What APEX is

APEX is TOVR's freight price intelligence service. It ingests spot-and-executed freight prices from European exchanges, normalizes them into directed corridors, and answers "what does this lane pay?" as p25 / median / p75 percentiles with a confidence score, over a simple API.

APEX is TOVR's freight price intelligence service. It answers one question well: what does this lane pay? It ingests millions of freight price observations from European exchanges, normalizes them into a corridor model, and exposes price estimation and market analytics over a REST API. Inside TOVR, APEX is what grounds the market half of every bid recommendation.

What APEX outputs

For a given lane, APEX returns the market price as a distribution, not a single number:

p25 / median / p75 — the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile of observed price, in euros per kilometre and as a total for the distance. The spread tells you how much room there is to negotiate.
A confidence score and quality status — how much to trust the estimate, driven by how much data backs the lane and how fresh it is (broadly HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW). The exact scoring is documented in APEX › Reference.
A match level — how the estimate was derived when exact data was thin (see the cascade below).

A price estimate

A single call returns a lane's estimate:

curl -X POST https://apex.tovr.eu/api/v1/estimate \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your-api-key" \
  -d '{
    "loading_country": "PL",
    "loading_postal_code": "50-148",
    "unloading_country": "DE",
    "unloading_postal_code": "60311",
    "distance_km": 700
  }'

{
  "estimated_price_eur": 1168.3,
  "estimated_price_per_km": 1.669,
  "p25_price_per_km": 1.5935,
  "median_price_per_km": 1.669,
  "p75_price_per_km": 1.8707,
  "confidence_score": 0.87,
  "quality_status": "HIGH",
  "match_level": "exact"
}

The estimated total is simply the median per-km rate times the distance.

The cascade: graceful fallback when data is thin

Not every lane has enough exact observations. APEX resolves an estimate through a cascade, using the first level that meets its minimum-observation threshold and discounting confidence as it broadens:

Level	Match	Uses	Confidence
1	exact	the precise origin→destination pair	full
2	reverse	the same pair in the opposite direction	slightly reduced
3	postal_prefix	the broader postal areas of each end	reduced
4	country_pair	the country-to-country lane	most reduced

If no level has enough data, APEX returns a well-formed response with zeros and a quality_status of INSUFFICIENT_DATA rather than guessing — an honest "we don't know."

What else APEX exposes

Beyond single estimates, APEX offers:

Batch estimation — many lanes in one call, for enriching a whole set of shipments.
Corridor inventory — the directed lanes APEX tracks.
Market analytics — a suite of endpoints for market overviews, geographic heatmaps, corridor rankings and trends, price bands, equipment and shipment-type comparisons, source quality, price-movement and stale-data alerts, and regional imbalance.

These are catalogued in APEX › Reference.

How the estimate is built

The data behind these numbers — where observations come from, how corridors are formed, and how the numbers stay honest — is covered in How APEX works. How TOVR consumes APEX is covered in Using APEX from TOVR.