Freight Waves

FreightWaves is a supply-chain, logistics, and transportation news and market- intelligence company based in Chattanooga, TN, and backed by 8vc. Its SONAR platform delivers freight-market data — rate indexes, tender volumes and rejection indexes, capacity and pricing signals — by market, lane, and national geography over a REST API at api.freightwaves.com. Access uses a bearer token obtained from the Credential authenticate endpoint (valid one year); data calls are billable while lookup calls (indexes, qualifiers, levels, lanes, zip3, latest) are free, and a global 100 requests/minute rate limit applies. FreightWaves also operates a hosted, OAuth-protected MCP server (api.freightwaves.com/mcp, scope mcp:read) exposing SONAR data to agents.

Freight Waves is listed with 3 APIs on the APIs.io network: Authentication API, Data API, and Lookup API. Tagged areas include Company, Freight, Logistics, Supply Chain, and Transportation.

Freight Waves’ developer surface includes documentation, API reference, getting-started guide, support, engineering blog, signup flow, pricing, and 22 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

37.0/100 thin ▬ flat Agent 48/100 agent ready Front door AI 3/6 light Heartbeat 50/100 alive saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-01 · rubric v0.26.0 · Show this score on your site →

AccessSelf serve

3 APIs 1 MCP Servers 1 Agent Skills

Company Freight Logistics Supply Chain Transportation Trucking Market Data AnalyticsFreight RatesSonar

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-01 · rubric v0.26.0

Composite quality — 37.0/100 · thin

Contract Quality 2.7 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 8.8 / 15

Access Clarity 6.7 / 15

Operational Transparency 2.3 / 10

Contract Governance 0.4 / 9

Discoverability 6.0 / 8

Regulatory Posture 4.9 / 15

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 48/100 · agent ready

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 12 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8

Request/Response Examples 7 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 5 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 6 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 5 / 5

Registration Without a Human 6 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 0 / 5

Distinct Operations 3 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Securities & Market Data regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

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Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

Idempotency +9 pts — OpenAPI mutating operations declare an idempotency key — a header, a request-body property, or a named de-duplication token whose own description says so (verified); else common[].type matches /idempoten/i (documented)
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0
Typed Event Surface +6 pts — AsyncAPI document, OR webhooks/callbacks objects in the as-published OpenAPI, OR common[].type includes Webhooks
Documented Reversibility +6 pts — a reversal operation in the contract, graded up when a window is documented too
Pagination +5 pts — share of collection GETs (an array, or one wrapped in data/items/results ...) that declare a page/limit/offset/cursor parameter, a Link header or a next/cursor field; na with no collection GETs
Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document +5 pts — a parsing /.well-known/ucp.json or acp.json declaring a version and at least one service — `self` when its endpoints are on the provider's own domain, `platform` when they are on a vendor's

3 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Contract Quality scores 14.5 — up to +21.4 composite points
Contract Governance scores 4.5 — up to +11.5 composite points
Access Clarity scores 44.7 — up to +11.1 composite points

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/freight-waves/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/freight-waves to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Standards implemented 5

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

measured — observed by APIs.io (verified)

OAuth 2.0 Protected Resource Metadata

measured — observed by APIs.io (verified)

Dynamic Client Registration

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

OAuth 2.0

measured — observed by APIs.io (declared)

APIs 3

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Freight Waves Authentication API

Obtain and refresh API bearer tokens.

Freight Waves Data API

Billable index data queries by item, level, and lane.

Freight Waves Lookup API

Free reference lookups for valid indexes, qualifiers, levels, lanes, and zip3.

Open Collections 3

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

FreightWaves SONAR Authentication API

OPEN COLLECTION

FreightWaves SONAR Authentication Data API

OPEN COLLECTION

FreightWaves SONAR Authentication Lookup API

OPEN COLLECTION

MCP Servers 1

Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.

Freight Waves MCP Server

FreightWaves hosts a remote MCP server exposing SONAR freight-market intelligence to agents. The endpoint is protected by OAuth 2.1 (bearer) with the mcp:read scope; unauthentic...

MCP SERVER

Agent Skills 1

Packaged agent skills for driving this provider's APIs from an AI assistant.

Fetch SONAR freight-market index data

AGENT SKILL

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Freight Waves Rate Limits

1 limits

RATE LIMITS

OpenAPI Overlays 1

Overlays applied on top of this provider's contracts. Each card says who wrote it: a document the provider publishes, or one API Evangelist derived or generated.

Freight Waves Sonar Overlay

3 actions · update · freight-waves-sonar-openapi.yml

DERIVED

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Freight Waves Authentication

http/oauth2 · 2 schemes

SECURITY

Freight Waves Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · DMARC

SECURITY

Scopes 1

OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.

Freight Waves Scopes

1 scope · authorizationCode

1 scopes

SCOPES

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Freight Waves Agentic Access

9 operations · 1 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Get Started 4

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

DeveloperPortal

DeveloperPortal

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

Login

SignUp

SignUp

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

APIReference

APIReference

Agent Surfaces 5

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

MCPServer

WellKnown

LLMsTxt

AgenticAccess

AgentSkill

Design & Contract 5

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conventions

ErrorCatalog

Lifecycle

Conformance

DataModel

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Access & Security 3

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Authentication

Authentication

OAuthScopes

OAuthScopes

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Support

Support

RateLimits

RateLimits

Commercial 3

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Pricing

Pricing

TermsOfService

TermsOfService

PrivacyPolicy

PrivacyPolicy

Company 3

The organization behind the API

BlogRSS

BlogRSS

Website

Website

Blog

Blog

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Overlay

Overlay

Source (apis.yml)

aid: freight-waves
name: Freight Waves
description: FreightWaves is a supply-chain, logistics, and transportation news and market- intelligence company based in
  Chattanooga, TN, and backed by 8vc. Its SONAR platform delivers freight-market data — rate indexes, tender volumes and rejection
  indexes, capacity and pricing signals — by market, lane, and national geography over a REST API at api.freightwaves.com.
  Access uses a bearer token obtained from the Credential authenticate endpoint (valid one year); data calls are billable
  while lookup calls (indexes, qualifiers, levels, lanes, zip3, latest) are free, and a global 100 requests/minute rate limit
  applies. FreightWaves also operates a hosted, OAuth-protected MCP server (api.freightwaves.com/mcp, scope mcp:read) exposing
  SONAR data to agents.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/freight-waves/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: high
  source:
  - openapi
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: self-serve
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Self-serve signup
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - authentication
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://www.freightwaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FreightWaves-1.png
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- 8vc
x-tier: enriched
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-10-06'
x-docs-platform: swagger-ui
x-docs-platform-confidence: medium
x-docs-platform-checked: 2026-10-03
tags:
- Company
- Freight
- Logistics
- Supply Chain
- Transportation
- Trucking
- Market Data
- Analytics
- Freight Rates
- Sonar
tags_raw:
- Company
- Freight
- Logistics
- Supply Chain
- Transportation
- Trucking
- Market Data
- Analytics
- Freight Rates
- SONAR
apis:
- aid: freight-waves:freight-waves-authentication-api
  name: Freight Waves Authentication API
  description: Obtain and refresh API bearer tokens.
  humanURL: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
  baseURL: https://api.freightwaves.com
  tags:
  - Authentication
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/freight-waves-authentication-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://knowledge.gosonar.com/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
- aid: freight-waves:freight-waves-data-api
  name: Freight Waves Data API
  description: Billable index data queries by item, level, and lane.
  humanURL: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
  baseURL: https://api.freightwaves.com
  tags:
  - Data
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/freight-waves-data-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://knowledge.gosonar.com/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
- aid: freight-waves:freight-waves-lookup-api
  name: Freight Waves Lookup API
  description: Free reference lookups for valid indexes, qualifiers, levels, lanes, and zip3.
  humanURL: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
  baseURL: https://api.freightwaves.com
  tags:
  - Lookup
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/freight-waves-lookup-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://knowledge.gosonar.com/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
common:
- url: https://www.freightwaves.com:443/feed
  type: BlogRSS
- type: Website
  url: https://freightwaves.com
- type: DeveloperPortal
  url: https://knowledge.gosonar.com/
- type: Documentation
  url: https://knowledge.gosonar.com/
- type: APIReference
  url: https://api.sonar.surf/Help/
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://knowledge.gosonar.com/
- type: Support
  url: https://www.freightwaves.com/contact
- type: Blog
  url: https://www.freightwaves.com/news
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/FreightWaves
- type: Login
  url: https://sonar.surf/auth/login
- type: SignUp
  url: https://gosonar.com/sonar-demo-request
- type: Pricing
  url: https://www.freightwaves.com/subscribe
- type: TermsOfService
  url: https://www.freightwaves.com/terms-of-use
- type: PrivacyPolicy
  url: https://firecrown.com/privacy-policy/
- type: Overlay
  url: overlays/freight-waves-sonar-overlay.yaml
- type: MCPServer
  url: mcp/freight-waves-mcp.yml
- type: WellKnown
  url: well-known/freight-waves-well-known.yml
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/freight-waves-llms.txt
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/freight-waves-authentication.yml
- type: OAuthScopes
  url: scopes/freight-waves-scopes.yml
- type: Conventions
  url: conventions/freight-waves-conventions.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/freight-waves-rate-limits.yml
- type: ErrorCatalog
  url: errors/freight-waves-problem-types.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/freight-waves-lifecycle.yml
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/freight-waves-conformance.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/freight-waves-domain-security.yml
- type: DataModel
  url: data-model/freight-waves-data-model.yml
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/freight-waves-agentic-access.yml
- type: AgentSkill
  url: skills/_index.yml
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-19'
  status: backfilled
  pass: local-v1
  note: backfilled from .gitignore signal + verified work evidence

Freight Waves API — frequently asked questions

Does Freight Waves have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 3 APIs from Freight Waves, including Freight Waves Authentication API, Freight Waves Data API and Freight Waves Lookup API.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the Freight Waves API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 3 OpenAPI specifications for Freight Waves, each linked for download from this page.

How do I authenticate with the Freight Waves API?

Freight Waves documents its authentication (http/oauth2 · 2 schemes). The details are profiled on APIs.io as Freight Waves Authentication.

Does Freight Waves have an MCP server?

Yes. APIs.io lists 1 MCP server for Freight Waves: FreightWaves hosts a remote MCP server exposing SONAR freight-market intelligence to agents. The endpoint is protected by OAuth 2.1 (bearer) with the mcp:read scope; unauthenticated requests return 40

Is the Freight Waves API ready for AI agents?

Freight Waves has a Kin Score of 37.0 out of 100 (thin) and an Agent Readiness score of 48.1 (agent-ready), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-01.

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