ROUTEBID / THE OWNER'S DESK
Know the lowest daily rate a bus route can pay you.
Before you sign a school transportation contract, count every mile, paid hour and closure day it will cost you, then divide by the days it actually pays.
For owner-operators and small fleets pricing district, charter-school or brokered student transportation routes. You enter your own numbers. RouteBid does the arithmetic in your browser.
Get RouteBid · $19$19 USD once. Browser worksheet and offline copy. Full refund if you ask within 30 days.
Why a route that looks fine can lose money.
A daily rate is easy to compare against fuel and the driver’s wage. The costs that sink a route sit elsewhere: miles from the yard to the first stop, paid time between the morning and afternoon runs, an aide, testing and training hours nobody bills, and a bus payment and insurance premium you owe for twelve months while the contract pays for about 180 days.
Closures make it worse. Some contracts pay nothing on a snow day. Some pay part of the rate. Either way, the bus still costs money that day.
The billing-day floor.
RouteBid adds up one route’s full year: fuel and maintenance for every mile driven, deadhead included; driver and aide pay with payroll burden; unbilled driver hours; the share of the bus’s payment, insurance, permits and equipment this route carries; testing and training; a reserve for spare buses and substitute drivers; and overhead.
It then divides by billing days: days the route runs, plus each partly paid closure day times the share it pays. That gives your break-even per day. Your target margin turns it into a minimum bid, rounded up to the cent.
If the RFP prices by the hour or by the mile, the same floor is shown per paid driver hour, per loaded mile and per total mile.
What you get for $19
- A worksheet for one route at a time, with a help note on every field.
- Minimum daily bid, break-even, the year’s total, and per-hour and per-mile equivalents.
- An offered-rate check: profit for the year, margin, and the fuel price where the rate stops covering cost.
- A cost breakdown showing what share of the year each cost takes, and what deadhead alone costs.
- Up to 10 saved routes side by side, a printable bid summary, JSON backup and restore, and a downloadable offline copy.
Check the arithmetic yourself.
Every formula is written out on the worksheet. Money is computed with exact fractions and rounded once, up, at the cent, so a floor never comes out a cent short. The arithmetic was checked against a separate reference calculation on 2,001 generated routes.
Nothing you type is uploaded. The worksheet runs in your browser tab and works offline. Device saving is off until you turn it on.
RouteBid is new. We have no customer reviews to show yet, so judge it on the worked example above.
Before you buy
I already have a spreadsheet. Why pay for this?
If your spreadsheet already splits run days from closure days, carries fixed costs over the whole year and counts deadhead and unbilled hours, you may not need RouteBid. It is for operators who price routes from a daily rate and a fuel estimate and want the full-year picture in one place.
Does it know my state’s wage or insurance rules?
No. You enter the wage, insurance premium and minimums your RFP or state requires. RouteBid does not check them or give legal, tax or accounting advice.
Will it tell me what to bid to win?
No. It shows the lowest rate that covers the costs and margin you entered. It does not know what other contractors will bid or what the district will award.
Our contract pays per hour or per mile, not per day.
The result also shows the same floor per paid driver hour, per loaded mile and per total mile, so you can compare it with those rates.
What if it is not useful?
Email hello@moneyyoureowed.com within 30 days of purchase for a full refund. You do not have to show any result.