Swarm Logistics
Swarm Logistics Fleet Control is a German REST API that dispatches commercial fleets automatically: it assigns transport orders to cars, vans and trucks, sequences the stops and prices every tour on cost rather than on distance.
What is Swarm Logistics?
Swarm Logistics Fleet Control is the automatic fleet dispatching and tour-planning service of Swarm Logistics GmbH, a deep-tech company based in Stuttgart. The terms and conditions name it explicitly: the demonstration site autodispatcher.de is described there as Swarm Logistics Fleet Control Systems, showing the vehicle and fleet tour-planning API functions. The company's English homepage sums the offer up as AI-based fleet control, tour optimisation, tour planning and value-based routing over REST API, developed specifically for commercial fleets.
The problem it solves is combinatorial. Given, say, ten heterogeneous vehicles and a hundred transport orders, it decides which orders go to which vehicles and in what sequence, under capacity limits such as volume, payload, service times and European driving and rest times. It works many-to-many with arbitrary pick-up and delivery stops, handling depot-to-customer, customer-to-depot and customer-to-customer legs in one run, and it will reject orders when capacity is short so they can be replanned. Freight, passengers and service jobs are all supported, on cars, vans and trucks up to 44 tonnes.
Underneath sits the vendor's value-based routing engine. Instead of minimising distance, it scores routes on cost factors that differ for every vehicle, crew and trailer combination, so a two-person crew, a 3.5-tonne van and a 40-tonne truck subject to tolls, dangerous-goods rules and night driving bans produce genuinely different routes. Travel time comes from a proprietary AI model trained on historical traffic flows, which the company argues is what makes planning for a future moment possible where live-traffic systems fall short.
Alongside the commercial API, Swarm Logistics documents a decentralised variant: economic AI agents running as vehicle-based decision modules on on-board units, negotiating freight and prices with other vehicles' agents through a smart-contract protocol on distributed ledger technology. The company presents this as a prototype validated in a proof of concept with a demonstrator and is seeking joint development and pilot partners; its logical layer already forms the core of the commercial fleet planning solution running centrally in the cloud.
What it does
- Assign transport orders to the right vehicles across a mixed fleet in a single optimisation run
- Sequence stops under payload, volume, service-time and European driving and rest-time constraints
- Route on cost rather than shortest distance, counting laden and empty kilometres, tolls and vehicle profiles
- Predict arrival times with an in-house AI model trained on historical traffic flows
- Cost every tour for heterogeneous fleets, from cars to 40-tonne trucks
- Export the plan as turn-by-turn navigation to a driver app or navigation device
- Push optimised plans into an existing TMS planboard over REST
When to use Swarm Logistics / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Swarm Logistics is the right fit.
When to use Swarm Logistics
- Fleet managers and dispatchers at haulage and forwarding companies running mixed car, van and truck fleets
- TMS, ERP and telematics vendors that want optimised tour plans pushed into an existing planboard over REST
- Developers and technical founders building their own mobility or transport applications on a routing and dispatching engine
- In-house transport and field-service operations scheduling freight, service jobs and passengers across Europe
- Automotive and autonomous-vehicle teams exploring vehicle-based decision agents for robo-taxis and software-defined vehicles
When not to use Swarm Logistics
- Emergency and rescue services: the terms explicitly forbid uses where failure of the service could cause death, injury or major property damage
- Consumers and private individuals: the offer is addressed to businesses only, and minors may not register
- Operators working outside Europe: map coverage is European and toll calculation is limited to Germany
- Buyers who want a ready-made dispatching screen: this is an API to integrate, with no management interface sold alongside it
- Teams that evaluate vendors by benchmarking: the terms explicitly prohibit benchmarking the products against other tools
How to use Swarm Logistics
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Try the dispatching engine on the public demonstration at autodispatcher.de, or the routing engine at swarmrouting.de, with no registration
- Review the five REST endpoints listed on the Developer page and the Swagger interfaces they link to
- Read the published REST documentation to size the integration effort before committing
- Book a demonstration slot through the scheduling link on the homepage, or request a test by email
- Register an account and agree payment terms; the vendor checks the application and may decline it without giving a reason
- Confirm the activation email within 24 hours, which is what concludes the contract
- Buy a licence in the online shop under the fleet tour-planning API category
- Include the API licence key issued with your account in every request
- Send vehicles, orders and constraints to the fleet tour-planning endpoint and read back the optimised plan
- Import the plan into your TMS planboard, or export it as turn-by-turn navigation to a driver app
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Optimises on real cost, including empty kilometres, tolls and per-vehicle profiles, instead of shortest or fastest distance
- Predictive arrival-time model trained on historical traffic, usable for planning ahead rather than only for the present moment
- Geocoding, routing, tolls and planning covered by a single fleet endpoint
- European driving and rest times, vehicle restrictions and dangerous-goods rules built into the optimisation
- Public tiered pricing, online licence purchase and a published 99% availability service level
- Free web demonstrations usable without registration, plus openly reachable Swagger and REST documentation
- Website and backend hosted in EU data centres, with individually named subprocessors and local-only backups
Cons
- Map coverage stops at Europe and toll calculation is limited to Germany
- Documentation, Swagger interfaces and the technical account all live on subdomains named test
- The German and English pricing pages disagree on the per-run stop limits and on the driver app price
- The terms are dated April 2023 while the privacy notice is dated July 2026, and the two imprints publish different contact addresses
- No customer-facing data processing agreement, no stated position on model training and no security certification
- Monthly transaction allowances expire at month end with no pro-rata refund, and caching results beyond one day is forbidden
- The decentralised economic-agent variant is a proof of concept rather than something that can be bought
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan: the terms make registration and a payment agreement a precondition for the commercial services, and every published tier starts at a paid amount, free access being limited to the unregistered web demonstrations. The entry point for fleet dispatching is EUR 25.00 net per month for up to 1,000 transport orders, or EUR 27.00 without a subscription, with volume tiers falling to EUR 19.00 per 1,000 orders above 50,000. Cheaper building blocks are sold separately: vehicle tour-planning from EUR 3.90 net per 1,000 stops and value-based routing with arrival-time forecasting from EUR 0.99 net per 1,000 car or van stops. All prices are stated net of statutory VAT and the offer is addressed to businesses only.
- EUR 25.00 net per 1
- 000 on a monthly subscription
- EUR 27.00 without subscription
- geocoding
- routing and tolls included
- up to 50 vehicles per optimisation run
- EUR 24.00 net per 1
- 000
- EUR 19.00 net per 1
- 000
- above 200
- 000
- on request
- from EUR 3.90 net per 1
- 000 monthly stops
- EUR 4.00 without subscription
- down to EUR 3.00 per 1
- 000 between 200
- 001 and 1
- 000
- 000
- from EUR 0.99 net per 1
- 000 monthly stops
- EUR 1.20 without subscription
- down to EUR 0.93 above 50
- 000
- geocoding included
- from EUR 6.00 net per 1
- 000 monthly stops
- EUR 6.20 without subscription
- down to EUR 5.10 above 50
- 000
- geocoding and tolls included
- monthly subscription per driver
- listed at EUR 12.60 on the German price page and EUR 12.99 on the English one
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Swarm Logistics handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is concrete and unusually detailed for a company of this size. The controller is named as Swarm Logistics GmbH in Stuttgart, the Baden-Wuerttemberg data protection authority (LfDI BW) is identified as the supervisory body, and the Article 15 to 21 rights plus the Article 77 right of complaint are spelled out. The privacy notice, dated July 2026, gives a legal basis per processing activity and names its processors individually, among them IONOS, Hetzner, Flatbooster, Microsoft 365, Google Ireland, Stripe, PayPal, Calendly and Mistral AI, citing standard contractual clauses for third-country transfers. It states that no automated decision-making or profiling takes place. No data protection officer under Article 37 is named, no Article 27 representative is required, no customer-facing data processing agreement is published and no security certification is claimed.
Who owns the data?
The terms keep the software firmly with the vendor. Subscribers receive a single, non-sublicensable and non-transferable right of use limited to the contract term, and they run the services on Swarm Logistics' own IT systems: no software is handed over. Copying, renting, lending, sublicensing, reselling or transferring that right is barred, integration into the subscriber's own products being the stated exception, and every right not expressly granted is reserved. Materials displayed or executed inside the products belong to Swarm Logistics or to third parties under German and international copyright. Subscribers additionally grant the vendor free use of their own company names, brands and logos as references, revocable in writing on a legitimate interest. No published clause assigns ownership of the data a customer sends to the API.
Reuse rights
Reuse is bounded rather than free. Results may be integrated into the subscriber's own products, but the terms forbid making the services available to third parties, and caching results for longer than one day is not permitted. Every product must display a Swarm Logistics credit and an OpenStreetMap attribution, plus any further public data-supplier credits the documentation calls for. Benchmarking against the subscriber's own or third-party products, reverse engineering, scraping and mass downloads are all explicitly prohibited. The terms position the outputs as decision support that does not replace a qualified professional's final judgement, and disclaim any guarantee of legal certainty on routing or scheduling results, leaving the user responsible for how those results are applied.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Hosting is European by default. The website runs on IONOS SE in EU data centres, and the backend serving the APIs, applications and databases runs on Hetzner Online GmbH, also in EU data centres; the domain resolves to an IONOS address in Frankfurt. Email for the vendor's .net domain is handled by Flatbooster GmbH in Berlin, which the privacy notice says processes in Germany and the EU with no third-country transfer, while transactional mail under the .de domain goes through Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online, where a third-country transfer is possible under standard contractual clauses. AI functions call Mistral AI in France, processed primarily in the EU and EEA, with standard contractual clauses and additional measures for any third-country sub-processor. Backups are taken locally, with no transfer to external cloud services, and stored only on systems the vendor controls in the EU; Google fonts are served locally. Transfers to the United States, covered by standard contractual clauses, arise for Google Analytics, Stripe, PayPal, Calendly and Gravatar.
Where Swarm Logistics works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Swarm Logistics.
- Automation complacency: the terms describe the output as decision support that does not replace a qualified professional's judgement, yet a dispatcher under time pressure will be tempted to accept every plan unchecked
- Real-world gaps: the vendor disclaims any guaranteed optimum, citing roadworks, congestion, renamed streets and missing height or width data, and places responsibility for the results squarely on the user
- Driving-hours exposure: liability is excluded for driving-time breaches or overloading caused by wrong input, so a mis-keyed payload or working-time limit becomes the operator's legal problem
- Location surveillance: the driver app processes precise and background position data, device identifiers and tour status, kept up to twelve months, which amounts to employee monitoring and needs its own governance
- Contradictory documentation: the German and English pricing pages disagree on per-run stop limits and on the app price, and the two imprints publish different contact addresses, so verify any figure before relying on it
- Silence on model training: nothing on the site states whether customer data feeds model training, and no opt-out mechanism is documented
- Commercial small print: monthly allowances expire unused, no pro-rata refunds are given, caching results beyond one day is forbidden, and the service-level remedy is capped at a 15% monthly discount
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
High for a non-technical buyer, moderate for a development team. This is an integration product: no management interface is sold, so the customer builds or connects their own. An account and a payment agreement come first, the vendor may decline an application without giving a reason, and every call must carry a licence key. The terms make the customer responsible for installation and integration and guarantee no compatibility with a given network or use case. REST documentation and Swagger are public, which helps sizing. Per-run limits of 50 vehicles and 300 to 500 stops constrain the design.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Swarm Logistics
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is Swarm Logistics Fleet Control?
Which vehicles and transport types does it handle?
Is there an API, and is it documented?
Can I try it before buying?
What does it cost?
Where does it work geographically?
Where is the data hosted?
Is customer data used to train models?
Is there a mobile application?
What commitment and service level apply?
Should you pick Swarm Logistics?
Swarm Logistics Fleet Control is a narrow, serious piece of engineering rather than a general-purpose logistics suite. Its distinguishing idea is that commercial routing is an economic problem, not a geometric one: routes are scored on cost factors that change with vehicle, crew and trailer, empty kilometres and tolls are counted, and arrival times come from a model trained on historical traffic rather than from live congestion data. For a haulier or an in-house transport operation planning a mixed fleet across Europe, that combination is genuinely uncommon, and the vendor backs it with public tiered pricing, an online licence shop, open documentation and a stated 99% availability commitment.
The reservations are mostly about maturity and housekeeping. Coverage stops at Europe and tolls are computed for Germany alone. Documentation, Swagger and the technical account sit on subdomains labelled test. The German and English pages disagree on per-run stop limits, on the driver app price and on the contact address published in the imprint, and the terms date from April 2023 while the privacy notice was refreshed in July 2026. Nothing on the site states whether customer data feeds model training, no customer-facing data processing agreement is offered and no security certification is claimed, which matters for a service that ingests addresses and order data. The much-publicised decentralised variant, with economic AI agents negotiating over a distributed ledger, is explicitly a proof of concept looking for pilot partners, not a purchasable product.
Treat it as an integration project with a strong optimisation core: evaluate it through the free demonstrations and the Swagger interfaces, then settle the data-governance questions in the contract.
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