break down the moment the shared-infrastructure logic fails.

The move to shared-value networks in freight will come from challengers, as it almost always does when the incumbent business model depends on the very thing the new model fixes.

The useful question for shippers is which network structure lets them participate in the gains their own volume creates. In a closed broker model, a shipper's growth subsidizes someone else's margin. In an open network, that same growth lowers the shipper's own cost base and that of every other participant on it.

Freight has been treated for a long time as a commodity negotiation. It’s actually a network, and networks reward the participants who understand they are in one. The next decade of freight will be defined by shippers who stop asking for a better rate and start asking to be part of a better network. The operators who can offer the second thing will define the standard. Everyone else will spend the decade explaining why the tide never lifted them.

Troy Lester is chief revenue officer and co-founder of Warp.