Freightmate
Dispatching, tracking, invoicing, paperwork: running trucks eats an operator's week. Freightmate is trucking operations software that automates that daily work for owner-operators and fleet owners. The founder came to Designli with a working product and fleet customers already on board, looking for more velocity and a more consultative software development partner. Designli now runs product development for the platform as a dedicated team.
Why Freightmate?
Freightmate (freightmateapp.com) is a SaaS platform for trucking operations, a transportation management system (TMS) built for owner-operators and fleet owners. It handles the jobs that soak up an operator's time (dispatching, load tracking, invoicing, and document management) with AI that pulls load details straight off rate confirmations, one-touch driver assignment, and a driver mobile app on the App Store and Google Play. Freightmate's pitch to fleets is direct: save 250 hours per year, per truck.
By the time the founder came to Designli, this was already a working business. Fleets were on the platform and monthly recurring revenue was arriving at a healthy clip. What he wanted was a different kind of development team: more velocity than he was getting, and a partner with its own opinions about what to fix first.
An Impact Week and a SolutionLab came first.
Fleets rely on Freightmate every day, so Designli didn't rush the transition. The engagement started with an Impact Week, Designli's product workshop, followed by the SolutionLab. The dedicated product team took over development from there.
An Impact Week to map the pain points.
The team spent a week working through the product with the founder. The output was a concrete list of pain points: dashboard maps that took far too long to load, gaps in notifications, and reporting that didn't give the operation what it needed. That list set the agenda for the SolutionLab.
A SolutionLab to prioritize and design the fixes.
Designli's proprietary product roadmapping service, the SolutionLab, turned that list into a prioritized plan and finished designs: a rebuilt design system, a redesigned trip page, and improvements to the fleet map, vehicle icons, and trip timeline.
The ongoing UX/UI refresh.
One of the founder's original pain points had nothing to do with code. He wanted a fresh set of eyes on how intuitive the software really was, so UX/UI design stayed part of the engagement after development began.
The SolutionLab rebuilt Freightmate's design system from the ground up, with consistent typography weights, color variables aligned to the brand, spacing standards, and standardized buttons, inputs, tables, and navigation. It also delivered a full trip-page redesign and a dashboard refresh: new icons, status colors per Freightmate's brand guidelines, filters, clickable trip IDs, and a trip progress bar.
Designli's product designers remain on the team, and design reviews are part of the regular cadence.
A dedicated product team.
Designli's dedicated product team took over development: a Product Owner leading day to day, a Technical Leader, React and C#/.NET Developers, a QA Engineer, and a UX/UI Designer. The team runs two-week Scrum sprints with the founder in sprint planning and sprint review, plus a monthly strategic session. With this cadence, the team ships near-weekly production releases.
The team's first recommendation: fix stability before building features. That meant isolated dev and QA environments with CI/CD pipelines and a brand-new production environment built as infrastructure-as-code. The founder rated the deployment experience 5 out of 5.
Performance got the same early attention. The first sprint cut dashboard map load time by about 70%, from roughly 33 seconds to 8, by fixing inefficient queries. Later database index work cut data-retrieval I/O by about 95%.
With the foundation solid, the team turned to the product, and the growth followed: Freightmate onboarded a record number of new trucking-company accounts in a single month, with self-service account creation so the founder can onboard new fleets himself.
Feature spotlight:
live fleet tracking map.
Every asset is tracked by satellite GPS, ELD telematics, or driver-phone GPS, with geofences, color-coded asset status, dynamic ETAs, and automated SMS alerts on geofence entry and exit.
Feature spotlight:
scheduling & dispatch.
AI pulls load details straight off rate confirmations, and drivers are assigned in one touch. A .NET scheduling API creates loads automatically from a fleet partner's scheduling system, on the order of 12,000 loads a year.
Feature spotlight:
invoicing & custom reporting.
Automated invoice creation, plus a purpose-built reporting suite that replaced an off-the-shelf BI tool, with exports load-tested to a million rows.
Everything got much faster - the map renders almost immediately. The team took the time to do it right, and they did it quickly.
The system is working and things are looking successful. Designli has been solid and consistent, and I see this as the first step to more efficient development. We're looking forward to increasing output together.
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