The Method
No truck is being driven. The truck on this channel is a simulated carrier — one tractor, one trailer, one authority, all on paper. It is not a truck I own today, and it is not the one I used to. The loads are real: pulled off a live board each evening, unedited, and priced in TrueRPM against the cost model below.
I'm Brandon. Eighteen years in transportation, and for part of that I ran my own truck.
It didn't work. Not because the freight wasn't there. Because I didn't understand the numbers on this page. I watched rate per mile, I watched the gross, and I never once worked out what a load actually left me after the empty miles, the days it tied the truck up, and the costs that billed whether I moved or not. I shut it down by choice, before it shut me down.
TrueRPM is the tool I needed and didn't have. This page and the channel are that math, run in public, so somebody else doesn't have to learn it the way I did.
If one of these numbers is wrong, say so in the comments and I'll correct it publicly. That's the deal.
1. The truck
| Tractor | 2019 Freightliner Cascadia, DD15 |
| Odometer at season start | ~548,000 miles |
| Purchase / financed | $62,000 · $55,000 financed at 12% over 48 months |
| Trailer | 2016 Wabash 53' dry van, owned outright |
| Authority age | 3 years |
Financed on purpose. A paid-off truck makes every week look survivable, and most operators aren't running one.
2. Fixed costs — these bill whether the truck moves or not
| Item | Per month |
|---|---|
| Truck payment | $1,448 |
| Insurance — liability, cargo, physical damage, occ/acc | $1,500 |
| IRP plates + IFTA admin | $183 |
| HVUT (Form 2290) | $46 |
| Load boards + ELD | $220 |
| Accounting, UCR, drug consortium | $120 |
| Parking / yard | $150 |
| Phone, tools, misc | $110 |
| Total fixed | $3,777 / month |
That daily figure is what one day of detention costs before the truck earns a dime.
3. Variable costs — charged on every mile, loaded or empty
| Item | Per mile |
|---|---|
| Fuel — $5.348/gal at 6.8 MPG | $0.786 |
| Maintenance + tire reserve | $0.250 |
| Driver wage — paid to yourself | $0.600 |
| Variable cost per mile | $1.636 |
Tolls are entered per load rather than folded into cost per mile — an I-95 run and a Kansas run are not the same trip. Diesel is the U.S. EIA on-highway national average and updates every Monday. It is the most volatile number on this page.
The line most operators skip. The $0.60 driver wage is your pay. Leave it out and the truck looks profitable while you work for free. At 1,870 loaded miles a week that's $1,122 — and it's the single most common omission in owner-operator cost math.
4. How $2.05 is built
| Variable cost per mile | $1.636 |
| Fixed cost per mile — $872/wk ÷ 2,125 mi | $0.410 |
| Total cost per mile | $2.047 |
Why 2,125 miles a week and not 2,500. The load filters in section 6 cap a day at 250–450 loaded miles plus up to 150 deadhead. One load a day, five days a week, and this truck realistically turns about 2,125 total miles — not the 2,500 a full-time OTR truck runs. Fewer miles carrying the same $872 of fixed cost means a higher cost per mile.
An earlier version of this page used a 2,500-mile basis and published $1.99. That understated the truck by about six cents a mile. The basis here is the one the truck actually runs, and it's the number you see on screen.
5. The math on screen is the app's math
$2.05 is the only figure I supply. It goes into TrueRPM's cost-per-mile field and everything after that is the app doing arithmetic, exactly as it would on your phone:
revenue = gross linehaul + accessorial
total miles = loaded + deadhead
cost = total miles × $2.05 + tolls
net profit = revenue − cost
net per day = net profit ÷ transit days
broker rate = gross ÷ loaded miles
true rev/mi = revenue ÷ total milesType the same load into TrueRPM with cost per mile set to 2.05 and you will get the number the video showed, to the cent. If you don't, that's a bug and I want the email.
Breakeven
Spreading cost across loaded miles only, at 12% deadhead:
| Cost per loaded mile | $2.326 |
| Same, if you factor at 2.5% of gross | $2.385 |
The app does not deduct a factoring fee, because factoring is a percentage of gross rather than a cost per mile. The $2.326 figure is the one that matches what you'll see on screen. The second line is there so people who factor know where their real line sits.
For scale: ATRI's Operational Costs of Trucking put the 2025 industry average at a record $2.336 per mile. This model, built bottom-up from unrelated inputs, lands just under it.
6. Deadhead sensitivity — why good rates still lose money
Same truck. Same fixed costs. Same week of work. Only the empty miles change.
| Deadhead | Loaded mi/wk | Cost / loaded mi |
|---|---|---|
| 5% | 2,019 | $2.154 |
| 12% | 1,870 | $2.326 |
| 20% | 1,700 | $2.558 |
| 28% | 1,530 | $2.843 |
Between 5% and 28% deadhead the rate you need moves by 69 cents a mile. Nothing about the truck changed.
7. How the loads get picked
The first thing anyone says about a channel like this is that the loads are cherry-picked. So the picking is taken away from me.
The pull
- Board pulled every weekday morning between 06:00 and 09:00 Eastern, live, for that same day's load.
- Origin is fixed: wherever yesterday's winning load delivered. No jumping to a better market.
- Screenshot taken at pull time with the qualifying load count. Retained, and available if you ask.
- Episodes publish one week behind the pull. By the time you see a load here it is history, not freight you could book.
- Season 1, day 1 exception. Monday's pool was pulled the previous Sunday at 6:00 PM Eastern, before the morning rule was adopted. Days 2 through 5 are live morning pulls. Noted here rather than smoothed over.
The filters
- 53' dry van · authority filter off
- Deadhead to pickup ≤ 150 miles
- Loaded miles 250–450
- Pickup within 150 miles of the truck's current position
- Posted within the last 24 hours
The three selectors
Every load meeting the filters forms that day's pool. Three are drawn from it by rules that deliberately disagree:
Highest rate per loaded mile.
Highest total posted rate.
Shortest deadhead to pickup.
If two selectors land on the same load, the higher priority keeps it and the lower takes its next-best. Priority runs A, then B, then C.
The winner
TrueRPM picks it, not me — highest net profit per day. No veto, including the days it picks badly. When the load with the worst rate per mile turns out to pay best, that's the whole point of the channel.
Conventions
- Miles come from the board's own trip figures.
- Tolls from TruckRouter, loaded leg only.
- Transit days = delivery date − pickup date, minimum 1.
- Miss a pull and it goes up the next morning with the real timestamp. Two consecutive misses and the truck sits: $0 revenue, fixed cost still charged.
- No qualifying load in the market. The truck repositions empty to the nearest origin that has one. The full deadhead is charged at $2.047 a mile against zero revenue, and the day is logged as a reposition — not skipped, not re-rolled from a friendlier market.
- A sit day costs $174.47 — one fifth of the $872.37 weekly fixed nut. Fixed cost is recovered through miles, so a day that turns no miles recovers none of it.
- The truck does not go home. Harrisburg is where the costs are registered, not where the truck sleeps. Each week starts wherever the previous week ended. See section 8.
8. What this model does not do
- No detention, layover, lumpers, or accessorial pay.
- No reset and no breakdown. An empty market is now handled — the truck repositions and eats the deadhead — but a genuine multi-day freight drought is not modelled.
- It assumes the posted rate is the paid rate. In practice you negotiate, and brokers short-pay.
- Maintenance is a flat reserve, not a repair schedule. Real maintenance arrives in lumps.
- No home time. A real owner-operator runs a tour and then goes home, and that trip is usually several hundred unpaid miles followed by days earning nothing while the fixed costs keep billing. This truck runs continuously. That makes the model look better than a real week with home time in it, and you should read the numbers knowing that.
- It is one truck, one region, one equipment type. Your costs are not this truck's costs.
9. Run your own truck through it
Price a load in about ten seconds. TrueRPM is a free download and gives you five load calculations every day, no credit card. Put your own cost per mile in instead of this truck's and see what your board is really offering.
Get TrueRPMFree cost-per-mile worksheet
Don't know your cost per mile yet? The worksheet walks every line item — and it's how you'll hear the day the iPhone version lands.
10. Sources
| Diesel | U.S. Energy Information Administration, weekly on-highway diesel, national average |
| Rate context | DAT Freight & Analytics, published national averages |
| Cost benchmark | ATRI, Operational Costs of Trucking |
Not financial advice. Outputs are estimates based on the figures entered and are not financial, tax, or business advice. Your costs are not this truck's costs — run your own numbers. Published by Haulmoore LLC.