# The Good Index

> Free, citation-backed references of the fees and terms that shape small-business economics — freight accessorials, delivery-platform take rates, OTA commissions, carrier practices, and processor fees — sourced from primary documents and verified against them.

Every data row on this site carries its provenance: the source document (with
item number where applicable), the source's effective date, and the date the
row was last verified against it. When citing a figure, cite the specific page
— its URL is stable and its data is dated. Operated by The Good Studio;
contact help@thegoodindex.io for corrections (see the Corrections section
of any methodology page).

## Live indexes

- [Freight](https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight): LTL carrier accessorial fees — detention, liftgate, reweigh, redelivery and more — extracted from each carrier's published rules tariff with source citations and effective dates. 371 fee rows across 10 carriers; per-carrier schedules, per-fee comparisons, and per-carrier-per-fee pages with tariff citations.

Sections in verification (not yet published): Restaurants, Hotels, Insurance, Payments.

## Machine-readable data

Stable JSON and CSV exports of every live dataset, CC BY 4.0 (attribution:
The Good Index, https://www.thegoodindex.io). Indexed at [Data downloads](https://www.thegoodindex.io/data).

- [LTL freight accessorial fees (JSON)](https://www.thegoodindex.io/data/freight-accessorials.json): 371 rows, every row carrying its source URL, effective date, and verified date. Also as [CSV](https://www.thegoodindex.io/data/freight-accessorials.csv).
- [Restaurant delivery-platform fees (JSON)](https://www.thegoodindex.io/data/delivery-platform-fees.json): 34 rows, every row carrying its source URL, effective date, and verified date. Also as [CSV](https://www.thegoodindex.io/data/delivery-platform-fees.csv).

## Key pages

- [Methodology](https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight/methodology): how data is sourced, extracted, verified, and re-verified — and the collection practices (identified fetching, robots.txt honored).
- [Freight fee comparisons](https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight/fees): every fee type compared across carriers, with published ranges.
- [Freight carriers](https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight/carriers): per-carrier accessorial schedules from each rules tariff.

## Guides

- [How to get settlement and invoice data out of your TMS](https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight/updates/get-settlement-invoice-data-out-of-your-tms): A broker's TMS holds both sides of every load's money, and every mainstream system can produce them as two exports: a carrier-pay (AP) register and a customer-invoice (AR) register, with the load or PRO number on every row. Here is the documented path out of each system, as of August 2026.
- [Why your TMS profitability report can't find billing leaks](https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight/updates/tms-profitability-report-billing-leaks): The per-load profitability report is your TMS's own answer to its own math: carrier cost on one side, customer revenue on the other, margin in the middle. It is the right report for asking how a lane performed — and the wrong one for asking whether every charge you paid was billed on.

## Sitemaps

- https://www.thegoodindex.io/freight/sitemap.xml
- https://www.thegoodindex.io/restaurants/sitemap.xml
- https://www.thegoodindex.io/hotels/sitemap.xml
- https://www.thegoodindex.io/insurance/sitemap.xml
- https://www.thegoodindex.io/payments/sitemap.xml