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Spot savings measures how much you saved by tendering below the midpoint of all bids you received on a quote.
Midpoint means the median bid: line every bid up from cheapest to most expensive and take the one in the middle. It is not the halfway point between your cheapest and most expensive bid — that figure gets pulled around by a single unusual quote, and Owlery doesn’t use it.
What Counts as a Spot Load
A spot load is one you put out to bid. Loads moved on a contract rate are excluded, because there was no bidding process and so nothing to compare against.How Spot Savings Is Calculated
Spot savings is the midpoint of every bid you received minus the rate you tendered. With an even number of bids, Owlery averages the two middle bids. Every bid counts toward the midpoint, including the one you tendered — the midpoint describes the whole field of bids that came in, not the field minus your winner.A Worked Example
A quote that received five bids:
The middle bid of the five is $1,100. You tendered $950. Spot savings on this load is $150, or about 13.6% below the midpoint of the market you saw.
Why the Midpoint
The midpoint estimates what the load would have cost without a competitive bidding process — an ordinary price from a market that was never under pressure to sharpen its pencil. Owlery uses it in preference to the second-cheapest bid, the average, or the most expensive bid, each of which either answers a different question or moves too easily on a single outlier. The full reasoning, with a worked comparison of all four benchmarks, is on Why Owlery Uses the Midpoint.Spot savings is a benchmark, not an accounting figure. It measures the value of running a competitive event against the market you saw on that quote. It isn’t money that appears anywhere in your ledger, and it isn’t a comparison against a budget, a contract rate, or a market index.
The Summary Tiles
Avg Bids per Spot Load is the one to watch alongside the savings figures. Spot savings depends entirely on carriers competing for your freight — more bids means a wider spread and a more meaningful midpoint. When this number falls, savings usually fall with it.
The Percentile Tiles
These two don’t describe how savings varied from load to load. They re-run the whole calculation against a different benchmark: instead of the middle bid, take the bid a quarter of the way up the field — or three quarters of the way up — and average across your loads exactly as before. What you get is a range around the headline figure. The 25th-percentile number is what your savings look like under a stingy assumption about what you’d otherwise have paid; the 75th-percentile number is what they look like under a generous one. The midpoint sits between them by design. Reading all three tells you how much the answer depends on that assumption. Sitting close together means the benchmark choice barely matters and the headline number is on solid ground. Spread far apart means your bid fields are wide, and the figure leans more heavily on that middle assumption than it does on a tight day.The Charts
Bids per Spot Load
A stacked bar per week showing what share of that week’s loads drew each number of bids. Each color is a bid count, so a bar that is mostly dark green means most loads that week attracted seven or more carriers. Watch for red, which is a single bid. A load with only one bid cannot produce savings — see When Savings Show as $0.Spot Savings
Two series drawn on one chart:- Total Spot Savings (green bars): the dollars saved that week. This moves with load volume, so a short bar can mean a quiet week rather than a bad one.
- Average Spot Savings (blue line): the dollars saved on a typical load. This is the better line to trend, because volume doesn’t distort it.
The first and last points on both weekly charts almost always cover partial weeks clipped by the edge of your date range. A dip at either end is usually your date filter, not a real change.
The Load Tables
Under the charts are two tables. They cover the same loads and differ in what a single row means.
Either one exports. Click the ⋯ at the top right of the table and pick CSV or Excel.
When you export Spot Loads with all Bids, the load-level columns repeat on every row belonging to the same load. A load that drew 17 bids appears as 17 rows, each carrying that same load’s cost and savings. Summing that column would count the same savings 17 times over. Use Bids per Spot Load for anything you plan to total.
Measure It Your Own Way
The midpoint is what Owlery reports because it’s the benchmark we’d defend — see Why Owlery Uses the Midpoint. It isn’t the only defensible one, and it doesn’t know your lanes the way you do. So the bids are yours to take. Export them and measure against the second-cheapest bid, trim the top and bottom off each field, weight by lane or by volume, or set the whole thing against your contract rates. If you land somewhere different and it holds up on your freight, we’d like to hear about it.When Savings Show as $0
The ordinary reason a load shows no savings is that only one carrier bid. With a single bid, that bid is also the midpoint, so the midpoint and the rate you tendered are the same number. A week where every load drew one bid will show $0 total savings. That doesn’t mean anything is broken, but it is worth chasing: it points to a carrier coverage gap on that lane rather than a pricing problem.Common Questions
Why did total savings drop this week?
Why did total savings drop this week?
Check the Average Spot Savings line before worrying. Total savings moves with how many loads you shipped, so a quiet week produces a short bar even when every load performed well.
Does high spot savings mean I got the lowest rate available?
Does high spot savings mean I got the lowest rate available?
It means you tendered below the middle of the bids you received. Whether a cheaper rate existed somewhere in the wider market is a different question, and this dashboard can’t answer it.