A couple of months ago we wrote a blog about why Free events are Free on RunSignup. We also wrote about some of our philosophy around why we offer so many free features and tools like Free Email, Free Websites, Free Volunteer capability, Free Refunds, Free Checkin, Free Photos, Free Results, Free Result TXT Notification, etc. If we help events that use our product grow, then we will grow and be more successful. Also, if we offer a friendly on-ramp, more customers will join us.
At this point, we have a thriving community. Allison and I talk about this in our 2025 Kickoff Webinar about how our customers support and and we support our customers in a virtuous cycle. This has resulted in about half of the races in the country using our platform, which is great. That critical mass allows us to spend over $6 Million on development and a little less than that on customer support. And we have the lowest cost of any major vendor in the registration business in addition to the broadest platform.
Bandits
In that article we discussed the concept of bandits – like runners who do not pay an entry fee but jump into a race. These are races who use a variety of our free services but do their transactions on another platform. We used an example of a customer who had people buy tickets on TIXR and then they had to register on RunSignup with a free coupon and results were posted on RunSignup and they used our free email. It is just not in the spirit of what we are trying to do with a community. They are not paying their fair share, and take advantage of our employee-owners and our customers.
Competitor Bandits
There is actually an even worse version of bandit in our business – a competitor bandit. Here is an example story:
There is a race who had used RunSignup for over a decade. They were a bit frustrated with their long term timer. They were approached by “Timer E”, who told the race they had to move to their registration product (Red Podium, which is less features rich and in some cases cheaper than RunSignup) because “their timing software did not work with RunSignup”. This “Timer E” uses our scoring product for $199 a year to time and score and produce results for hundreds of races. “Timer E” basically lied to win a customer, took revenue away from the RunSignup community, yet is using software produced by RunSignup to help them take customers away from us.
“Timer E” have been doing this for a couple of years. We hoped that they might become more of a partner at some point. I had discussions with this timer again in November and it was clear they would never move to RunSignup. I asked them to move off of our products completely as we felt it was not right that a competitor was using our own product to take customers away from us. They were very offended, and have not moved off our scoring product saying it would hurt their business. Of course they are not quite as considerate looking our way and realizing they are hurting our business with our own products.
Help Us
To be honest, we do not want to start putting a bunch of license management features into our products as it is not productive. We also want an easy onramp so prospective customers can use some of our free tools and then start to use us commercially over time.
We would just like to ask the RunSignup community to help us. If you are approached by a timer or a competitor offering you something better, at least have a conversation with us. In the case above, if the race had asked us, we could have recommended a dozen different timers in her area who would have helped them.