Jimenez Julien, the operator behind DeadheadMath

Why I built a calculator for trucks

DeadheadMath started because of a conversation at a truck stop outside Effingham, Illinois, in the winter of 2023. A man with one truck and eleven years of authority behind him showed me a load he was proud of: $2.28 a mile, twelve hundred miles, a broker he trusted. Then he told me where he was sitting when he took it, and where he expected to sit after the drop. Once we added the empty miles at both ends and the two nights the trip would hold the truck, that load was worth about $1.61 a mile against his own costs. He had been running that lane for two years.

What struck me was not that he had made a mistake. He is a careful operator who reads a rate confirmation line by line. The problem is that the math is genuinely awkward. Deadhead lives in your head, fuel price changes weekly, and fixed cost is a number almost nobody in a single truck operation has ever actually computed. Load boards quote loaded miles because loaded miles are what brokers pay for, and every downstream tool copies that habit. The trade needed a calculator that does the arithmetic the way the bank account experiences it.

So I spent 2024 doing the unglamorous part. I sat with owner operators, husband and wife teams and one dispatcher who runs five trucks out of Laredo, and I asked them to show me their real numbers: settlement statements, insurance declarations, tire invoices, the maintenance they had deferred. I learned that a two truck carrier can tell you their rate per mile to the penny and cannot tell you their cost per day within a hundred dollars. I learned that detention gets written on the back of a receipt and forgotten. I learned that most people do not need a fleet management platform, they need one honest number before they answer a phone call.

DeadheadMath is that number and the small amount of structure around it. It is not a load board, it is not a factoring service, and it will never sell your rate data to the brokers you negotiate against. It exists so that a carrier who does the work of entering their real costs once can stop guessing forever after.

Experience and expertise

I have spent the last decade building small, focused business software for trades that do not get much attention from software companies: operations tools, quoting systems and pricing calculators for owners who do their own back office. My work is published through MLJ, SASU, a company I run and am personally responsible for. Before DeadheadMath I built cost and quoting models for service businesses where a wrong margin does not show up for six months, which is exactly the failure mode small carriers live with.

For this product specifically, my expertise is in cost modeling and in the plumbing of settlement documents. I have read several hundred settlement statements from brokers, factoring companies and dispatch services, which is how the reconciliation engine learned what a short paid fuel surcharge looks like. I am not a driver and I do not pretend to be one. Everything about hours of service, appointment behavior and lot conditions in this product came from operators who corrected me, sometimes bluntly, and I keep a list of those corrections.

How this product is built and maintained

Three rules govern what ships. First, no number on the screen is invented: every figure in the calculator traces to something the carrier entered or to a public source we name in the app. Second, nothing is automated where a wrong answer is expensive; imports are checked by the operator before they are committed, because a silently mis-parsed settlement is worse than no import at all. Third, the marketing claims on this site come from the same database that runs the product, and when a figure moves, the page is edited.

Releases go out roughly every three weeks. Each one is tested against a set of real anonymized loads with known outcomes, so a change to the fuel or deadhead math cannot quietly shift historical results. Support requests are answered by me, in order, usually within one business day. When a carrier reports that the calculator disagrees with their settlement, that becomes the highest priority item on the list until we know which one of us is right.

The content on this site is reviewed twice a year. Prices, plan contents, statistics and testimonials are checked against the account records and the people quoted, and the review date sits on the privacy and terms pages. Nothing here is written by a copywriter who has never seen a rate confirmation.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and you get me, not a ticket queue. Good reasons to send an email: your settlement does not match what the calculator said, you want the cost sheet built with you on a screen share, you found a market where the deadhead estimate is off, or you want to argue about how driver pay should be modeled. I read everything, and I answer with specifics.

If you would rather start with the product, the fastest route is to send us a lane you already ran and let us score it against what actually landed in your account.