CargoWise Value Packs Frequently Asked Questions

There is a minimum monthly charge that applies only in cases of near zero usage, as there is in the previous STL pricing model. There are no other minimums or thresholds.

CargoWise Value Pack fees are charged at a specific and published community price per logistics transaction, as published on our community pricing page. 

The basis for the charges are shown in our Community Pricing fees here. There are no variations in fees based on business size. 

Community Pricing is available here. You can see included features here. 

The charges will likely comprise a very small percentage of the overall CargoWise Customer’s invoice and an even smaller percentage of the landed cost that the logistics customer sees and are a valid charge to capture the value that CargoWise adds significantly to the logistics and supply chain processes. The key improvement that substantially benefits our CargoWise Customer is the CargoWise Automation Fee, which is configured to be automatically recovered from the logistics customer, removing this cost from your P&L, potentially making CargoWise dramatically cheaper or zero cost and increasing your P&L profit and margin percentage.

The new invoicing model is designed to be significantly simpler and provide a lower cost to your P&L in its default configuration. With the default configuration, CargoWise potentially becomes significantly lower cost for our CargoWise Customers.

With the default configuration, passing the CargoWise Automation Fee to your customer will mean a CargoWise Customer will record a much lower P&L cost than with the former STL pricing model.  Additionally, you will get access to hundreds of features and modules, and the soon to be released Agentic AI Workflow Engine and AI management engine. These AI features are designed to introduce significant operational efficiencies.  

Community Pricing has been released and can be found here.

Remember, in the default configuration the CargoWise Automation Fee is recovered by you and passed through to your customer, potentially making CargoWise much lower cost, if not zero cost, from a Profit & Loss point of view,  subject to your billing and recovery practices.

There are potentially large savings under the CargoWise Value Pack, and these can be very significant for you. The CargoWise Value Packs include more than hundreds of features and modules, and the soon-to-be-released AI Workflow Engine and AI management engine. These AI features are designed to introduce significant operational efficiencies.

Based on internal modelling, there may be opportunities for meaningful labour cost reductions over time, however, actual results will vary by customer and operational factors. Remember, in the default configuration the CargoWise Automation Fee is passed through to your customer, which potentially makes CargoWise much lower cost, if not zero cost, from a Profit & Loss point of view, subject to your billing and recovery practices.

The CargoWise Value Pack is a new pricing model tied to a substantial and valuable bundle of features and modules. The community price list is public and applies to all customers large or small, as the charge is treated as a disbursement it is not available for discounting or negotiations.

Under the New Commercial Model and the CargoWise Value Packs, a CargoWise Customer on the recommended default billing procedures, in P&L terms, will potentially pay significantly less than the CargoWise Customer paid on their previous STL pricing model.  

There are no discount tiers or commitments. There is a minimum monthly charge for customers with extremely low usage, which is consistent with the current STL minimum fee.

CargoWise Customers will get access to many new features and will potentially be able to recover a large part, if not all, of the CargoWise transaction fees from their customers if the recommended default billing procedures are implemented. 

Billing will function as it does today. You will continue to receive a monthly CargoWise invoice, but through the default setting much, if not all of the charges, will be passed through to your customer as a disbursement on their invoice for recovery and, in the default configuration, will not pass through your P&L.

In the default configuration, you will be able to easily and automatically recover the CargoWise transaction fees from your customer (as described in various parts of this FAQ), as this has been automated and integrated into the CargoWise billing engine, meaning your P&L affected cost potentially reduces significantly, subject to your billing and recovery practices.

You can change the accounting treatment to take the CargoWise Automation Fee through the P&L but we strongly recommend against this change as it will have a negative impact on the treatment of the disbursement and on your P&L profit and margin percentage.

There are no special discounts in the CargoWise Value Pack model as it is treated as in its recommended default setting, it is treated as a disbursement.  

Customers with commitment contracts: For Commitment customers there are no changes planned for the 1^st of December. However, there are significant advantages to all customers, and we intend to be in touch with current commitment customers shortly.

The CargoWise Automation Fee is applied per job based on the operational event recorded in CargoWise. The fee applies to the shipment direction (import / export / domestic / transshipment) and the freight mode (LCL / LTL / AIR / NON-FCL vs FCL / FTL) and is not dependent on billing party, origin, destination or any other criterion.

In the case of stand-alone formal customs procedures there is a single charge for an Export Entry and a charge for an Import Entry. The different modes and their respective fees can be seen here.

Yes. CargoWise will continue to support cost allocation and reporting by branch, division, or entity. Your existing internal allocation practices and data available through MyAccount and reporting tools will continue to function as they do today.

Multi-entity structures continue to operate as they do in the current commercial model. Each entity’s activity contributes to the group’s overall shipment and declaration count, and charges flow through the standard monthly CargoWise invoice. There are different charge rates for exporter forwarding, import forwarding and special category for Gateway/Transit/Transfer/Cross-Trade/Wholesaler/Co-load master as a way of managing the wholesale, trade or internal costs of these transactions.

It’s a very simplified model and the costs are to the Logistics Customer in the default configuration. In the default configuration, the P&L cost to our CargoWise Customer is significantly lower than it would be under the previous STL pricing. If you have further questions after reading these FAQs, we will be happy to answer questions regarding the model, pricing and other matters. Please note that this is a global change and we are dealing with thousands of CargoWise Customers and we may take a few days to respond.

At this stage, we have no price rises planned, however we reserve our rights to apply price rises in the future.

No, however, there are no seat fees that apply to CargoWise Value Packs or the New Commercial Model. There will be a longer-term requirement to have reasonable CargoWise training for operators and line managers, but this will be introduced gradually. That said, the CargoWise Value Pack replaces all previous pricing models including related discounts and the per job transaction charge is standardized and published publicly.

Whilst you the customer will have control over the final presentation of your invoice to your customer, the default configuration does not provide for an uplift in the CargoWise Automation Fee. However, a CargoWise Customer has the ability to remove the default charge line and take the cost up themselves in their P&L or to add the charge as a margin line instead of the disbursed cost or add a service fee next to the CargoWise Automation Fee. However this is manual, and the automated addition of the CargoWise Automation Fee will remain unless the customer manually removes the charge on each invoice.

The addition of the CargoWise Automation Fee is automated in the default setting, however the customer can manually adjust the charge on each invoice and adjust how they treat the costs and revenue of the CargoWise Automation Fee.

We publish prices in USD, and as is very common with much of forwarding and customs practice, the invoice converts the charge to local currency with whatever exchange rate and CFX is used by the CargoWise Customers system configuration. We will continue to bill in USD as is common practice, but your customer will see both a USD and local fee (if the local currency is not in USD).

For Warehousing and Land Transport we will provide a USD price however CargoWise will convert this into the CargoWise customer’s preferred currency as is common with other A/P USD costs.

Whilst it is always for you to determine how best to communicate with your customers, one suggestion might be to highlight the CargoWise Automation Fee as a relative cost to their landed cost of goods, and that the CargoWise Automation Fee has been added as other industry standard service fees set by other service providers, infrastructure and government agencies (like terminals, customs authorities etc) are usually added to the landed cost of goods.

The CW Automation Fee is treated as a disbursement with these key configurations:

• The Automation Fee charge codes are created with the ‘Disbursement’ charge code type
• The general ledger accounts that are used in this disbursement charge code are placed in the balance sheet and are not automatically recorded as revenues or costs
• When a job is recorded in CargoWise, the cost accrual is automatically posted into a disbursement accrual account (using a Job Revenue Journal transaction) and the expected invoice value is defaulted to the same values as the cost accrual.
• The net impact of the Cost Accrual posting is as follows:
  • DR CW Automation Fee Clearing (Clearing Account)
  • CR CW Automation Fee Payable (Accrual Account)
• When receiving the CargoWise invoice, your payable invoice will post as follows:
  • DR  CW Automation Fee Payable (Accrual Account cleared)
  • CR Payables Control
• When posting the receivables invoice to your customer, the posting will occur as follows:
  • DR Receivables Control
  • CR CW Automation Fee Clearing
• The estimated sell accrual is also reversed as part of the AR Invoice posting.

Per the above, the standard configuration for the Automation Fee is to pass through the balance sheet as a disbursement item and does not pass through the P&L Account. This is standard accounting for disbursement transactions like the CW Automation fee. 

All Forwarding and Customs-related features are included in their respective CargoWise Value Packs. A small set of Excluded Items and Optional and/or rarely used billable Premium Services are listed at the bottom of CargoWise Value Pack features. These exclusions have no practical impact on the Forwarding Agent CargoWise Value Pack or the Customs Agent CargoWise Value Pack.

The majority of new features released that relate to the CargoWise Value Packs will be included in the CargoWise Value Packs at no extra cost. We will take an inclusive view of these features, and some features will span all CargoWise Value Packs and some features will be expressly related to a particular CargoWise Value Pack.

The majority of WiseTech Academy courseware including the well regarded Diploma of Customs Brokage, the Diploma of International Forwarding and the management courseware called the Black Belt in Thinking are included in the CargoWise Value Packs at no cost (noting a number of third-party provided courses, such as IATA dangerous goods, may charge additional fees for payment to the provider of that capability, in such cases the Academy passes those actual costs from the third party provider direct to the student with no uplift or other fee).

A small set of Excluded Items and Optional and/or rarely used billable Premium Services are listed at the bottom of CargoWise Value Pack features. These exclusions have no practical impact on the CargoWise Forwarding Agent Value Pack or the CargoWise Customs Agent Value Pack.

Any function or module not explicitly excluded in the CargoWise Value Packs is automatically included for customers, even if it is not separately listed.

No. Under the CargoWise Value Packs you will likely receive an increase in the functions and modules that are available to you with no loss of functionality. The CargoWise Value Packs are designed to help increase your own capability, productivity, P&L profitability and margin, subject to your billing and business practices.

We have working AI models for formal Export procedures and formal Import procedures, and International Trade Compliance which are complex, costly and risky procedures to deal with and require highly skilled staff and carry a substantial complex risk in today’s world.

Our Agentic AI Workflow Engine and AI Management Engines capabilities will roll out over the coming months, helping you to automate many tasks that are currently performed manually, enabling your operations to be more efficient, productive and much more scalable.

Consider these AI Agents as already operating like a highly trained and capable but narrowly defined automated actor (largely preventing what the industry describes as “hallucination”) that are designed to assist with complex tasks and reduce manual workload, complementing skilled operators. AI Agents will be included in the CargoWise Value Pack at no additional cost and the preliminary implementations are available for production use to customers that sign a Trial Access Addendum (TAA). Trial Access Addendums (TAA) are only available for customers on the New Commercial Model/CargoWise Value Pack.

Importantly AI Agents are highly scalable, instantly on call, can work 24x7 without complaint, never get sick, never take holidays, ask for pay rises, and work at the same reliable and predictable rate and, no doubt, become even smarter, faster and more capable as the AI industry and WiseTech continues to invest heavily and rapidly evolve.

From day one, you will have access to our:
•    AI Classification Assistant
•    ComplianceWise
•    ACE AI Chatbot
•    AI-assisted document ingestion

If you wish to access in-development AI automations, please indicate your interest and we will provide access to in-development AI automation on a Trial Access Addendum (TAA) for production usage. TAAs are only available for customers on the New Commercial Model/CargoWise Value Pack.

Yes. These are different CargoWise Value Packs, including for Warehousing and Land Transport, please refer to the linked features here.

The CargoWise Forwarding Value Pack has all the Customs procedures for forwarding and includes all the formal export and import procedures included in the Customs Clearance Value Pack. So there are no charges for Customs processes for a Forwarding shipment.

Refer to our inclusion list here: CargoWise Value Pack features

• All freight forwarding and related customs procedures including formal import and export customs procedures are included in the CargoWise Forwarding Value Pack.
• All formal import and export customs-related features are included in the stand-alone CargoWise Customs Value Pack.
• The CargoWise Warehousing Value Pack includes Contract (Product based), eCommerce and Duty Deferral Warehouses and all related features in the same way we are bundling Forwarding and Customs. Thes charges are not passed to the logistics customer by default.
• Land Transport includes all capabilities related to land transport. These charges are not passed on to the logistics customer by default.

In the New Commercial Model, there are no charges for hand-held of forklift mounted devices in the Contract Warehouse Manager CargoWise Value Pack, or Land Transport CargoWise Value Pack. We are charging for the value delivered by the Logistics Service Provider to the Logistics Customer, not for the “inputs” used – such as device license. So just like there are no seat fees there are no use fees for devices.

This is not possible for a number of technical and commercial reasons. From your notification onwards, we have converted to CargoWise Value Packs and STL is no longer available. This is both a strategic issue driven by the AI revolution but also a practical matter, as there are no seat fees under the New Commecrial Model/CargoWise Value Pack it is impossible to have a blended STL/New Commercial Model. From this point STL is impossible to use given the seat fee is completely removed when you are using CargoWise in the New Commercial Model mode.

All languages are now included and free in the New Commercial Model/CargoWise Value Pack, the former “Bundled Language Pack” is no longer relevant, please see included list.

For customers who have received CargoWise Value Pack notifications, the move occurs on 1 December 2025 and is mandatory. The STL model is no longer available to the customers that have been notified. 

No. The New Commercial Model and the related CargoWise Value Packs is driven by the AI revolution and its opportunities and risks, and our soon to be released Agentic AI Workflow Engine and AI Management Engine’s capabilities. Given the rapid and dramatic change that is upon us all, the STL model will be retired, and the CargoWise Value Pack model will apply going forward. 

If you have received a notification, you will be automatically switched to the new model on the 1st of December 2025.

The switch is automatic on 1 December 2025. No specific implementation work is required though we appreciate it may take businesses some time to accommodate and become familiar with the new commercial model and associated CargoWise Value Packs.

If you have received a notification, the process will occur automatically.

Yes. This happens automatically for the Forwarding Value Pack and the Customers Broker Value Pack. The CargoWise Automation Fee is not passed to customers for the other CargoWise Value Packs. 

None. If you have received a notification, the transition is automatic.

For many years, we have offered customers on the CargoWise Cloud the flexibility as to when they applied upgrades and patches. In practice, that approach has created increasing risk, complexity and operational issues, but it was maintained while customers were directly paying for CargoWise Cloud hosting. Under the new CargoWise Value Pack model, this has had to change, and system updates will be rolled out automatically. Cloud fees have been removed, and, as has always been the case, customers do not have an unfettered right to remain on outdated versions. The combination of technical complexity, rising costs which we now bear directly, and the growing importance of cyber-security now requires us to apply patches and upgrades on a regular basis, and at times on an urgent basis, to protect your systems and ensure you receive the full value of CargoWise.

Like all modern cloud-based software providers, we will continue to roll out updates progressively, where practical. Patches, which deliver critical fixes and essential security hardening, cannot reasonably be deferred without exposing customers to unnecessary risk and WiseTech to unreasonable risk and cost, and so these are on a tighter cycle and sometimes (rarely) will have to be urgently applied for your own protection.

Upgrades, on the other hand, deliver new features, improved performance, and expanded capability. These are provided in line with our terms and conditions and are staged via the DPR, STD and GPR release rings that you can select and participate in, and overall, these reflect the value created through our continued investment in CargoWise.

The recent patches and upgrades ensure you have the latest and strongest security protections, a reduced defect profile and access to all features included in the CargoWise Value Packs – including, importantly, the ability to recover your CargoWise costs directly from your own customers.

From December 2025 we will publish an upgrade and patch schedule on the CargoWise website and whenever practical provide you with an email update of any changes to the upgrade or patch schedule. In all but the most urgent or cyber critical events we will provide updates and patches as far outside of your main operating hours as possible. On a daily basis, in the My Account portal, update notes will be published as soon the feature or change is available in the DPR version of CargoWise Next.

Regardless of when a patch or upgrade was applied and regardless of whether you choose to recover the CargoWise Automation Fee from your customers or not, the Value Pack pricing model will be in effect for your subscription from 1 December 2025.

CargoWise Next was rolled out to the vast majority of CargoWise customers during 2025. As part of the transition to the CargoWise Value Packs, anyone remaining on the CargoWise One system will be automatically updated to CargoWise Next. Note that in most cases, the CargoWise Next changes had already been rolled out to you some months ago, and have simply been “enabled”.

As we do with many other features, changes are rolled out to ensure WiseTech can continue to invest in new features and ensure our customers have access to the latest features and compliance updates.

All standard CargoWise Cloud hosting fees are included in the CargoWise Value Packs at no additional cost.

Yes.

The CargoWise Automation Fee is applied per job based on the operational job type recorded in CargoWise.

Yes. CargoWise will continue to support cost allocation and reporting by branch, division, or entity. Your existing internal allocation practices through MyAccount and reporting tools will continue to function as they do today.

Multi-entity structures continue to operate as they do in the current commercial model. Each entity’s activity contributes to the group’s overall shipment and declaration count, and charges flow through the standard monthly CargoWise invoice.

There is a pro forma invoice available on the Forwarding and Customs jobs that show the CargoWise Automation Fee as charged to the Logistics Customer.

No, this is a system-wide change. The Warehouse and Land Transport Value Packs, as well as the Container Transport Optimizations Booking, do not push the charges to the customer invoice as they are not technically operating in the “Agent For” model of disbursements. You can, of course, choose to delete the charge on the customer invoice.

The same process for considering jobs/shipments will apply between STL and the CargoWise Value Pack model. The CargoWise Automation Fee only appears on access to the billing tab. Even if the shipment is cancelled at this late stage, the shipment can be reused on another job unless the invoice has been posted or a customs procedure lodged.

It will be based on shipment information as described above and the trigger does not occur unless the billing tab is accessed after the job being fully registered and saved.

It will apply to jobs that have invoices opened for the first time on or after 1 Dec 2025.

Yes, a new charge will appear on the shipment billing tab after the shipment registration is complete and once the billing tab is accessed.