Every TMS vendor publishes ROI numbers. Most of them are nonsense — either cherry-picked from a single happy customer, or modelled in a spreadsheet by a marketing manager who has never sat in a transport office. We wanted to do this differently.
Over six months, with permission, we pulled twelve months of P&L data from 47 SkyRocket customers across India. Fleet sizes ranged from 8 trucks to 312. Lanes ranged from short-haul intra-city to long-haul Mumbai-Guwahati. Sectors covered FMCG, steel, cement, e-commerce and general cargo. We compared their last-12-months operating cost against their previous-12-months cost, controlling for diesel price changes and trip volume changes. Here is what we found.
Headline: median savings of ₹4.2 lakh per truck per year
The median customer saved ₹4.2 lakh per truck per year. Top-quartile customers saved ₹6.8 lakh. Bottom-quartile customers saved ₹1.9 lakh. Even the worst performer was net positive: SkyRocket Pro costs ₹899/truck/month or ₹10,788/year. Nobody we measured lost money on the deal.
But the headline number hides where the savings actually came from. Here's the breakdown for the median customer.
Where the money came from
Of that ₹4.2 lakh per truck per year, the components were roughly:
- Fuel savings: ₹1.84 lakh (44%)
- Pilferage / leakage reduction: ₹68,000 (16%)
- Admin / munshi efficiency: ₹52,000 (12%)
- Faster billing → faster collections (working capital): ₹46,000 (11%)
- Reduced detention / check-post penalties: ₹38,000 (9%)
- Tyre & maintenance discipline: ₹32,000 (8%)
The numbers don't tell you what's interesting. What's interesting is that almost none of our customers expected the savings to come from this distribution. When we did pre-sales ROI models, the malik usually expected savings primarily from "better tracking" and "billing speed". In reality, fuel and pilferage dominated — categories most owners didn't believe they had a leak in.
"I thought we were doing fine on fuel. The first month report showed me ₹38,000 of leakage at one pump alone. I had been signing those bills for years."— Deepak Mehta, MD, Mehta Logistics · Indore · 56 trucks
The customer-acquisition effect (the one we couldn't model)
The savings above are the easy-to-measure ones. The hardest-to-measure category — and arguably the biggest — was new business won because the fleet now had digital infrastructure to compete for it. Of the 47 fleets we analysed, 31 reported winning at least one new major customer in the 12 months post-implementation specifically because they could now offer live tracking, automated PODs, or integrated GST invoicing.
One fleet in Bangalore (38 trucks, FMCG specialist) won a contract with a major paint manufacturer in March 2025 explicitly because the procurement team had blacklisted any transporter without real-time visibility. That single contract added ₹2.1 crore of annual revenue. The TMS cost: ₹4.1 lakh a year.
The cost side: time-to-value
The other question owners always ask is "how long until I actually see this?" The honest answer, across 47 customers: 6 to 11 weeks for fuel and pilferage savings to show in the P&L. 3 to 6 months for admin efficiency to translate to actually-reduced headcount (most fleets don't fire the munshi — they redeploy him to collections, where he generates more value).
Working capital improvement (faster billing → faster collections) showed up almost immediately. The median customer cut their billing cycle from 11 days to 2 days within month one. That's a one-time release of working capital roughly equal to 30% of one month's revenue.
Where it doesn't work
To be useful, we should also say where the ROI numbers were soft.
Fleets running primarily intra-city deliveries (Mumbai dabbawalas, last-mile e-commerce) saw smaller fuel savings (8–12% vs the headline 22%) because route variance is low. Their ROI came primarily from billing efficiency.
Fleets where the owner refused to enforce app adoption — i.e. let drivers continue using WhatsApp for everything — saw roughly 30% of the headline ROI. The product can't compensate for a culture that doesn't want to change.
Single-truck operators occasionally found the per-truck pricing tight at the Lite tier. We launched a 4-truck minimum on Lite for this reason.
47 customers consented to share P&L data for this analysis. We controlled for diesel price changes (Petroleum Planning & Analysis Cell data, all-India retail average) and trip volume changes (their own dispatch records). We did not control for general macroeconomic factors — we considered them noise at this sample size. Top and bottom 10% of outliers were excluded from the median calculation. This is field data from real customers, not a marketing model. Full anonymised dataset available on request.
If you'd like us to run a custom ROI model on your fleet's last 12 months of data, send us your trip sheets ↗. We'll do it for free — no commitment to buy — and share the spreadsheet with full assumptions.