Logistics is one of the deepest verticals in the catalog: 670 providers publishing 3,257 APIs. Of those, 623 are scored, and their mean Kin Score is 21.4, against a catalog mean of 23. The top of the list is not who you would expect. The companies that physically move the parcels score thin. The software that sits on top of them scores exemplar.
Who is where
| Layer | Provider | Kin Score | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Post-purchase tracking | AfterShip | 78.6 | exemplar |
| Last mile | DoorDash | 76.2 | exemplar |
| Multi-carrier shipping | Sendcloud | 67.5 | exemplar |
| Delivery orchestration | Nash | 61.4 | strong |
| Postal operator | La Poste Groupe | 60.5 | strong |
| Freight brokerage | C.H. Robinson | 46.4 | developing |
| Postal operator | USPS | 35.4 | thin |
| Parcel carrier | FedEx | 30.8 | thin |
| Parcel carrier | UPS | 30.5 | thin |
| Parcel carrier | DHL | 25.9 | emerging |
DHL has 51 API pages, more than anyone in that table, and scores 25.9. The contracts are not what separates the groups: FedEx scores 51.6 on contract quality and UPS 53.7, against Sendcloud’s 70.4. The gap is everything around the contracts. Operational transparency is 5.3 for FedEx, 5.3 for UPS and 7.9 for DHL, against 50.0 for Sendcloud and 92.1 for AfterShip. Access clarity is 26.3, 13.2 and 15.8 for the three carriers, against 100 for both AfterShip and DoorDash. The carriers publish the API. The software layer also publishes how to get access, what it costs and what changed.
What has shifted
The distribution is bottom-heavy. Five exemplar, 15 strong, 86 developing, 114 thin, 167 emerging and 236 minimal. The median is 14.8. Nearly two-thirds of the scored logistics roster sits in the bottom two bands.
The vertical is behind the catalog on the agent layer. Nine percent of scored logistics providers publish an MCP server, against 15% catalog-wide. Eight percent publish OAuth scopes, against 12%. Mean Agent Readiness is 11.7, just under the catalog’s 12.2. The leaders are software: AfterShip at 59.6, with Onfleet and Sendcloud in the top ten.
The biggest adopters barely publish. The page’s demand side, enterprises adopting API and AI technology, is led by XPO and GXO. GXO is also on the provider roster, scoring 1.0 with no API pages at all.
A note on fairness. The cohort brief says 548 of the 623 scored members have under half their catalog-attributable points satisfied, so part of the low mean is how far our enrichment has reached. That applies to the carriers too: FedEx and DHL have 44 of 115 such points, against Sendcloud’s 93. The transparency and access facets, though, measure pages a carrier either publishes or does not.
Where to start
For shipping, start with a multi-carrier layer like Sendcloud and read the carrier contracts behind it second. For delivery inside a product, DoorDash, Onfleet and Nash are the strongest last-mile surfaces here. For freight, C.H. Robinson is the highest-scoring broker in the table.
Takeaway
In logistics, the software layer publishes better than the carriers underneath it. To close the gap, a carrier would need to publish its operational record and a plain statement of how to get access and what it costs. The contracts are already most of the way there. See the whole vertical, cohort brief included, at apis.io/industries/logistics/.