Bid recommendation
The recommended bid combines two things — a cost-derived viability floor from the cost engine, and the lane's market percentiles from APEX. It is the canonical way TOVR suggests a price, and it never recommends below the floor.
The bid recommendation is the price TOVR suggests a carrier bid for a chain. It is the canonical answer to "what should I charge for this?" — and it is grounded in two independent sources: a cost-derived floor (from the cost engine) and the lane's market (from APEX). This page owns that definition; other surfaces that mention a "suggested bid" defer to it.
The two inputs
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The viability floor. The cost engine computes what the chain costs to run for this specific vehicle and carrier. The floor is that cost plus the carrier's minimum margin:
min_viable_eur = chain_cost × (1 + min_margin_pct / 100)min_margin_pctdefaults to 8% and is a per-carrier setting — the minimum margin on Settings › Costs & margins. Below the floor, the carrier loses money or misses its margin target — so the recommendation never goes there. -
The market position. APEX returns the lane's price distribution as percentiles — p25, median, and p75 in euros per kilometre — with a confidence score. These describe where real freight on this corridor actually clears.
How they combine
The recommendation positions the floor against the market:
- Competitive entry — aim near the lane's p25 (a keen, win-likely price)…
- …floored at viability — but never below
min_viable_eur. If p25 is below the floor, the recommendation is the floor. - …capped toward the median — the upper reference for a normal bid is the market median, so the carrier does not leave money on the table on a strong lane.
- Above-market flag — if even the viability floor exceeds the lane's p75, the chain is flagged above market: the carrier cannot serve this lane profitably at prevailing prices. That is a signal to skip the load, not to bid high and lose.
The result is attached to the chain as a market position plus a recommended figure, so the dispatcher (or fOS) sees both the number and why it sits where it does.
The floor is a floor, not a ceiling
A carrier sells freight capacity. The recommendation's cost-derived number is a walk-away floor — the least the carrier should accept — not a target to bid down toward. When negotiating, the carrier moves down toward the floor from a higher ask, never below it. fOS enforces this in live negotiation and never reveals the floor to the counterparty (see fOS › Guardrails).
A note on "quick" market figures
Elsewhere in the system you may see a fast, market-only figure computed directly as
p25 × distance — a rough market-anchored number with no cost floor applied. That figure
is a convenience for quick market context only. It is not the authoritative bid: it can
sit below a carrier's real cost. The recommended bid on this page — floor first, market
second — is the number to act on.
Where the pieces live
- The floor and the chain cost: Cost engine.
- The market percentiles and their confidence: APEX and Using APEX from TOVR.
- How fOS uses the recommendation in a deal: fOS › Mission loop.
Cost engine
The cost engine computes a freight chain's real per-leg profit-and-loss from five cost components — fuel, tolls, driver, vignettes, and border crossings — using each carrier's own rate tables. It is the single source of cost truth, and it runs entirely from cached data with no live external calls.
Procurement & outreach
Procurement is how a carrier actually wins the freight a chain identifies — by negotiating with the shipper's contacts, learning from every interaction, and confirming the win. Confirming a win records the association and triggers commission billing.