Carriers make most of their small-business margin on surcharges that are negotiable, waivable, or simply junk — and they count on you not knowing which is which. ShipFair names every line, benchmarks the fair price, and arms you to dispute the rest.
Four of five lines are surcharge. The carrier never said which were optional.
Same package. Same carrier. Same truck. $15.30 was extraction.
A Fortune 500 logistics department gets transparent, surcharge-stripped pricing because it has people whose job is to know the tariff. The bakery shipping forty boxes a month gets rack rate plus every surcharge the system can attach — not because the goods are different, but because the information is. ShipFair closes that gap for everyone below the enterprise tier.
Drop in a rate confirmation, an invoice, or a checkout screenshot. PDF, image, or paste.
Each charge is matched against the Surcharge Atlas and classified: real cost, negotiable, or extractive.
A transparent all-in benchmark for the same shipment, computed from live carrier rate APIs.
A templated dispute letter citing the specific tariff clause, plus where and how to escalate.
A living, public taxonomy of the lines that appear on small-business shipping invoices — what each one is, when it can be waived, and how much it typically costs you. Knowledge that was locked in enterprise contract negotiations, published for free.
ShipFair grows from a free transparency tool any business can use today, to a covenant cities adopt for every SMB in their jurisdiction, to the coordinated local last-mile that turns delivery from a cost into community infrastructure.
Surcharge Atlas, fair-rate benchmark powered by direct carrier APIs, and AI-mediated invoice review that produces a dispute artifact. Free for any small business. This is the institution.
A jurisdiction adopts the ShipFair Fair Trade Covenant — a published transparency standard that declares its local businesses entitled to legible shipping pricing, and points every one of them to free AI-mediated review. Aggregation leverage no single SMB has.
Climate-controlled municipal hold-points and vetted neighbor-courier delivery with photo proof. Instead of paying a national carrier to drive five miles up a country road, the neighbor who rides that road anyway carries the parcel — fewer trucks on the arterial, more dollars staying local.
A business operating in this jurisdiction is entitled to shipping pricing that is itemized, legible, and honest. Where it is not, the remedy is not silence — it is the exhibit, the review, and the dispute.
The maker shipping dozens of boxes a month who suspects the invoice is padded and has no way to prove it. Upload one. Find out in seconds. Dispute with a letter that cites the clause.
Adopt the covenant as economic-development infrastructure. Deployable template, AI-run intake, zero standing cost. Declare a hedge over every SMB in your jurisdiction without rewriting a single tariff.
Farmers market managers, maker collectives, downtown associations. Pool your members' volume into one transparent rate program and a shared local-delivery lane.
Upload your first shipping invoice and see exactly which lines are real and which are extraction. No account required to run an exhibit.