Flat-Fee vs Contingency Freight Audit: Which Model Keeps More of Your Money?
Freight-audit services come in two pricing shapes, and the difference matters more than most buyers realise — because it changes not just what you pay, but what the auditor is motivated to do. Here's a straight comparison of the contingency (success-fee) model and the flat-fee SaaS model.
> This compares the two models, not specific providers.
The contingency (success-fee) model
In a contingency arrangement, the auditor takes a percentage of the money they recover for you — commonly somewhere in the range of 20–50% of recovered overcharges. You pay nothing upfront; the auditor is paid out of the savings.
The appeal: no fixed cost, and the auditor only earns if they find something.
The catch is in the incentive. A success-fee auditor earns only on invoices that contain recoverable errors. So the model quietly rewards focusing on the invoices most likely to yield a big, easy recovery — and skipping the ones that probably won't. The clean invoices, the small discrepancies, the hard-to-recover claims: there's no economic reason for a contingency auditor to spend time on them. You also hand over a meaningful slice of every recovery, indefinitely.
The flat-fee (SaaS) model
In a flat-fee model you pay a fixed subscription regardless of how much is found, and you keep 100% of whatever is recovered — there's no success fee.
The appeal: every shipment gets checked, not just the promising ones, because the auditor's revenue doesn't depend on findings. And the economics flip in your favour the moment recoveries exceed the subscription — after that, the savings are entirely yours.
The consideration: you pay the fixed fee whether a given month is rich in errors or clean. Which is the better deal depends on volume and error rate (below).
Which model fits you
A rough way to think about it:
- High freight volume / regular shipping: flat-fee almost always wins. At scale, a percentage of recoveries dwarfs any reasonable subscription, and you want every shipment checked.
- Very low volume / occasional shipping: contingency can make sense if you'd struggle to justify any fixed cost — you only pay when money comes back.
- You value certainty and coverage: flat-fee, because clean invoices are checked too (see the value of a clean invoice) and you keep the full recovery.
The honest summary
Contingency is genuinely low-risk to start — but it's incentivised to cherry-pick and it taxes every recovery forever. Flat-fee asks for a predictable subscription and, in return, checks everything and lets you keep 100% of what's found. For any team shipping with regularity, the flat-fee math compounds in your favour.
FAQ
What percentage do contingency freight auditors charge? Typically 20–50% of the overcharges they recover, taken from the savings. The exact share varies by provider and volume.
What does "keep 100% of your savings" mean? On a flat-fee model there's no success fee, so every euro recovered from a carrier stays with you — you've already paid for the service via the fixed subscription.
Which is cheaper overall? For regular or high-volume shippers, flat-fee is usually cheaper in total because a percentage of all recoveries exceeds a fixed fee. For very occasional shippers, contingency's pay-only-on-success can be lower. Compare your recovery volume against the subscription to see where you land.
--- Related: Flat-fee vs contingency, in detail · Pricing · How Sentra works