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Enter carton count, dimensions and weight; get CBM, gross weight, and the chargeable quantity each channel bills on — the three numbers every freight quote depends on. Free, no signup.
Freight cost calculators that show a price are multiplying your volume by a rate someone published months ago. The rate your forwarder actually charges depends on the contract they hold, the lane, the week’s surcharges, and whether you are consolidating with other cargo. A number produced without those inputs is not an estimate — it is a guess that will be wrong in the direction you notice least until the invoice arrives.
Most quotes come back wrong or get revised because the request left one of these out. Send all three and the price you get back is the price you pay.
Add the commodity description at the same time. It determines whether any restriction, duty rate or handling requirement applies, and it is the single most common cause of a quote being revised after booking.
Once you have the chargeable quantity per channel, a forwarder can quote each one without a follow-up question, and you can compare their answers on the same basis instead of comparing guesses. The workbench runs this comparison end to end for a full shipment, including the consolidation and repacking options that change the quantities in the first place.
Everything computes locally in your browser. No upload, no account — channel ratios and rounding conventions are published rules, not quotes. Channel data verified 2026-09-28.
A freight price depends on the contract your forwarder holds, the lane, the season and the surcharges in force that week. Any generic calculator that prints a dollar figure is guessing, and the number goes stale. What does not change is the quantity each channel bills on: cubic metres for sea, chargeable kilograms for air and express, revenue tons for LCL, or a flat container for FCL. Those are the numbers you need before you ask.
Chargeable weight is the greater of the actual gross weight and the volumetric weight, where volumetric weight equals volume times a channel-specific ratio. Express typically uses 200 kg per cubic metre, air around 167, and sea LCL 1000. A light but bulky shipment is billed on volume; a dense one is billed on weight.
Compare your gross weight against the volume multiplied by the channel ratio. If volume times the ratio exceeds the actual weight, you are billed on volume, which means reducing carton size is what lowers the bill. If actual weight governs, no amount of repacking will help and only a lighter product or a different channel will.
Send the carton count, the outer dimensions of one carton, the total gross weight, the total cubic metres, and the commodity. With those, a forwarder can price every channel without a follow-up question. Sending only the weight is the most common reason quotes come back wrong or get revised later.
The unit most sea freight is billed in. A revenue ton is the greater of the shipment's volume in cubic metres and its weight in metric tonnes, under the rule that one cubic metre counts as 1000 kg. Light cargo is billed on volume, heavy cargo on weight, and you pay whichever is larger.
When your volume is close enough to container capacity that the LCL rate per revenue ton, plus the per-shipment fees you stop paying once you fill a box, exceeds the container price. That point moves with freight rates, the lane and the season, so it has to be worked out for your shipment rather than assumed. A container is also a cliff: once you have paid for it, the marginal cubic metre inside is free.
Because they are not the same purchase. A port-to-port LCL rate covers the ocean leg and stops there, with destination handling, customs clearance, duty and final delivery billed separately on top. A DDP price per cubic metre bundles all of that in. Two quotes can only be compared once they have been put on the same scope.