How much does logistics app development cost?

"Logistics app" is a category, not a product. It covers a driver's proof-of-delivery app, a fleet tracking dashboard, a dispatch and route planning tool, a warehouse management system, a freight marketplace, and a full TMS. Those are six different businesses with six different budgets, and the first thing a good quote does is establish which one you actually want.

Published 2026 breakdowns from development firms converge on roughly this shape, though every vendor prices its own work and the edges differ¹²:

1. Driver and proof-of-delivery app ($18k to $70k)

   The stops for today, in order, with photo and signature capture at the door. It's the cheapest useful thing in the category because it needs no hardware beyond the phone the driver already has. Component pricing puts the driver app at $18,000 to $45,000, and a standalone last-mile MVP with its own backend at $40,000 to $70,000.

2. Fleet tracking dashboard ($40k to $180k)

   Live vehicle positions, trip history, driver behaviour, and utilisation reporting. Published 2026 figures put a fleet management MVP at $40,000 to $70,000 and enterprise platforms at $120,000 to $180,000 or more. The software is the smaller half of the decision: this is the sub-type that puts a device and a monthly data plan on every vehicle.

3. Route planning and dispatch ($10k to $120k)

   Adding routing to an app you already have runs about $10,000 to $20,000 in published 2026 feature pricing, because you're integrating a bought engine rather than writing a solver. A standalone dispatch product with its own planning board, driver assignment, and exception handling runs $70,000 to $120,000.

4. Warehouse and inventory management ($70k to $300k)

   Receiving, put-away, bin locations, picking, and cycle counts. Published 2026 figures put a WMS MVP at $80,000 to $120,000 and an enterprise build at $200,000 to $300,000 or more, with another source putting the category at $70,000 to $150,000. It's the sub-type where rugged scanners and label printers enter the budget.

5. Freight marketplace or load board ($90k to $350k)

   Shippers post loads, carriers bid or book. Published figures put freight management systems at $90,000 to $200,000 and enterprise third-party logistics platforms at $220,000 to $350,000 or more. It's a two-sided marketplace before it's a logistics product, with all the liquidity and trust problems that implies.

6. Full transportation management system ($50k to $200k)

   Load planning, carrier tendering, shipment tracking, and freight settlement in one system. Published 2026 figures put a TMS MVP at $50,000 to $80,000, a mid-tier build at $80,000 to $140,000, and enterprise at $140,000 to $200,000 or more, over four to ten months. Integration depth, not screen count, sets where you land.

One boundary worth drawing now. If what you're building is last-mile food delivery, with restaurant panels and courier dispatch, that's a different category with its own four build paths, and our guide to food delivery app development cost covers it properly. Everything below is about freight and fleet: moving goods, tracking vehicles, and running an operation that has trucks in it.

Treat these as directional 2026 market ranges rather than a menu. They come from software vendors pricing their own work, not from a neutral audit. For the wider picture across all app categories, start at our hub guide on how much it costs to build an app, or run your own numbers in the app development cost calculator.

Here's the vocabulary, in plain English:

Vehicle routing problem

The mathematical problem of finding the cheapest set of routes for a fleet of vehicles serving many stops. It generalises the travelling salesman problem, and because that problem is NP-hard, so is this one. That single fact is why route optimization is a thing you buy rather than a feature you spec.

Routing engine

The service that turns a list of stops, vehicles, time windows, and capacities into an actual driving plan. You can rent one from Google, Mapbox, or HERE and pay per request, or self-host an open-source solver like OR-Tools and pay engineers instead. Almost nobody should write one from scratch.

Telematics

The hardware and data service that reports where a vehicle is and what it's doing: GPS position, engine diagnostics, harsh braking, idle time. It means a device in every vehicle plus a monthly data plan per vehicle, which is why a logistics product has a per-truck running cost that pure software never has.

ELD

Electronic logging device. Under the FMCSA rule, most US commercial drivers who must keep hours-of-service records of duty status have to use a device that is certified and registered with FMCSA and that reads data from the engine. If your users are US truck drivers, this is compliance, not a feature request.

TMS

Transportation management system: the software that plans loads, tenders them to carriers, tracks shipments, and settles freight invoices. It's the spine of a shipper's operation, and if your app can't exchange data with the one a customer already runs, you're asking them to work in two systems at once.

EDI

Electronic data interchange, the decades-old message format the freight industry still runs on. Standard transaction sets cover load tenders, shipment status, and invoices. It's unglamorous, it's mandatory to trade with large shippers and carriers, and it carries setup fees per trading partner plus per-message charges.

The formal version matters because it explains the price. The vehicle routing problem generalises the travelling salesman problem, requiring a single route to visit all locations, and since the travelling salesman problem is NP-hard, the vehicle routing problem is NP-hard too⁷. In practice that means the time to find a guaranteed optimal answer explodes as you add stops, so production systems don't find optimal answers. They use heuristics tuned over years to find very good ones quickly, while respecting time windows, vehicle capacities, driver shift rules, and the fact that a 43-foot trailer cannot use every road a car can.

That tuning is the product. It's why a routing engine is something mature companies sell rather than something a project team writes in a sprint, and why a quote that lists "route optimization" as a line item next to "push notifications" is telling you the vendor hasn't priced it seriously. Published 2026 feature pricing puts integrating a bought routing engine at $10,000 to $20,000². Building a competitive solver is a different order of investment entirely, and it is not what your money should buy.

The 1959 date is the detail worth keeping. Dantzig and Ramser posed the truck dispatching problem in Management Science that year, applied to routing a fleet of gasoline delivery trucks from a bulk terminal to service stations⁸. Sixty-seven years of operations research have gone into it since. Anyone offering to solve it inside your build budget is either reselling someone else's engine, which is fine and correct, or hasn't understood the question.

The payoff for getting it right is real, which is why this is worth renting properly rather than skimping. Fuel, driver hours, and vehicle wear are the largest controllable lines in a transport operation, and they all fall out of the route plan. An engine that shaves a few percent off the miles driven pays for its per-request fee many times over, which is exactly why paying per shipment beats paying a team to reinvent the solver.

These prices were checked against the vendors' own published pricing pages in July 2026. Vendor pricing changes, so verify before you build a model on it.

Three things in that table deserve a closer look. First, Google's Route Optimization bills per shipment, not per API call, and it splits into two SKUs: single vehicle routing at $10 per 1,000 and fleet routing at $30 per 1,000 in the first volume tier, with only 5,000 and 1,000 free calls a month respectively³⁴. Per shipment is the unit that matters: a daily plan for 40 trucks and 800 drops is 800 billable shipments, every day.

Second, Mapbox is dramatically cheaper on paper, free to 100,000 requests a month and then $2 per 1,000, dropping to $1.20 at high volume⁵. The caveat is capability rather than price: Mapbox's original Optimization API caps at 12 coordinates per request, which is a small route, and its full vehicle routing solver handling time windows, capacities, and driver shifts is the newer version. Check which one covers your case before you budget on the cheaper number.

Third, OR-Tools is genuinely free. Google's open-source optimization suite is licensed under Apache 2.0 and includes a mature vehicle routing solver⁶. That is the right answer for teams with the engineering depth to host and tune it, and the wrong answer for a five-truck operation that just wants better routes on Monday morning. Free software is not free to run.

There's a fourth option people forget: don't build the dispatch product at all. Off-the-shelf routing software is sold per driver or per stop, and OptimoRoute for example publishes $35.10 per driver per month on its Lite plan and $44.10 on Pro, billed annually. If a subscription solves your problem, the cheapest logistics app is the one you don't commission. Our guide to how much custom software costs walks through when custom actually beats buying.

Start with compliance, because it isn't optional. The FMCSA electronic logging device rule, mandated by Congress under MAP-21, requires ELD use by commercial drivers who have to prepare hours-of-service records of duty status, and the devices must be certified and registered with FMCSA⁹. Carriers have to retain the records and back-up data for six months. If your users are US truck drivers, that isn't a feature you can de-scope to hit a budget.

The practical implication for your build is that you almost certainly shouldn't make the ELD. Certification is a regulatory process with its own timeline, and there are dozens of registered devices you can integrate with instead. What your app has to do is read and store that compliance data correctly, with the retention rules and audit trails the regulation expects. That's a data-integrity problem, not a hardware one, and it is much cheaper to solve.

One risk worth designing around, because almost nobody mentions it in a pitch. ELDs are self-certified by their manufacturers rather than tested by FMCSA, and FMCSA periodically removes devices from the register when they don't hold up. In one 2026 action the agency removed ten devices and told carriers to replace them by a fixed date, after which affected drivers can be placed out of service¹¹. Build your integration behind an abstraction so a hardware vendor can be swapped without a rewrite, and check the revocation list as a matter of routine.

1. ELD units for US commercial drivers

   Required by the FMCSA rule for most drivers who keep hours-of-service records of duty status, and the device has to be certified and registered with FMCSA. In its own rulemaking analysis FMCSA put a telematics ELD at $419 per commercial vehicle per year annualized, within a researched range of $166 to $667. Integrate a registered device rather than building and certifying your own.

2. GPS trackers and telematics units

   The box that reports position, engine diagnostics, and driving behaviour, usually sold alongside ELD service. Published market figures run $15 to $30 a month for a phone-based app, $25 to $35 for an OBD-II dongle with hardware at $0 to $199, and $45 to $60 for a rugged in-cab tablet with hardware at $499 or more. Several of the largest vendors publish no pricing at all.

3. Temperature sensors for cold chain

   Refrigerated freight needs continuous temperature records, not spot checks, because a broken cold chain is a rejected load. Under the FDA's Sanitary Transportation rule the shipper must specify operating temperature in writing and records have to be kept for twelve months, with offsite records retrievable within twenty-four hours. That's a data-retention requirement for your app, not just a sensor on a trailer.

4. Scanners and rugged handhelds

   Warehouse and proof-of-delivery work runs on barcode scanning, and consumer phones don't survive a distribution centre. Published reseller pricing puts a Zebra TC22 at roughly $1,180 to $1,640 per unit and a Zebra TC53 at $2,530 to $3,230. They change your app's design too: one-handed, glove-friendly, and driven by a hardware trigger rather than a touch target.

5. Per-vehicle data plans

   Every connected device needs connectivity, billed monthly per unit, forever. This is the line that makes logistics a capex plus opex business rather than a pure software one. A hundred vehicles at $30 a month is $36,000 a year of running cost that never appears in a development quote, and it grows with the fleet, not with the code.

The structural point is worth stating bluntly, because it changes how you should think about the whole project. Software is capex once and a maintenance percentage after. Hardware is capex per vehicle, plus opex per vehicle, plus replacement when units fail or a truck leaves the fleet. A hundred vehicles at $30 a month is $36,000 a year of running cost that appears in no development quote and grows with the fleet rather than with the code. Model your unit economics per vehicle from the start, not per user.

Two notes on the numbers above. FMCSA's $419 figure is authoritative but old: it comes from the December 2015 final-rule evaluation and is stated in 2013 dollars, within a researched range of $166 to $667 per vehicle per year¹⁰. Use it as a sanity check on a quote, not as this year's price. The current market splits by tier: roughly $15 to $30 a month for a phone-based app, $25 to $35 for an OBD-II dongle with hardware at $0 to $199, and $45 to $60 for a rugged in-cab tablet with hardware at $499 or more¹².

And a buying note that surprises people: several of the largest telematics vendors, Samsara, Motive, Verizon Connect, and Geotab among them, publish no pricing at all on their own websites, gating it behind a sales conversation. Contract terms of one to three years are common. Get the per-vehicle price, the contract length, and the early-termination terms in writing before you commit a fleet to anyone, and treat any per-vehicle figure you read in a comparison blog as unverified.

Cold chain deserves its own line, because the compliance sits in your software rather than the sensor. Under the FDA's Sanitary Transportation rule the shipper has to specify operating temperature in writing, records must be kept for twelve months, and offsite records have to be retrievable within twenty-four hours. Reading a probe is the easy part. Storing, retaining, and producing those readings in a form an auditor accepts is the build. Published 2026 figures put IoT sensor support at $20,000 to $40,000 of development².

Warehouse work adds one more per-user capex line. Consumer phones don't survive a distribution centre, so picking and proof-of-delivery run on rugged handhelds, and published reseller configurations put a Zebra TC22 at roughly $1,180 to $1,640 a unit and a Zebra TC53 at $2,530 to $3,230¹³. They also change how you design: one-handed operation, glove-friendly targets, and a hardware scan trigger rather than a button on screen. Budget the devices and the extra UI work together, because one implies the other.

The specifics, from Google's own published pricing list in July 2026: Compute Route Matrix costs $5 per 1,000 elements at the Essentials tier with 10,000 free elements a month, and Compute Routes is priced the same way³. An element is one origin-destination pair, so checking 40 vehicles against 200 stops is 8,000 elements in a single call. Do that a few times a day across a real operation and the arithmetic gets interesting quickly.

One change catches out anyone working from older guidance. Google retired the long-standing $200 monthly credit at the end of February 2025, replacing it with per-SKU free thresholds that are considerably less generous: broadly 10,000 free calls a month per Essentials SKU, 5,000 for Pro, and 1,000 for Enterprise⁴. If your plan assumed the old credit covered a pilot, re-check it.

Our teardown of what it costs to make an app like Uber puts third-party APIs for maps, SMS, and payments at $5,000 to $30,000 a year at real usage, and the same teardown lays out the three-build pattern, a driver app, a customer app, and a dispatch back office, that most logistics products quietly repeat. If your app has vehicles and jobs in it, read that page before you finalise scope: the mapping-cost lesson and the three-build structure both transfer directly.

Nobody in freight starts from a blank page. The load already exists in someone's system, the invoice has to reach the finance team, and the shipper wants status updates in the format they already consume. So the integration list, not the feature list, is what decides whether your product can be bought.

Four connections come up again and again. The ERP owns money and master data, so orders and invoices have to reconcile with it. The WMS owns stock and locations, so your app can't claim inventory it can't see. The TMS owns loads and carriers, so a dispatch tool that ignores it creates a second source of truth. And carrier APIs own tracking, rates, and labels, each with its own quirks and no two alike.

Then there's EDI, which surprises people who expect a modern industry. Freight still runs on X12 transaction sets, and the canonical truckload sequence is a 204 load tender, a 990 response accepting or declining it, 214 shipment status messages along the way, and a 210 freight invoice at the end. It is unglamorous, it is decades old, and you cannot trade with large shippers without it.

It also carries its own pricing model. Legacy EDI benchmarks put trading-partner setup at $1,000 to $5,000 each, monthly network charges at $500 to $1,500, and per-document fees on top, with newer cloud platforms pricing per trading partner per month instead¹⁴. Note that these benchmarks come from EDI vendors comparing themselves with incumbents, so treat them as directional. The planning lesson holds regardless: every trading partner is a cost, so count them before you promise a launch date.

The practical advice: name your two or three must-have integrations during scoping and cut the rest to a later phase. Integrations also stretch schedules more than engineering does, because you wait on third-party credentials, sandbox access, and partner certification, all on calendars you don't control. Our guide to how to scope an MVP covers how to make that cut without gutting the product.

Here's how the four stack up for a real operation:

• Maintenance, 15 to 20 percent of build cost per year. Bug fixes, operating-system updates, security patches, and small improvements. If your product includes mobile apps, every iOS and Android release lands on you, and a driver app that stops working is an operation that stops working.
• Cloud hosting, growing with activity. Our delivery platform figures put cloud infrastructure at $200 to $500 a month at launch and $2,000 to $10,000 or more at scale. Continuous GPS ingestion is the driver here: position data arrives constantly and has to be stored, indexed, and queried.
• Mapping and routing, per request forever. Covered above, and worth repeating because it's the line most often left out of a business case entirely. It scales with routes calculated and miles tracked, not with headcount.
• Hardware subscriptions, per vehicle forever. $15 to $60 per vehicle per month, plus replacement units. This is the meter that makes fleet growth a cost event as well as a revenue event.

One more structural note on where build money goes. Roughly 40 to 50 percent of a build lands in the backend, the part nobody sees, and in logistics that share tends to sit at the top of the range because the hard work is data ingestion, state management across vehicles, and integrations rather than screens. Our mobile app development cost guide covers the front-end side, including the 30 to 45 percent saving from building cross-platform rather than two native apps, which applies to driver apps as much as anything else. For the underlying data across categories, see our app development cost statistics.

If you're early, build the driver app first. Stops in the right order, photo and signature capture, status visible in the office. It needs no hardware beyond the phone in the driver's pocket, so you skip the per-vehicle capex entirely, and it changes how a real operation runs on day one. Add tracking hardware and dispatch once the operation is asking for them, not before.

On routing, make the buy-or-build call explicitly and early, because it reshapes everything downstream. Almost every small and mid-sized operator should rent an engine. Price Google and Mapbox against your actual expected volume, look hard at whether an off-the-shelf dispatch subscription solves the problem outright, and only consider self-hosting OR-Tools if you have the engineering depth to tune it.

If you want to see how we build and why a fixed quote holds, read our custom software build methodology or the overview on our custom software development services page. And if you'd rather just get a real number, our free 48-hour build plan turns a few sentences into a written scope, a milestone breakdown, and a fixed quote, with no sales call. When you're ready to move, start a build and we'll take it from there.