HullAndLine — a platform built for car haulers

For: Jesse From: Patrick Date: 2026-06-03

Hey Jesse —

This is a working document about something I've been building. The short version: it's a service designed for owner-operators like you — specifically, for car haulers running stinger-steered rigs — that automates the paperwork-and-chase work that eats your week and your wallet.

I wanted to share what's in flight before we talk about it so you can read at your own pace, react with the parts that resonate (and the parts that don't), and tell me which features you'd actually use. Your input shapes what gets built next.

This is honest: we're early. The core platform is built and running. The car-hauler-specific pieces are designed but not yet shipped. I'm sharing it now because the order we build things in matters, and you know your day better than anyone I'd describe it to.

The problem (you already know it)

You're running a small business. Your truck cost north of $350K. You gross $25K–$35K in a good month, you net half of that after fuel, repairs, and downtime. The difference between a profitable month and a painful one is rarely about how many cars you moved — it's about how much you got paid for the time and the risk you absorbed.

The places that bleed money:

Damage claims. Every car you load is a financial exposure. A scratch you didn't catch on the pickup inspection becomes a $1,500 paint-correction claim at delivery. You eat it, or you spend hours fighting it.
Detention at docks, auctions, and dealer lots. You're owed money for waits past the free window, but most carriers never collect because the paperwork to claim it is annoying and brokers don't pay vague requests.
TONUs and layovers that go uncollected. When a broker cancels after you've already rolled to the pickup, or a dealer pushes delivery to the next day mid-route, you're contractually owed money for it. Almost nobody chases it because chasing it costs more time than the fee.
Auction key fees and gate-pass costs you eat in cash. The auction's release window slips, the gate-pass isn't ready, the title is held, the buyer hasn't actually paid — and you make phone calls and pay small fees that the broker is supposed to cover and rarely does. Individually small, monthly significant.
Wasted trips to auctions. You drive to Manheim or Copart to pick up a car that isn't actually released yet because the buyer hasn't paid or the gate pass isn't generated. That's hours of your day, gone.
Double-brokering fraud. You haul a load from a "broker" who turns out to be a credential thief, and you can't get paid. The high-end vehicles are the targets because they're worth more to scammers.
Scanning Central Dispatch. You spend hours a day staring at a load board that looks like it was designed in 2005, trying to filter for loads that actually fit your lane and your equipment.
Multi-stop invoicing. Nine cars to four dealers means four invoices, four sets of paperwork, four payments to chase. Each one is a place to lose money to a missed reference number or a 30-day-NET delay.
IFTA quarterlies. Four times a year you lose a weekend to fuel receipts and state-by-state mileage spreadsheets, and if you file late or wrong the penalty stack adds up fast.

You know all of this. None of it is news to you.

What might be news: industry research puts the uncollected detention alone at $15 billion per year across US trucking, and damage claims plus uncollected accessorials (TONU, layover, lumper) plus invoicing friction plus dispatcher fees probably double that number. The money is on the table. Most carriers don't collect it because the work to collect it competes with the work of actually driving.

What we're building, in plain terms

A back-office assistant for an owner-operator. When something happens on a load — you're stuck at a dock, a damage claim shows up at delivery, a broker tries to short you, a load offer looks fishy — the assistant does the paperwork-and-chase work. It drafts the claim email, reads photos of your BOL or rate confirmation, looks up brokers in the federal database, files your invoices, tracks the payment to the bank.

You decide how to talk to it. The app on your phone is the main surface — every load, every claim, every message that went out on your behalf, all in one place. The web dashboard is the same thing on a laptop when you want a bigger screen. And you can text the assistant when your hands are full or you're walking back from the receiver — same draft-then-approve flow, just over SMS.

The big idea: the assistant does the work; you spend five minutes a day reviewing instead of forty-five minutes filling out forms. The interface is whichever one fits the moment.

We're building it in layers. Here's the order.

Layer 1: Detention claim drafter (first thing we ship)

The first feature is the one that's easiest to explain and works for every kind of trucker, not just car haulers:

You tell the assistant you're stuck — tap the "I'm stuck" button in the app, or text the number, whichever's faster from where you're sitting. The assistant asks a few quick questions, has you snap a photo of the rate confirmation and the BOL, drafts the detention claim email citing the contract's own terms, and sends it to the broker once you approve. Then it tracks the broker's reply and notifies you the moment they respond.

Example. You arrived at Manheim Riverside at 7 AM for a 10-car pickup. The released-vehicle staging line is backed up. By 8:30 AM you're still waiting. You text "stuck at manheim riverside since 7am." The assistant asks when you arrived, what broker the load is for, asks for a snap of the rate-con. You send the photo. The assistant reads it, sees detention starts at 2 hours at $65/hr, runs a quick check on the broker (legit, no recent fraud flags), and starts drafting. You roll out at 2:45 PM. You text "left 2:45." The assistant finalizes the math (5h 45m past threshold × $65 = $373.75 owed), drafts a 350-word claim email with three legal citations, and asks you to reply YES to send. You reply YES. Email goes out. Broker replies the next day offering $300. You're notified by text. You reply "accept." Twelve days later the money hits your bank. The assistant's cut is taken out of recovered claims only — you never pay out of pocket for a tool, and you never pay anything on a claim you don't actually collect.

That's Layer 1. It works for any owner-operator, not just car haulers. But car haulers have a bigger set of unique problems, which is where Layers 2 and 3 come in.

Layer 2: The car-hauler-specific tools

After the detention drafter is live and working, we add the car-hauler-specific features. These are the ones that make this platform feel like it was built for someone running a stinger, not a 53-foot dry van.

A. The VCR / damage shield

The single most important document in your day is the Vehicle Condition Report — the inspection paperwork signed at pickup and delivery. We both know how a claim goes: a dealer points to a scratch, says you caused it, and unless you can prove the scratch was already there at pickup, you're paying the paint correction.

Here's how the tool would work:

Before you load each car, you snap photos with your phone — driver side, passenger side, front, back, roof, four corner closeups, plus any spots you'd flag manually. You text them to the assistant. It runs each photo through a vehicle damage AI (the kind of tool insurance companies already use), drafts a VCR with every pre-existing scratch, dent, chip, and crack pre-marked. You review on your phone, tap CONFIRM, and the digital VCR is stored with timestamps and GPS coordinates. Same process at delivery.

Example. You pull a Hellcat from Manheim Riverside. You text 8 quick photos of the car at pickup. Within 30 seconds: "Pre-existing chip on left rear quarter panel near taillight (3mm); dent on passenger door (4 inches); existing windshield star-crack lower right; rock chip on hood center; scratch on rear bumper trim. VCR pre-marked. Reply CONFIRM to file." You confirm. Two weeks later at delivery in Phoenix, the receiving dealer claims the hood damage is new. The assistant pulls the pickup VCR, shows the timestamped + GPS-stamped photos with the hood chip clearly visible, drafts the counter-response to the broker citing the documented pre-existing damage. The claim dies. You saved $2,000 and four hours.

B. The damage-claim defender

When a broker DOES file a damage claim against you, the assistant pulls the VCR + photos automatically, drafts a counter-response citing the documented pre-existing condition, and sends it. You confirm by text. You spend two minutes instead of two hours.

These two together — the AI inspection and the claim defender — are designed to take the single biggest financial drain on a car hauler and shrink it to a non-event.

C. The Central Dispatch SMS filter

Central Dispatch is the load board most car haulers actually use. You probably already pay for it. The platform would connect to it (using your own account, on the Premium plan if you're not already there) and text you only the loads that match what you've told it you want.

You'd say once: "I run California to Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. Open transport, 9-car stinger. Minimum $0.85/mile loaded. No Copart pickups before noon." From then on, when a relevant load posts on Central Dispatch, the assistant texts you within seconds: "Phoenix → Las Vegas, 3 cars, $1,850 ($0.92/mile loaded), Sherpa broker (verified, 4.8 stars, NET 7-day pay). Pickup ready 1 PM. Reply CLAIM to dispatch." You reply CLAIM, the dispatch happens, paperwork starts.

This isn't replacing Central Dispatch — they're a Cox-owned monopoly and we have no interest in fighting them. We're being your front door to it. You stop scrolling and start hearing only what matters.

Layer 3: The things we'll add after that

Once Layers 1 and 2 are working for you, we'd start building these in priority order. Each one is independent — you don't have to use any of them, but they're available when you want them.

TONU claim drafter. You roll out of the house at 4 AM to make a 6 AM pickup two hours away. At 5:45 AM, the broker calls: "Shipper canceled, sorry." You just burned a half-day of work and a tank of fuel for nothing. Per the rate-con, you're owed a Truck Order Not Used fee — typically $150–$300. You text the assistant "tonu, broker canceled at 5:45, drove from chandler to tucson." The assistant pulls the rate-con's cancellation clause, drafts the TONU claim with your mileage and the timestamp, sends it once you approve. Same flow as detention, different category of money.

Layover claim drafter. You're delivering Phoenix → Albuquerque on a Friday afternoon. You arrive Saturday morning. The receiving dealer says "actually, we can't take delivery until Monday." Now you're stuck in Albuquerque for two nights — hotel, food, idle truck — on your own dime. Per the contract, that's a layover situation and the broker owes you per-day layover pay. You text "layover, abq, dealer pushed to monday." The assistant drafts the layover claim citing the rate-con's layover clause and the calendar evidence, files it for you.

Auction-fee reimbursement. You pull up to a Manheim or Copart pickup and the gate tells you the buyer hasn't cleared the key fee or the gate-pass charge — $75 here, $40 there — and you front the cash so you can leave with the load. Per the rate-con or the shipper's instructions, the broker is supposed to reimburse those pass-through fees. Most carriers eat them because chasing a $75 charge feels like more work than it's worth. You snap a photo of the auction receipt and text it to the assistant. It reads the receipt, pulls the rate-con's accessorial clause, drafts the reimbursement claim with the photo attached, sends it after you approve. Five minutes of work, the money back in your account.

Fraud check by forwarding. You get an unsolicited rate-con from a "broker" you don't recognize. It looks great — Phoenix → Tampa, 3 cars, $3,200, pickup today. Too good. You forward the rate-con to the assistant before you commit. Within 30 seconds: "DON'T TAKE — MC# issued 2 weeks ago, no load history in any database, 3 fraud complaints on r/Truckers in the last week matching this MC# pattern, broker email domain registered 6 days ago. This is double-brokering bait — the real shipper will refuse to pay you when the actual broker isn't this entity. Walk away." Or, on a clean one: "Looks legit — MC# 8 years old, A+ rating with Carrier411, NET-15 payment history confirmed by three other carriers in last 90 days. Safe to dispatch."

Per-vehicle invoice splitter. You finish a 9-car run delivering to four different dealers. Within 30 minutes of the last delivery, the assistant has generated four invoices with the right reference numbers, BOLs attached, and submitted them to the right brokers. No spreadsheets. No missed numbers.

Auction pre-flight check. Before you leave for a Manheim pickup at 6 AM, the assistant checks the auction's portal overnight, confirms the vehicle is actually released (buyer paid), confirms the gate pass is in your name or your transport company's name, and texts you either GO or DON'T-GO with the reason. No more wasted trips.

EV weight planner. When a load post says "5 Tesla Model Y, 3 Ford F-150 Lightning, 1 IONIQ 5," the assistant runs the math on your axle limits and warns you if the load would put you over GVWR. EVs are 1,000–2,500 lbs heavier than their gas equivalents; nameplate 9-car capacity is becoming effective 6-or-7-car capacity on EV-heavy loads. You catch this before you waste the trip.

Factoring / quick-pay agent. Invoice goes out → if it's a NET 30 broker, the assistant automatically submits to your preferred factoring company. If it's a quick-pay broker (Montway's 2-day, others), it triggers their flow. Cash in your bank within 24 hours either way.

Layer 4: Bigger pieces, later

Once the day-to-day claims-and-loads flow is humming, we'd start on the bigger administrative pieces — the kind of work that eats whole weekends a few times a year.

Quarterly IFTA filer. Instead of you spending a Saturday and Sunday wrestling with fuel receipts and state-by-state mileage spreadsheets, the assistant pulls your GPS miles per state from your ELD, pulls your fuel-card receipts, computes the IFTA report for the quarter, and has it ready to file Monday morning of quarter-close week. Optional layer: a CPA we partner with signs off before submission, for peace of mind. Owner-ops typically burn 12–15 hours a quarter on this and another few thousand a year in late-filing or wrong-filing penalties. This makes it a 10-minute review.

Insurance certificate routing. Broker says they need a COI with their company listed as certificate holder before tomorrow's pickup. You forward the request to the assistant. It forwards it on to your insurer with the broker's info and your policy details pre-filled, tracks the issuance, and confirms with the broker once the updated COI lands. You're out of the loop after one forward.

Auction-win orchestrator. When a customer wins a vehicle at auction, the assistant coordinates the pickup paperwork, the gate pass, and the dispatch to you automatically — turning a multi-call, multi-email scramble into a single text confirmation.

Weekly business numbers. Every Sunday, text from the assistant: "This week — 4,200 miles, gross $13,800, fuel $2,640, tolls $185, deadhead 11%, estimated net $4,950. Two open claims totaling $440. Quarterly IFTA stands at: CA 2,100 mi, AZ 800 mi, NV 350 mi, TX 950 mi." You always know where you stand.

Some of these are weeks of work, some are months. The order depends on what would actually save you the most time and money in your real week.

Eventually: the full Chief-of-Staff bundle

Past all of the above, the longer vision is a complete back-office layer for an owner-operator — claims, invoicing, fraud screening, compliance filings, weekly P&L, tax-prep handoff — that runs in the background of your day by text and lets you focus on driving and growing the truck count. Not anytime soon, but it's the direction.

What's unique about this approach

There are existing tools in this space — Super Dispatch is the big one, Ship.Cars is the AI-leaning challenger, RunBuggy is the carrier-friendly newer entrant. They're decent. They share an assumption: that you'll open the app, tap through five screens of forms, and do the paperwork yourself. The app is the place where YOU do the work.

This service makes a different bet: that the work itself — drafting the claim, citing the contract clause, sending the email, chasing the broker's response — should be done by the assistant, not by you. You see the draft, you tap approve, the rest happens in the background. Five minutes of your attention instead of forty-five minutes of your morning. The app, the web dashboard, and the text-message surface are all just ways to see the assistant's work and approve it — not places where you fill out forms.

The other unique angle: every part of this is designed to be agent-callable — meaning that in a couple of years, when more brokers and dealers start running their own AI assistants, your platform can talk to their platform directly to settle claims and confirm pickups, machine-to-machine, faster than humans clicking buttons. This is a bet on where the industry is heading. We're building for it now so we're not retrofitting later.

How the financial side works (for you)

You don't pay a monthly fee for the tool itself. The model is simple: we only get paid when you get paid. If the platform recovers detention pay, TONU/layover/auction-fee money, damage-claim defense dollars, or other money you wouldn't otherwise have collected, we keep a small percentage and you keep the rest. If we don't collect, you owe nothing. It's a contingency cut, never a subscription.

That structure is intentional. Owner-operators famously won't pay for software that doesn't prove its value, and you shouldn't have to. The platform has to earn its keep by actually putting money in your account that wasn't going to be there.

The specific percentages and the legal structure around contingency-fee work are things we want a trucking-experienced lawyer to weigh in on before scaling — but for the early window with you, we'd start free entirely. You use it, you tell us what works and what doesn't, we iterate.

The IFTA filer and a couple of the Layer 4 pieces are different because they're not contingency-shaped (you're not "collecting" on an IFTA filing, you're avoiding penalties + saving a weekend). Those would be a flat per-quarter or per-filing fee, sized to be a no-brainer against the time and penalty risk they remove. We'll talk through pricing on those when we get there — your reaction to the shape matters before we commit numbers.

What's actually built right now (and what isn't)

To be honest about the current state — here's a clean ledger:

Built and running today:

The backend service — FastAPI app, deployed and reachable on the public internet
The Postgres database — fresh schema, six migrations applied, ready for production data
The SMS conversation engine — handles inbound webhooks, persists driver + conversation records, routes to the agent
The AI agent that drafts claim emails — runs Claude inside the service container, pulls the right regulations, drafts a real email
The document reader — reads photos of rate confirmations, BOLs, auction receipts, damage photos and extracts the right numbers
The federal broker database lookup (FMCSA SAFER) for fraud checks
The regulatory citation engine — 15 verified documents covering 49 CFR Parts 385–395, federal payment-timing rules, ATA model contract language, state prompt-pay statutes for CA/TX/FL
The email send + inbound capture path — broker reply lands in your conversation thread automatically
The web dashboard — login by emailed magic link (no password), see every claim, every message, every status

Not yet live, but coming soon:

The text-message surface. The app + web dashboard work today; the text number itself takes a 1–3 week carrier-registration step (an industry verification process the major wireless carriers require before any business can text customers, called A2P 10DLC) before SMS can route. Buying the number + starting the clock this week. The app surface lets you test everything during the wait — same assistant, same draft + approve + send flow.

Designed and partially built (waiting on your input on order):

The car-hauler-specific features — VCR damage shield, damage-claim defender, Central Dispatch SMS filter
The Layer 3 claim variants — TONU, layover, auction-fee, driver-facing fraud-check

Not yet built, planned at the concept level:

Layer 4 features — IFTA filer, COI routing, auction-win orchestrator, weekly business numbers
Self-serve sign-up + billing
Outreach to other drivers beyond you

What happens next, in order

Here's the rough sequence. I'll send you a note when each item lands.

This week:

Walkthrough call with you. 30–45 minutes. I show you the web dashboard + walk through the detention-claim flow end-to-end (simulated, no live broker yet). You tell me which of the not-yet-built modules above actually matter for your day vs. which are nice-to-have-later. That conversation sets the build order for the next two weeks.
Buy the text number + start the A2P 10DLC carrier-review clock. Once submitted, the 1–3 week wait is in motion. Nothing we can do to speed it up.

Next two weeks (while waiting on the carrier):

Polish the in-app chat surface so you can test the full agent — same draft-and-approve flow you'll get over SMS, just from the app — without us being blocked on the carrier review.
Land the car-hauler-specific pieces in whatever order you set on the walkthrough — most likely the VCR damage shield first, since that's the one that prevents disputes vs. fights them after the fact.
Wire document storage so your rate cons, BOL photos, auction receipts, and damage photos get archived under your account and you can pull them up months later for tax or dispute purposes.

Once the text number is live (~3 weeks out):

Your first real detention claim runs through the system. You text us when a dock holds you, we draft + send, the broker either pays or replies. Either outcome teaches us something. We iterate.
You decide if it's worth telling another driver. If yes, we onboard a second beta person — probably someone you'd refer.

Months 2–3:

Real self-serve sign-up + pricing structure. Most likely shape: a free tier (one claim a month — enough to prove it works), a $49/mo standard tier (unlimited claims + filing assist), and a $149/mo tier that adds IFTA filing + load-screening + the fraud-sniffer-on-every-rate-con.
Outreach to other car haulers — Reddit, TruckersReport, a couple of YouTubers in the space. By that point we'll have your story (assuming you stick with it) as the proof-of-concept.

What we'd ask from you

Just the realistic version: you use the tool, tell us when it does something useful, tell us when it does something stupid or annoying, suggest features that would actually help your week. The platform gets better in the directions you push it.

The first few weeks would be light — the detention drafter is the first thing live, and you'd only use it when you're actually stuck somewhere. As Layers 2 and 3 come online (the VCR shield, the claim defender, the load filter, the TONU/layover/auction-fee drafters, the fraud-check), you'd use the platform more often.

The three concrete asks, in priority order:

The walkthrough call this week. Easiest possible — I show you the system, you tell me what's wrong with it, I take notes. No prep needed on your side.
Honest reactions, especially the negative ones. If a feature seems pointless, say so. If we're missing something obvious about how car haulers actually work, say so. Your job here is critic, not customer.
One real detention claim, when the text number goes live (~3 weeks out). Just the next time a dock holds you, text us instead of eating it. We do the work; you tell us what felt wrong about the experience.

We're also going to need a few practical things to wire things up — none of these are needed right away, but they're on the eventual list:

A phone number you'd use if you wanted to text the assistant instead of using the app (probably your existing number).
An email address the platform can send claims from on your behalf (or, if you want, the platform sends from its own domain and copies you on every send).
Your Central Dispatch login (only if you want the load filter feature; only stored in encrypted secrets).
Confirmation of which insurance carrier you use, so the COI tool can plug in when we get there.
Eventually, your ELD account and fuel-card login for the IFTA filer — but only when we get to Layer 4, and only if you want that feature.

None of this is needed right away. We'll go in the order that makes sense.

Why we're starting with you

Two reasons.

One, you reached out and offered to look at this early. That's rare. Most people only show up when there's something polished to look at; you offered before there was anything to see. That kind of feedback is worth more than a million dollars of marketing research, and we want to honor it.

Two, you run the equipment we're optimizing for — a stinger-steered open carrier. The car-hauler vertical has its own specific paperwork (the VCR), its own dominant load board (Central Dispatch), its own fraud patterns (luxury-vehicle theft via double-brokering), its own accessorial categories (TONU, layover, auction-passthrough fees) that get under-claimed because nobody has time to chase them. Designing the car-hauler features with someone who actually does the work — versus designing them based on what we think the work looks like — is the difference between a tool that gets used and a tool that doesn't.

We're not trying to be everything to everyone. We're trying to be exactly what you need, and then expand from there.

Some things worth thinking about before we talk

When we get on the call, these are the questions I'd want to walk through with you:

Where do the biggest dollars leak in your typical week? Detention? Damage claims? TONUs / layovers / passthrough fees? Wasted auction trips? Fraud? IFTA? Something else not on this list?
What's a feature you'd want that ISN'T on this list? You know things about your day we don't.
Is there a recent claim or incident where you'd have wanted help — and you can walk us through it as a use-case? Real stories beat hypotheticals every time.
What's your honest reaction to using something like this? What would make you trust it? What would make you ditch it?
The contingency-fee model versus a flat subscription — which one feels more honest for the kind of work this does? Is there a third structure we're missing?

That's the brief. Read at your own pace, react however feels right, tell us anything we missed.

— Patrick