When we started the company in 2010, we made the decision that free events should be free. We figured that our incremental cost of a free event is very low if we are not burdened by support. And our development team had already created the features in a true self-serve SaaS platform. And free events are typically very positive for the world – bringing people together and raising awareness about important issues.
After nearly 15 years, we are very happy with that decision.
Helping Good Causes and Making Customers Happy
For example Bimbo Bakeries hosts a free Virtual challenge with 20,000 free entries and they raise money and donate their own money to Feeding America. In fact we have almost 1 Million free registrations and tickets on our platform each year.
While this makes us feel good about helping good causes, it also benefits our business. Often an organization starts with putting a free event on our site, and then they put paid events on later, which introduces us to a new customer and generates revenue. It also makes life easy for our customers who have a mix of paid and free events – keeping customers happy keeps them hanging around and helping to pay our bills and salaries.
Timers and Partners
Having free events also helps our timing partners and other organizations that might have to support a mix of registration and ticket platforms. Many times each weekend a number of timers will basically create a race on RunSignup and import registrations from another platform. They do this to use our many tools – perhaps the CheckIn App, or Results, or Results TXT notifications or RaceDay Scoring.
Again, this makes our customer’s lives easier. It also sometimes introduces our technology to new customers and they wind up moving their paid registration to our platform at some point.
Bandits
Just like races, we have bandits. These are organizations that put on events and knowingly violate our best of intentions. Just like bandits in a race, they use the value of our products without supporting our entire community.
A good example is Jesse Itzler’s Running Man. They met with us and told us our platform did not have enough value for our pricing, and they were going to go with TIXR. Yet they wound up having all of the participants signup on RunSignup for free and used our platform for a number of features. So Participants had to signup on RunSignup and then pay with TIXR.
This is a clear example of someone violating our intentions and terms of service. We do not want organizations to use RunSignup for registration for free and take payments elsewhere. It ruins our business model and takes advantage of not only us, but all the other customers. The revenue we generate only comes from processing fees. Jesse’s event did not contribute their fair share as all of our other customers do to the development, security and maintenance of our platform.
It is fine if you are an event does not want to use us (as Jesse’s race did) – but please do not use us if that is the case.
Summary
In summary we are very, very happy with out policy of being free for free events, and allowing our partners to import data into our system. 99.9% of users of our system use it properly, but the “bandits” need to look elsewhere.