i see what your saying and of course we crunched #'s and we are doing the $1.50/mile for our solo's. the one good thing about taking the rate reduction and letting them pay the insurance is that if you are at home for a week or so here and their, zipp pays the insurance and you wouldn't have to worry about it. but anyhow, we found several companies that pay the trucks insurance and ifta tax, but their rates were considerably lower. most companies we found were only paying around $1.10-$1.15 + FSC, for solo's or teams, and even when you add the two together it didn't total the flat rate that zipp is paying. and the percentage rate that a few companies are paying was around 62-67% + FSC and in most cases, it wouldn't total the 80% that they offer. i would rather make more up front and have to pay a few expenses. ronnie told me they were trying to be more flexible with owners and not just offer one way of paying the owners, like most companies do. some owners like flat rate and others like the percentage, you have a choice here. as far as the tracking unit, from our research, most companies don't pay for those, a few might, but not most. the $100 per year admin. fee was explained to help control cost for MVR's and drug tests for the year. the layover fee is for when you drop a load and take your 10 hour break, if you haven't been booked on a load over 200 miles within 48 hours after that, they will pay you $75 to help cover idling cost and meals while waiting (so far, haven't come close to receiving that bonus). the anniversary bonus i mentioned earlier is one the big things we felt set them apart from most, each year on your anniversary date, you receive a $.01/mile bonus for all loaded miles. so if you run 100,000 loaded miles for the year, you receive $1,000. how many other companies are doing that? they also do a random drawing on the first of each month for $500 for the drivers. like i said, we did a lot of comparing of several companies, bid and small, and even though there a few expenses the owners have pay out, their are lot of extras that make up the difference. they obviously don't have the bank accounts of panther, express 1, or even load 1, but seem to care about there owner/drivers and are working hard to retain them. like i said, so far, so good.