Customer fees are our entire revenue. We take no carrier money. No 3PL money. No referral, rebate, kickback, marketing levy, shared-services payment, or volume bonus. Ever. We will sign that into any engagement contract on request.
TLK Source has never received, and contractually will never receive, any of the following from any carrier, 3PL, freight forwarder, technology vendor, or other logistics counterparty:
Customer fees, in AUD, billed through Stripe. The fees published on the pricing page are the entire economic relationship between TLK Source and the customer. Banded by the customer's annual spend in the relevant category.
That's it. There is no other revenue stream and no plan to introduce one.
An advisor paid by carriers is structurally incentivised to recommend the carriers that pay them. We don't take carrier money, so our recommendations reflect only what is best for the customer. If a customer's incumbent carrier is the right answer after tender, we say so. If a smaller specialist beats a tier-one operator on a specific lane, we say so.
An advisor whose ongoing revenue depends on a customer's existing carrier relationship is incentivised to preserve that relationship. We have no relationship with carriers, so when the right answer is "switch", we surface it without hesitation.
An advisor who sells customer data, or shares it back to carriers as "market intelligence", has a conflict of interest with customer confidentiality. We do not sell, share, or monetise customer data in any way. Full data handling policy for the technical detail.
An advisor selling a SaaS platform that integrates with specific carriers, 3PLs, or TMS vendors has commercial pressure to favour those integrations. TLK Source has no preferred integration partners. Our analysis works against whatever data the customer provides, in whatever format the customer provides it in.
At engagement commencement, the customer signs a standard agreement that includes the neutrality covenant verbatim. The covenant says: TLK Source has not received and will not receive any consideration from any third party in connection with this engagement, except customer fees as published.
If the customer wants us to sign that covenant before paying, we will.
If the customer wants their procurement team or legal counsel to audit the covenant, we will provide whatever evidence is needed.
Findings are surfaced regardless of whether they implicate the customer's preferred carriers, 3PLs, or providers. The monthly report names names where naming names is the right answer.
The carrier panel and 3PL longlist are built from the customer's operating requirements, not from a "preferred provider" list we maintain. We do not maintain a preferred provider list. Where we recommend providers, the recommendation is documented with reasoning a third-party reviewer can validate.
The contract review identifies clauses costing the customer money regardless of which 3PL holds the contract. The negotiation playbook gives the customer specific language to use, not "consult your 3PL relationship" deferrals.
We commit to providing the following on request:
TLK Source affirms, for the duration of the engagement and for 12 months following its conclusion, the following with respect to every carrier, 3PL, freight forwarder, technology vendor, and other logistics counterparty referenced in the engagement deliverables:
To be complete: TLK Source uses commercial software (Cloudflare hosting, Stripe payments, Resend email, Anthropic Claude API, Sentry monitoring) where we pay the vendor a market-rate fee for the service. None of these vendors influences our analysis or recommendations. They are infrastructure, not partners. The list is published on our security and trust page.
The freight and 3PL advisory market is full of "independent" advisors who quietly take money from the providers they recommend. We built TLK Source specifically to remove that dynamic from the customer relationship. The neutrality covenant is not a marketing position. It is the operating model. If we ever took provider money, we would have to stop calling the business independent. We are not going to do that.
If you ever encounter behaviour from TLK Source that appears to contradict this policy — a recommendation that seems unusually aligned with a specific provider, a finding that seems suspiciously favourable, anything that does not feel independent — tell us. Email hello@tlksource.com.au with the subject "Neutrality concern" and we will respond within one business day. If our response does not resolve the concern, the engagement is refunded.
For questions about this Policy, contact hello@tlksource.com.au.
Last updated: May 2026. This Policy forms part of our Terms and Conditions.