Peak Supply Chain Solutions← Design library

Private communications platform · commercial proposal

Peak Connect.

One secure, Peak-branded platform for warehouse, air freight, trucking and package handling.

01
The problem
Dispatch runs on Telegram
02
The product
One record per shipment
03
The portal
Ask the business a question
04
The price
What it costs, against the alternatives
05
Before signing
Five questions to settle first
06
The timeline
Piloting in the February lull

The problem

Peak does not own its own dispatch history.

Dispatch runs on Telegram, where Peak is not the customer. The dispatcher is. There is no company export, no retention Peak sets, no legal hold and no audit log. Any participant can delete a message for both sides, leaving no trace. When a dispatcher leaves, the carrier relationships and the record leave with them.

And the alternatives charge for the one group Peak cannot license

✗Teams needs an identity per driver: up to 12 hours to provision, and still not reachable by phone.
✗Slack bills a paid seat for every owner-operator added.
✓A Peak-owned app costs nothing to put on one more driver’s phone.

The product

Every message filed under the shipment it belongs to.

Teams inside the company, plain text messages to drivers, email from the shipper, all landing in one thread per load. The amber line under each message is the index doing its work: nobody typed the numbers on the right, they fall out of the timestamps.

See it running, at the end ↓

The portal

One box over people, loads, orders and messages.

Live, not a picture. Type into it. A chat app can search its own messages and that is its ceiling. Only an index that knows what a load is can answer a customer name with the shipments, the orders riding on them and the message that opened the exception.

Type into it, at the end ↓

The price

$112,000 in year one. $72,000 after that.

$40,000

One-time setup

Build and launch

$6,000

Per month

Hosting, support, updates

$72,000

Year two onward

The steady-state number

Everything included

Apps: Peak-branded web, desktop, iOS and Android
Messaging: Channels, direct messages, files, images, reactions
Calls: Group voice, video and screen sharing
Operations: Private data, high availability, backups, monitoring
Capacity: Up to 1,200 users · 12 TB pooled · 150 concurrent on a call
Support: 24–48 hour response, hosting, maintenance and updates

Scales by band, not by seat

Band	Users	Storage	Monthly
Current plan	Up to 1,200	12 TB	$6,000 /mo
Growth band	Up to 1,500	15 TB	$7,000 /mo
Expansion band	Up to 2,000	20 TB	$8,500 /mo

No second setup fee when Peak crosses a band.

Annual cost at 1,200 users

Platform	Year 1	Year 2+	Model
Telegramtoday	$0 to Peak	$0 to Peak	Personal Premium, per account ‡
Peak Connect	$112,000	$72,000	Owned, white-labelled
Slack Business+	$216,000	$216,000	$15 /user/mo
Microsoft Teams Enterprise	$123,120	$123,120	$8.55 /user/mo †

Annual cost as Peak grows

Users	Peak Connect	Slack Business+	Teams Enterprise
1,000	$72,000	$180,000	$102,600
1,200	$72,000	$216,000	$123,120
1,500	$84,000	$270,000	$153,900
2,000	$102,000	$360,000	$205,200
5,000	quote	$900,000	$513,000
10,000	quote	$1,800,000	$1,026,000

Per-seat pricing is a straight line: every user added costs the same as the last one, forever. A band is a staircase, and the step is what Peak is buying. At 1,200 users Peak Connect works out at $5.00 per user a month; at 2,000 it is $4.25, because the price moved and the headcount moved further. Slack is $15 a user at every one of these sizes.

Per-seat columns are rate × users × 12 on published list rates, checkable with a calculator. Slack Business+ at $15 per user a month on annual billing, verified 19 August 2026 · slack.com/pricing. Peak Connect is quoted to 2,000 users; past that it needs a number from the build partner, so none is shown.

What the zero is costing

Telegram is what dispatch runs on today, and the line to Peak is zero — but not because the tool is free. Telegram does sell a paid tier. It is a personal subscription, bought by a person, on an account that person owns. There is no company plan to buy, so Peak is not a customer and has no standing: the record sits in a dispatcher’s personal account, anyone in a thread can delete a message for everyone and leave no trace, there is no export the business can compel and no legal hold to place, and nothing dispatch needs can be built on top of it. Zero is what Peak spends. The cap on the team is what it costs.

‡ Telegram Premium is per account — Telegram’s own FAQ states each account requires its own subscription, and Telegram Business is included with it at no separate charge. Telegram publishes no list price; it is shown per country inside the app. Checked 19 August 2026 · telegram.org/faq_premium

† The Teams line assumes Peak buys Teams standalone. On Microsoft 365 it is already owned and the marginal cost is nearer zero, and it still cannot onboard a driver.

What this price is not

This is the engineering number. $6,000 a month keeps the software running: servers, patches, backups, monitoring and a support desk. It does not buy anyone deciding what gets built next — and it does not buy new features.

Custom engineering is scoped per project. A new integration, a TMS connection, a workflow the app does not yet have — each gets its own scope and its own quote, agreed before work begins. Nothing lands on the monthly number unannounced, and nothing gets built without a price on it first.

Design

Screens, states, flows, the brand on the app and its store assets. Already running — the prototypes above came from it.

Drew Bridewell · Next Level UX

Product

Who writes the specs, sets the roadmap and accepts the work. The technical review asks how a load number gets onto a message — that is a product question, and it decides whether this is a system of record or a branded chat app.

Drew Bridewell · Next Level UX

Rollout

Getting several hundred drivers onto the app and keeping them there. Comms, training, and support through the change.

Drew Bridewell · Next Level UX

All three sit with Next Level UX on a single retainer: $2,500 to $5,000 a month for 20–40 hours, a flat $125 an hour at either end. One partner rather than three is deliberate: it already holds the vendor relationship, wrote the technical review and built the prototypes above, so Peak is not paying twice for the same context. Splitting design, product and rollout across three parties is the reliable way to end up with a platform nobody owns: a branded chat app, which is the outcome this whole case exists to avoid.

All in

$142k–172k

Year one

Build, run, and the retainer

$102k–132k

Year two onward

Run and retainer only

$216,000

Slack, licences alone

No design, product or rollout

Peak Connect fully staffed, built, hosted, supported, designed, product-owned and rolled out, still costs less than Slack’s licences on their own, and Slack buys none of those last three. At the top of the band the gap is $84,000 a year; at the bottom it is $114,000.

Media storage

12 TB included

+$100/mo per additional 2 TB · 10 GB per user, pooled

Database capacity

500 GB included

+$210/mo per additional 500 GB

Backups

Included

30-day retention, point-in-time recovery, monthly restore testing

Before signing

Five questions to settle before anyone signs.

The price is clear. These five questions are how Peak makes sure the thing behind the price is what it thinks it is buying — and every answer belongs in the contract, not in a phone call. None of them require a technical background to ask.

01
What exactly are we buying — a new app, or an existing one wearing our logo?
Both can be the right purchase. Proven open-source platforms let a partner ship a Peak-branded app fast, and their licences allow it. But a from-scratch build and a re-badged platform are different products at different risk, and the $40,000 means something different in each case.
A good answer sounds like
A straight answer either way, in writing. If it is built on an existing platform, its name and licence go in the contract.
02
If we part ways with the vendor, what do we walk away with?
The whole point of building is owning. That is only true if the source code, the database, and the app store listings are Peak's on day one — not something to negotiate on the way out.
A good answer sounds like
Code in a Peak-owned repository, the app published from Peak's own Apple and Google accounts, and a full data handover clause with a named timeframe.
03
Who keeps it healthy, and what does that cost in year three?
Software is not a truck you park. Security patches, OS updates and the occasional breaking change arrive whether anyone budgets for them or not — and that upkeep is the largest hidden cost on any build. The $6,000 a month must cover it, explicitly.
A good answer sounds like
Maintenance, patching and app-store updates named inside the monthly fee, with a response-time commitment — not billed as extras.
04
Where does our data live, and who else can see it?
Leaving Telegram is about owning the record. That promise is only as good as the hosting: whose servers, which country, encrypted how, backed up how often, and restorable by whom.
A good answer sounds like
A named hosting provider and region, encryption in transit and at rest, daily backups with a tested restore, and Peak able to export everything at any time without asking.
05
What happens the morning it goes down?
Dispatch does not pause. If the app fails at 04:00 on a Tuesday, the question is who gets the alert, how fast someone acts, and what drivers fall back on in the meantime.
A good answer sounds like
Monitoring that alerts the vendor before Peak notices, a stated uptime target, and an agreed fallback channel for the hours a fix takes.

Why this matters: every one of these answers is cheap to get before signature and expensive to discover after. A vendor comfortable putting all five in writing is exactly the vendor to build with.

The runway

Live in the February lull.

February is the freight off-season — the one stretch of the year with room to change how dispatch talks without risking peak volume. Everything on this page works backward from it.

Sep 2026
Answers and signatures
The five questions above come back in writing, the scope is agreed, contracts are signed. This is the date that protects everything after it.
Oct – Dec 2026
The build
Peak-branded apps, the load index, hosting. Assumes roughly a twelve-week window — the build partner confirms the real number in writing before signature, and that answer sets the signature deadline.
Jan 2027
Dress rehearsal
Dispatch and one terminal run the app internally, on real loads. Telegram keeps running in parallel — nothing is cut over yet, so nothing can break.
Feb 2027
The pilot, in the lull
One market goes live in the off-season, when volumes are lowest and there is room to learn. Drivers onboard in minutes, and the record starts accruing to Peak.
Mar – Apr 2027
Market by market
The remaining markets roll out on the pilot's playbook. Telegram is retired market by market, not by decree.

The one date Peak does not control is the build window — the vendor sets it, in writing, as part of the five answers. Whatever that number is, count it back from February: that is the signature deadline.

Adding a driver costs nothing. That is the whole argument.

Per-seat platforms charge Peak for growing. This one does not: the $6,000 is fixed whether twenty drivers use it or twelve hundred, which at full capacity works out near $5 a user a month against Slack’s $15. And at the end of it Peak owns the record, the app and the index, not a subscription.

The decision record →Try the portal →

Pricing from the Peak Connect commercial proposal, read Aug 14, 2026 · comparison prices verified on slack.com and microsoft.com · prototypes are Peak’s own, on fixture data

The prototype

This is the thing, running.

Not a screenshot. Pick a load and the thread, the pinned exception and the derived numbers all follow it. Search a surname or one word from a message and every result opens the record it belongs to. Fixture data throughout — no real customer, driver or shipment appears here.

peakscs.com/connect/pk-4471

All

512 groups

Load PK-4471

MEM → DFW · Acme

Exception

Pinned

Pallet damage 13:58 · OS&D filed 14:06

Tuesday 12 August

DR
Dawn R. · dispatchTeams04:02✓✓
4471 tendered. MEM ramp, 0600 pickup.
indexed → tender · 04:02
MO
M. Ortiz · driverSMS05:47
Here. Dock 12, waiting on paperwork.
indexed → arrived · 05:47
MO
M. Ortiz · driverSMS07:15
Rolling. DFW by 14:30.
indexed → dwell 1h 28m · ETA 14:30
MO
M. Ortiz · driverSMS13:58
JPGpallet-4471.jpg1.2 MB
Held at the dock. One pallet’s crushed.
indexed → exception opened · 13:58
RD
R. Dunn · opsTeams14:06✓✓
Got it. Told Acme, OS&D filed.
indexed → notified · 14:06
AC
Acme · shipperEmail14:31
Any update on 4471?
indexed → they asked 25 min later
MO
M. Ortiz · driverSMS15:41
Delivered. Weeks signed for it.
indexed → POD signed · 15:41

Live load metrics

Computed from the thread’s timestamps — nothing typed in.

Dwell, MEM: 1h 28m
ETA slip: +71 min
First reply: 1h 45m
Ahead of Acme: 25 min
POD: 15:41 signed

Claim packet ready

Peak Connect as drivers and dispatchers would meet it, and it runs. Pick a load and the thread, the pinned exception and the derived numbers follow it. Search a surname, an order number or one word from a message, and every result is a door: a person opens their chat, a photo or a POD opens the load it belongs to. Telegram can only organise by person, which is the whole argument.

And the index behind it

Ask it a question a chat app cannot answer.

A customer name, a driver’s surname, an order number, or one word someone typed in a message. Each result opens the record it belongs to.

17 results

Try

Person4

M. OrtizDriver · 3 open loads · last message 15:41
Dawn R.Dispatch, MEM · tendered 4471 and 4490
R. DunnOperations · filed the OS&D on 4471
J. WeeksReceiver, Acme DFW · signed for 4471

Group2

4471 exception5 people · opened 13:58, still open
Acme · DFW lane11 people · 3 open loads

Load1

PK-4471MEM → DFW · Acme · exception open

Order1

SO-88214Acme · 2 pallets · riding on PK-4471

Message4

“Held at the dock. One pallet’s crushed.”M. Ortiz · 13:58 · PK-4471
“Got it. Told Acme, OS&D filed.”R. Dunn · 14:06 · PK-4471
“Delivered. Weeks signed for it.”M. Ortiz · 15:41 · PK-4471
“Rolling. DFW by 14:30.”M. Ortiz · 07:15 · PK-4471

Media1

pallet-4471.jpgM. Ortiz · 13:58 · PK-4471 · 1.2 MB

File2

POD-4471.pdfSigned by J. Weeks · 15:41 · PK-4471
OSD-claim-4471.pdfR. Dunn · 14:06 · PK-4471

Link1

Acme tracking, SO-88214Shared by Dawn R. · 04:04 · PK-4471

Voice1

Voice note, 0:14M. Ortiz · 13:59 · PK-4471