Terms of Service

Plain-language terms, kept deliberately short.

What this site is

RateCard Lab publishes research: 3PL fee benchmarks, guides, and analysis, all free to read. The figures are compiled from vendors' own published rate cards, carrier documentation, and named third-party surveys, together with data submitted by readers. The Quote Normalizer Kit is a paid digital product. These terms govern your use of ratecardlab.com and any digital product you buy from us, and using the site means you accept them. If you do not, please do not use the site.

Who we are

RateCard Lab is a sole trader business operated from Mauritius at 24 Dr Roux Street, Rose-Hill, Mauritius, publishing research on third-party logistics costs. Contact: hello@ratecardlab.com.

Not advice

Nothing on this site is legal, tax, accounting, or financial advice. It is research and general information, and it is not a recommendation to use or avoid any provider. Published rates are negotiating inputs, not verdicts. Verify any figure against the vendor's current pricing before you rely on it. Decisions you take about a logistics contract are yours.

Accuracy

We source every figure and record the date we checked it, we re-check rows on the cadence described in the methodology, and we log mistakes on the corrections page. Even so, fee schedules change without notice, published rates are frequently floors rather than the price you will be quoted, and most 3PLs publish nothing at all. We make no warranty that any figure is current, complete, error-free, or applicable to your situation, and you should verify anything material directly with the vendor before relying on it. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it and log the correction publicly.

Using our work

The fee data is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You may copy it, republish it, build on it, and use it commercially, including in a product that competes with ours, provided you credit RateCard Lab, link back, and release any dataset you build from it under the same terms. That licence covers the figures, units, conditions, source URLs and dates in the fee dataset. It does not cover the written guides, the site design, or the Quote Normalizer Kit, which remain all rights reserved.

Two things the licence does not permit, because attribution is the whole of what we ask. Presenting our figures as if you gathered them yourself is a licence breach, not merely rude: the value of a sourced number is that a reader can trace it, and stripping the trail destroys the thing while keeping the digits. And requesting the site at a volume that degrades it for others is not a licensing question at all — if you want the whole dataset, take the file rather than the pages.

The Kit

A Quote Normalizer Kit purchase is a one-time license for use inside your own company: the files are licensed to you, not sold, and one purchase covers use by you and your colleagues. You may not resell, sublicense, redistribute, or publish the files, in whole or in substantial part. The workbook performs arithmetic on figures you enter; its output is only as good as those inputs, and we do not warrant that it will produce a particular commercial outcome.

Payment is handled by a third-party merchant of record, which sells the product to you as reseller and handles applicable taxes. Their terms apply to the payment transaction alongside these. Refunds are covered by the Refund Policy.

Submissions

By sending us a rate card, quote, or invoice you confirm you are permitted to share it with us. Please check your own contract first: some 3PL agreements restrict sharing pricing, and whether yours does is a matter between you and your provider.

Quotes sent for a gap check or quote audit are used only to answer you. They are not added to our dataset or published unless you tell us to.

By submitting a rate card, quote, or invoice to the dataset, as described in how submissions work and the Privacy Policy, you grant us the right to normalize and publish its numbers in anonymized form. We remove identifying details about you and your company before publishing, and we name the vendor only.

Third-party links and disclosure

We link to vendor and carrier pages as sources. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content. We take no affiliate commission, referral fee or payment of any kind from the vendors and services referenced here, and no vendor pays for placement, ranking, or favorable treatment in our data.

Liability

The site and the Kit are provided as is. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits or savings not achieved, arising from use of the site or our products. Our total liability in connection with a product is limited to the amount you paid for it. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and if you are a consumer your statutory rights are unaffected.

Changes and governing law

We may update these terms; the date above changes when we do. Material changes affecting purchases already made will not be applied retroactively. These terms are governed by the laws of Mauritius, and the courts of Mauritius have jurisdiction, without affecting any mandatory consumer protections available to you where you live. Questions: hello@ratecardlab.com.