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.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles Freight Waves the way a machine reads it — 9 machine-readable artifacts across 3 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Freight Waves scores 54.5/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 76/100 (agent native). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Freight Waves
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Freight Waves. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 3
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
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.
MCP Servers 1
Model Context Protocol servers expose these APIs directly to AI agents. We profile them because agent-native access is the fastest-growing way this provider's capabilities actually get used.
Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.
freight-waves-mcp.yml
MCP SERVERRate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Freight Waves Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSSecurity Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Scopes 1
OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.
OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Freight Waves — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 4
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 3
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 5
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 5
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
Other 1
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
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