AboutPre-launch
We are building DrayBase in public
DrayBase is a TMS for container drayage, built next to one working carrier instead of from a market study. This page is the whole story: where it comes from, what runs today, what does not, and who you would be signing with.
01Where it comes from
One carrier, NY / NJ
The operation runs Newark, Elizabeth, Port Liberty NY. It belongs to a founder's father, which is the only reason we get to sit inside a real drayage business instead of surveying one from outside — watching the day go sideways at the gate, not reading about it.
- What we know
- Comes from two places: that operation, and taking apart, screen by screen, the drayage TMS it pays for today. It is not a field study across many carriers, and we are not going to dress it up as one.
- What we do not know
- Every port has its own gate rules, chassis pools and terminal habits. NY / NJ is the market where we can check an answer the same afternoon. Everywhere else we intend to ask before we build.
- Customer Zero
- That same carrier is meant to be the first tenant. It has not been migrated yet — no loads, no rates, no history moved across. When that happens, this page will say so, and what moving actually took will be written down.
- Why not a general TMS
- Because the money in drayage lives in the parts a general freight system treats as notes: last free day, per diem, chassis splits, street turns, dual transactions. Model those as first-class or you are running a spreadsheet with extra steps.
02The inventory
What is written, and what is not
The line between built and planned is the only thing on this site we treat as sacred. Everything below runs against a real Postgres database, on a development seed built to look like a NY/NJ week — two carriers, terminals, boxes and moves. No carrier's live data is in it, because none has been migrated.
- Dispatch board
- Reads loads, moves, containers, chassis, drivers, customers and terminals onto one dense table, filtered and sorted server-side. It is read-only today: you can look at the day, you cannot change it yet. How the board works.
- Derived status
- The status column is not a field somebody types. It is derived from which leg is active and how far along it is, with the container's holds overruling everything — and a hold stops blocking the moment the box is gated out. The rule is one function in a shared package: the API derives the status, the screen only paints what it was handed, so the two cannot drift apart.
- Free time and per diem
- Counted by calendar day in the port's time zone, never the server's and never UTC, with the daylight-saving change under test. A box cannot accrue both at once: demurrage stops at gate out, per diem starts there and ends when the empty comes back. Daily rates come from the steamship line, with a per-container override. Containers and clocks.
- Tenant isolation
- Every operational row carries its carrier, and Postgres enforces it: queries run under a role that cannot bypass row-level security, and the seed refuses to finish if one carrier can see another's data. How we isolate carriers.
- These forms
- The waitlist and contact forms are real. They write to the database and mail a founder directly, rate limited by IP — and that IP is only ever stored as a hash, never in the clear and never shown.
- What we measure
- The status page reports only the two components that have an actual probe. The other six say “not monitored” and why, because a green light over something nobody is watching is a lie told on the one page where it matters most.
And the other half of the truth — everything below is a decision and a design, not software you could use tomorrow. Where a piece of one already exists in the database, the line says exactly which piece.
03How we work
Three rules we do not bend
Being early is not an excuse for vagueness. It is the reason to be precise: you can check every claim on this site against something, and that is the point.
Anything that does not exist yet carries a Planned label, on every page. Where a number would sell better and we do not have one, you get a visible blank instead of a plausible figure. No metrics, no logos, no testimonials until they are real and in writing.
Every agent is designed to suggest, alert or draft with its evidence attached, and to wait. Autonomy gets raised per account and per lane, once you have watched an agent work — never as a default we picked for you.
Access opens by port so migrations get done properly. We would rather be slow and useful in NY / NJ than available everywhere and wrong about your gate rules.
A TMS is a decision you live with for years. You should be able to audit the pitch.
04The company
Who you would be contracting with
DrayBase LLC, a limited liability company. Governing law: Georgia.
Gainesville, Georgia — full address on request. The operation we build alongside is in New Jersey; the company that writes the software is not.
Newark, Elizabeth, Port Liberty NY — the lanes we can verify. Other port markets follow when someone there is willing to correct us.
One rate per active power unit per month, every office seat included. The model is decided; the numbers are not, and nothing on this site is an offer.
Early access
Come and check the work
If you dispatch containers for a living, you will spot what we got wrong faster than we will. The waitlist takes an email and nothing else; if you want to walk us through your terminals and your lanes, the contact form is the one that asks. Or keep reading: what the platform covers, what lands next, and how your data stays yours.
Or write to [email protected]. It goes to a person, not a queue.