Priced as a contract. Not a courier job.
Fleetable prices food delivery per mile with every cost shown — mileage, loading, return leg, surcharges — as a contract, not a one-off courier fee. A typical dedicated London route runs around £95 ex VAT — a from-price, confirmed on your own routes. Fleetable owns no vans, so you pay for delivery, not idle vans. Price a route below, then send it for a route-cost breakdown.
The problem
A cheap quote, then the extras.
A courier quote looks cheap until the extras land — return legs, waiting time and surcharges turn up on the invoice, not the quote. So we price per mile with every cost shown up front, as a contract, and confirm it on your own routes.
How it works
Proven on one route first
The estimate below comes from the same per-mile rate card we contract on. We then confirm it on your route: one route run in parallel with your current provider, one main driver and one backup, and you check the cost and the timing against your own invoices. Switch nothing until it works.
Price a route
An indicative estimate from our standard rate card
Enter an area or postcode above and set the distance with the slider. To search full addresses and have the driving distance worked out instead, we send what you type to Mapbox, our maps provider.
Indicative estimate
- Mileage — 8 mi at £1.60/mi
- £12.80
- Return leg — 4 mi
- £6.40
- Loading and waiting — 0 min chargeable of 20
- £0.00
- Congestion charge
- £18.00
- ULEZ
- £12.50
- Minimum route charge — £95.00
- £45.30
Total ex VAT£95.00
Live estimate from the real rate card. Final price confirmed on your route.
The pricing model
Open book, closed book, and which one this is.
Two words come up in every logistics tender, and they are worth pinning down before anybody quotes you.
- Open book
- The provider shows its own costs and an agreed margin on top. You are buying visibility of the cost base, and you can argue with it line by line at review.
- Closed book
- The provider quotes a rate and keeps its cost base to itself. You are buying a price, not the arithmetic behind it — which is how most delivery is bought, and it is not a lesser thing to buy.
Fleetable prices closed book, and itemises it.
The rate is per mile against the vehicle class the load needs. The cost base behind it is not published, so this is closed-book pricing, and saying so is more use to you than claiming the word that sells better.
What you get instead is an itemised rate. Mileage, loading, the return leg and any surcharge are quoted as separate lines before the contract starts, so every line on the invoice is one you saw before you signed, and a month's invoice reconciles to the drops that produced it.
That is transparent pricing, and it is not the same as open book. Open book tells you what the work costs us. An itemised rate tells you what you are paying for and why the number moved. Most food operations are buying the second and are sold the first as a slogan.
If your tender genuinely requires open book, bring it to the capacity review. You get a straight answer on whether it can be done, before you spend a round of the process finding out.
How to build a benchmark from your own invoices — what to separate, what a cost-per-drop figure hides, and why route density decides it — is set out at length in the Fleetable journal.
Contract terms
What a food logistics contract has to fix.
A contract is worth reading for the parts that are missing. Six things should be written down before anyone signs, and the sixth is where most disputes start.
- The route and the schedule. Which drops, in which order, in which window, on which days. A contract that names a service level without naming the round has fixed nothing.
- The vehicle class. What is booked for the load, and what happens on the morning a load will not fit it. Six classes are priced — bike or moped, car, small van, long van, Luton and 7.5t lorry.
- The rate. Per mile, with mileage, loading, the return leg and surcharges quoted as separate lines rather than rolled into one figure.
- The measures. On-time-in-full is the one that decides whether the contract worked. Alongside it: proof of delivery on every drop, and the temperature record where the load needs one.
- Who is accountable. One named contact, and a backup driver arranged in advance rather than found on the morning. Accountability that only exists after a failure is not a term, it is a hope.
- Notice, review and renewal. What ends the contract, what triggers a price review, and when performance is looked at. This is the one this page does not answer for you — see below.
What this page will not tell you.
Fleetable publishes no standard notice period, review cadence or renewal term. That is not an oversight and it is not a negotiating tactic.
A contract for six drops a week and a contract for sixty are not the same commitment, and a standard notice period published on a website is written for whichever of the two the writer had in mind. Bring the terms your procurement process requires to the capacity review and you get them in writing before you commit to anything.
The same principle runs through the rest of the site: a fact confirmed against your job beats a fact published on a web page. It is why the service is proven on one route first rather than argued for.
Service level
What a service level agreement should measure.
A service level agreement is worth exactly what can be checked after the fact. Three measures survive that test.
- On-time-in-full. The drop arrived inside its window and complete. Reported per route and per site with the drops behind the figure visible, so it can be checked rather than taken on trust.
- Cover. A set driver on the route and a named backup who already knows the run. The measure is whether the round ran, not whether somebody was eventually found to run it.
- Evidence. Proof of delivery on every drop, and the temperature record where the load needs one, handed over at signature rather than assembled afterwards.
Any on-time-in-full figure on this site is labelled a sample until it comes from an audited report, and no service level number is quoted here for the same reason. A percentage offered before there is a measurement behind it is a number you cannot hold anyone to, which makes it worse than no number at all.
What the reporting looks like, and what your finance team can pull from it, is set out on the tracking and reporting page.
The difference
Own vans, a courier, or Fleetable
| What matters | Your own vans | A courier | Fleetable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Set drivers for your routes | Yes | Shared | Yes, committed |
| A backup on every route | Your problem | Rarely | Always — primary and backup |
| Live tracking you can check | Manual | A tracking number | Live, auditable per drop |
| Reports for finance | Manual | No | On time, proof and cost |
| No idle-van cost | You carry it | Yes | Pay for delivery, not idle vans |
Proof
Reliability you can check.
A backup on every route
Primary and backup, always. A sick day never leaves a site short.
Chilled, checked before each job
Food-safe vehicles, kept to temperature the whole route.
Live tracking and proof of delivery
Time and temperature at every drop, with proof your finance team can check.
One named contact
One person who knows your routes — not a call centre.
Drivers checked to your standard. Chilled, food-safe vehicles. Proof at every drop.
Accreditations added as contracts require.
Related
Before you commit
FAQ
Questions, answered.
What is actually in the per-mile rate?
Is the estimate the price we pay?
How is pricing calculated?
How do I get a quote?
What if a driver does not show?
Can we try it without switching?
Do you own a fleet?
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