Snapshot: 69% less demurrage exposure, 67% fewer late pickups
A freight broker cut demurrage by 69% and late pickups by 67% after a year on OpenTrack. We compared its first six months on the platform with the same six months a year later, across thousands of containers. The gains showed up at every major port in the study, not just one lucky terminal.
In this piece, late pickups means containers picked up after destination Last Free Day. Cut demurrage by 69% means average demurrage days per container fell from 2.38 days to 0.73 days (on-time boxes count as zero days). That is days of free-time risk, not billed dollars. Broker records still don't give us usable demurrage invoice amounts.
Free time can be easy to miss because terminals and ocean carriers often publish different Last Free Days. If you only watch one, you can still get hit by the other. OpenTrack tracks both. More on that here: Terminal or carrier LFD? Why you need to track both.
Free time was already burning before they could act
Freight brokers live and die on terminal free-time windows. Miss Last Free Day and demurrage starts. Leave boxes on the street too long and detention and empty returns get messy.
This broker started with a rough baseline: more than a third of scored pickups were late, and average demurrage days per container sat at 2.38 days. Operators were still stitching status together across portals instead of working from one trusted source.
They needed one source for Last Free Day, not five portals
Late pickups are expensive, noisy, and hard to explain to customers. The team needed to know earlier when a box would be available, so they'd have enough lead time to book appointments and drivers before free time ran out. Manually refreshing carrier and terminal sites was introducing delays that showed up downstream as fees.
One year later: demurrage down 69%, late pickups down 67%
We lined up the same season and the same length of time before and after, on the same freight brokerage:
| Measure | First 6 months | Same 6 months, one year later | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Late pickups (after Last Free Day) | 35.4% | 11.7% | 67% lower |
| Average demurrage days per container | 2.38 days | 0.73 days | 69% lower |
| Median street dwell | 4 days | 3 days | 25% lower |
Average demurrage days per container, in plain terms: for every scored pickup, how many days past Last Free Day did it sit before pickup? If you picked it up on time or early, that count is zero. If you were three days late, it counts as three. Average those across all scored boxes and you get "how much free-time risk showed up per container".
Almost all of the 69% drop came from stopping late pickups, not from making the remaining late ones a little less late. Days late among the misses only fell about 7%.
The lift held across ports, not one lucky terminal
The improvement shows up on its own at every destination with enough volume to score: Seattle, Long Beach, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Tacoma. A skeptic can't wave it off as one port carrying the number.
How they did it with OpenTrack
According to the broker's review of this data, two mechanisms fundamentally drove the improvement:
- Operators used to burn time checking different sources for LFD and availability. With OpenTrack, the "time to answer" decreased significantly. Manual checks can't happen very often, adding a systemic source of delay in reaction time when something changed.
- Operators may not check the right source, might make manual errors, or might not have been able to ensure full handoff on a sick day. Higher frequency of these outlier events drive up the average demurrage days per container.
When OpenTrack became the single place to see container status end to end, their reaction time improved, and they drastically reduced the number of mistakes that can become expensive.
In practice, that looks like:
- Up-to-date terminal and carrier Last Free Days in one view, so urgent boxes surface before either free-time clock runs out (why both matter)
- Availability alongside LFD, so planning starts from when the box is actually ready
- Exception monitoring for demurrage and detention risk, so the team works the hot list instead of rediscovering it every morning
- Fewer portal hops, so appointments and drivers get planned from trusted milestones instead of conflicting carrier and terminal pages
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