Carriers moving over from DAT or Truckstop tend to assume Relay's load board is the same product with an Amazon logo on it. It isn't. Relay is a closed, first-party board where the shipper, the pricing engine, and the compliance system all belong to one company — and that changes how loads get posted, who sees them first, and how long they stay on screen.
A Closed Board, Not an Open Marketplace
Only carriers Amazon has approved and onboarded can view live loads or book Relay freight. Amazon doesn't tender loads through third-party load boards at all; when an Amazon load turns up on an outside board, it can still only be tendered to an approved carrier through the Relay web portal or mobile app.
In practice, that removes the broker layer entirely: no calls to confirm a posting is still live, no stale listings from last Tuesday. Spot rates are published as all-in prices — base rate, fuel surcharge, and tolls included — so what you see at the moment of booking is what you're agreeing to haul for.
What's Actually Posted on the Board
Three things sit on the board itself, and they behave differently:
- Spot freight. Single loads, including rail and port drayage and drop-hook work, bookable instantly at the listed all-in price. This is the bulk of what most carriers touch day to day.
- Blocks. Shifts booked as a block of time rather than as a specific load. The loads that fill them start and end in the same area and are assigned later, and blocks are typically paid in full even if your equipment ends up not being needed.
- Post A Truck. The board in reverse. Instead of searching, you publish where and when your trucks, trailers, and drivers are available, and Amazon matches loads to that capacity.
Contracts and auctions also exist on Relay, but they run on separate mechanics and their own grade thresholds. The board itself is a spot instrument.
Search Starts With Geography, Then Narrows
Every Relay search begins with an origin and a destination — or the distance you're willing to travel to reach a pickup. From there you narrow by trailer status, equipment type, load type, driver type, desired layout, maximum number of stops, and trip length. Searches can be saved, and the board layers its own suggestions on top: recommendations based on your booking history, reload options for the trip back, and replacements when a booked load gets cancelled. On select spot loads, carriers with strong performance scores can propose their own rate through Relay's AI chat tool, which either approves it on the spot or returns a counteroffer.
Those filters make the board usable. They're also part of why the best-paying loads vanish so quickly — plenty of carriers filter the same profitable lanes at the same moment.
The Refresh Cycle Is the Whole Story
Amazon refreshes spot freight matches roughly every 30 seconds, and thousands of loads sit on the national board at any given time, nearly doubling in volume during peak season. The board isn't a list. It's a stream. A load that posts at 2:14:30 can be gone before it ever appears on a screen someone is refreshing by hand.
This is the single most misunderstood part of the platform. New carriers assume a load they watched disappear went to someone with insider access. Far more often, it went to someone whose screen updated first. Amazon also gives high-performing carriers first access to loads posted on the board, so two companies running an identical search can be looking at different inventory.
Performance Quietly Decides What You See
Relay grades carriers on a rolling six-week window covering on-time delivery, load acceptance, app usage in transit, and disruption-free execution, and your overall grade equals the lowest of those four. That grade doesn't only affect what you're eligible to book — it affects visibility, early access, and priority in Post A Truck matching. A slipping score usually shows up as your best lanes quietly thinning out rather than as a formal warning, which is why the decline is easy to miss until it reaches the revenue numbers.
What This Means for a Small Fleet
If you're running one to ten trucks, the practical constraint isn't finding the board — it's watching it. Nobody refreshes a screen every 30 seconds around the clock, and dispatchers who try burn hours they owe to driver coverage and compliance paperwork.
There are three realistic answers. Post A Truck lets the matching run in the background. Email alerts and mobile push notifications flag new loads that meet your criteria. And automation tools — such as an Amazon Relay Load Board Auto Booker that monitors the board continuously and books loads matching preset criteria — narrow the gap between a load appearing and a human noticing it. None of these change your rates or your standing with Amazon. They change how much of the posting window you're actually present for.
The Takeaway
Relay's board rewards two things: filters set narrowly enough to be useful, and reaction time short enough to matter. The rates are published upfront and the compliance rules are documented, which leaves speed as the main variable a carrier still controls. Understanding that the board is a 30-second stream rather than a bulletin board is the difference between wondering where the loads went and building an operation around how they actually post.