A lease‑purchase is a bet. This tool prices the bet.

The problem

The deal only runs one way:

• The payment is fixed. It hits every Friday whether the truck moved or not.
• Your revenue is not. It goes to zero during breakdowns, home time, and slow weeks.

Cost-per-mile math — the only math most drivers are ever shown — gives you an average week. It says nothing about your bad weeks.

Nobody goes broke on an average week.

They go broke when a $9,000 engine repair lands in the same month as soft rates — and the payment is still due Friday.

This tool prices the bad weeks.

The two numbers that matter

The figures below are the tool’s example numbers. They are made up, not anyone’s real contract. Yours will be different — that is the whole point.

• Break-even

  $1.43/mi

  You stop losing money.

• Match your W2

  $2.24/mi

  You stop working for free.

• The gap

  $0.81/mi

  What your labor is already worth.

At $2.10/mi you’d take on the payment, the repairs, the downtime, the escrow, and all of the risk — to earn less than the company job you already have.

The fixed cost is due every week, even at zero miles. On these example terms that is $1,202 a week with the truck parked.

Which numbers actually decide this

Every input, ranked by how much it moves the outcome. YOU means you can influence it. MKT means the market decides, not you.

• Rate $/mi $55,784 MKT
• Loaded miles/wk $39,566 YOU
• W2 take-home $/wk $23,400 MKT
• Fuel $/gal $21,984 MKT
• MPG $15,405 YOU
• Deadhead % $14,523 YOU
• Maintenance $/mi $14,331 MKT
• Lease payment $/wk $13,000 YOU
• Breakdown prob/wk $12,407 MKT

61% of the outcome sits in things you do not control.

Read that last line again. You’d be borrowing serious money against one truck you can’t sell quickly — and 61% of how it turns out is decided by things that don’t care how hard you work.

That is not a guess about this year. It is how the deal is built, and it is true in any market.

The payment is not the lever

Run the rate you’d need against every payment a recruiter might offer:

The gap stays near $0.80/mi no matter what the payment is.

Talking $650 down to $450 — a 30% cut, real money, hard to win — moves the rate you need by ten cents.

The deal lives or dies on whether loads in your lanes really pay about $2.20 a mile. And you don’t set that.

What this tool will not do

It will not tell you whether to sign. Anything that claims it can is lying to you.

Feed it two sets of numbers that both look reasonable and it returns −$52,269 on one and +$78,973 on the other. A $131,242 swing — on the same lease contract. Only the guesses changed: the rate, the miles, the deadhead, the fuel, how often it breaks.

Both input sets ship in the repo as scenarios/soft-market.json and scenarios/strong-lanes.json, and a test holds them to this claim. Check it yourself.

Its real job is to show you which numbers decide your life, so you can go get the true ones instead of trusting someone else’s math.

It also will not scrape load boards. DAT and Truckstop cost money, need a login, and their terms say don’t. The tool lays out the legal ways instead — including the one that costs nothing and matters most:

“Show me the last 12 weeks of settlement statements from three drivers currently in this lease program.”

An honest program will show you. A predatory one changes the subject. The dodge is your answer.

Red flags it will catch

• An interest rate that’s predatory once you unmask it — a lease is a loan in a costume, and running the real payments against what the truck is worth shows the rate the paperwork avoids printing
• Total cost far above what the truck is actually worth
• Escrow you never get back — their money now, sold to you as your savings
• A balloon payment at the end that’s too big to handle
• Exit penalties that trap you in
• Savings too thin to survive one engine failure

Those come straight off the paperwork, not off any guess about freight rates. They are the only part of this that is fact instead of forecast.

The one question this replaces

You don’t have to agonize. You have to answer one question:

Do loads in my lanes clear $2.20+ a mile, consistently, after deadhead?

If yes, the truck is worth a serious look. If no, you already have the better job.

Go pull thirty days of real load-board data for the lanes you’d actually run. Not the national average. Not the recruiter’s number. Yours.

The worksheet

Before you can model anything, you have to go collect the numbers. Here is the whole list. You do not need the tool, a computer, or an email address to use it — print this page, or copy it onto paper, and go ask.

Every line is a question someone has to answer in writing. A straight program answers them. Watch what happens when you ask.

There is no email to give. Nothing on this page asks for one. If you want the same list as a printable text file, the tool prints it — python worksheet.py, no installing anything. If you never touch the tool at all, the list above is still the whole of it.

Get the tool

The worksheet above needs nothing installed. The model itself needs Python 3.10+ and two libraries. MIT licensed. No cloud, no account, no tracking, nothing phones home. Your contract terms never leave your machine.

git clone https://github.com/btlarkin/truck-lease-evaluator
cd truck-lease-evaluator

python worksheet.py                 # the checklist above. Nothing to install.

pip install -r requirements.txt     # only needed for the model itself
python lease_evaluator.py --dump-template > deal.json
#   ... edit deal.json with your REAL numbers ...
python lease_evaluator.py --scenario deal.json --all

Source and full documentation on GitHub →

Every number the model prints is checked against an answer worked out by hand. Turn the randomness off and the simulation has to land exactly on the plain-math result; a truck that never moves has to bleed exactly the fixed cost. A model you’d use to make a six-figure decision you can’t undo, with no tests behind it, is malpractice.