One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2025 Year in Review, 2025 RunSignup Product Review, 2025 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2025 TicketSignup Product Recap, 2025 Infrastructure Report, 2026 Company Strategy, 2026 RunSignup Roadmap, 2026 GiveSignup Roadmap, 2026 TicketSignup Roadmap. These will come out incrementally between the end of November and early 2025.
We are very pleased with the progress we made in 2025 in continuing to build new features that help our event customers be successful. Just as important, we continued our great record of a stable infrastructure with 0 downtime and 100% ontime payments to customers. We have had only 6 minutes of downtime since 2015, including major database upgrades, monthly system upgrades to maintain the latest security releases, and significant improvements across our product line with over 2,000 releases.
Importantly, we reached over 500 years of service by our team since we started in 2010. We have 19 people with over 10 years, and 42 people who have been with us since the pandemic hit (our employee count at the time – no one left!). This longevity enables us to deeply understand our customers, and build up a deep level of trust in each other. This allows us to be very efficient, and provide our customers with the best products and service at the lowest possible cost.
Let’s dig into the highlights from 2025.
AI
We declared 2025 as the Year of AI in January. Since then, we have been “All In” (AI on AI).
Most visible to our customers today is our Customer Service AI Chatbot that all of our customers can put on their websites (Website V2 and FAQ required). We had 55 customers in the private Beta and had remarkable success. In addition to being a groundbreaking use of AI with real tangible benefits for event directors, it also continues the trend of more and more events hosting their full event website on our platform (for free).
It is important to note that the financial success and structure of our employee owned company has allowed us to provide this customer service tool to our customers for free to our customers and much like EMail and Websites incur the cost ourselves. We expect large software development costs and token costs over time for this offering that might approach our Email costs. We think this is an important investment in our customer’s success – saving them time and improving the experience of their events for their participants.
We are also working hard to make events on RunSignup and TicketSignup appear in AI searches. We know that AI chat is becoming the third largest source for traffic after Google and Meta.
AI for Vibe Coding is the second major public area of AI advancement we have provided to our customers. This has leveraged our strategic advantage of a full fledged API (which now has a modern OpenAPI interface for easy AI consumption). Customers can now develop their own applications and dashboards using the data to solve specific needs. We have had over 70 races use some tools we created and shared publicly as an example.
We also have our MCP Server running internally. We will be taking advantage of this in 2026 in multiple ways. One will be to ensure the large models are incorporating our public data – making it easier to find and learn in depth information about events on our platform. We will also be enhancing our new Results capability with an AI interface. You will also start to see AI interfaces on Dashboard pages as we incrementally open up a natural language interface to various capabilities that directors use. There is a lot of infrastructure we will be building to enable this, and then a whole bunch of AI applications will start being incorporated into our product.
We have developed this graphic to help customers understand that AI brings a new platform and user interface for our customers:
Websites V2
Websites is the primary method of interaction between event directors and their customers – finding, buying, answering questions, getting results, seeing photos, etc. all happen on an event website. Website V2 makes it easier than ever to create clean, mobile-responsive websites for your event – and here are some examples. The old days of having a website and a separate registration page are gone. Of course, we have continually improved our (free) Website capability so it is now obvious for events to have a single website that integrates their race data with their content. Here are some of the improvements we made this year:
FAQ Component – The new component makes it easy to create FAQ section(s) or page(s) with pre-built suggestions. We automatically style the front end for easy navigation by your participants with the goal of helping to answer questions before they get escalated to event directors. We also use the FAQ as part of training for the Customer Service AI Chatbot.
Three and Four Column Layout Options now provide a variety of options for events to display content and highlight actions on their website.
Image Gallery Improvements and Propagation (soon to Banner Images!) – The Image Gallery provides a single place to store and reuse all of your images across your website and email.
Circle Images – One of the enhancements we made for Image Gallery is to offer circle images for appropriate components.
Image Group Component – this new component makes it simple to layout several images together. And it adjusts automatically for mobile.
Button Group Component – another component to enhance websites is adding action buttons in groups.
PDF Component allows for adding a button linking to a PDF document or image. We take care of storing the document and making sure it loads fast and securely for users.
Updated Social Links and Social Sharing including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, LinkedIn and Strava.
Font Themes are a fun way to spice up a website and make it unique. We do the hard work of applying matching styles to make headings stand out and have over a dozen font choices available for selection.
Email V2
Email V2 is one of our most popular features. Our V2 of this platform has incrementally improved over the past couple of years. We will send over 800 Million Emails for our customers this year. Like Website V2, it is competitive on a stand alone feature basis with email products like MailChimp and Constant Contact, while also having the huge benefit of being tied to event data like bib number and triggers like when someone registers or when price increases happen.
Here are some real examples to show the power of what we are providing for our customers (for free!).
EMail Infrastructure Improvement – we took time to make our system more secure and scale to handle billions of emails per year in the future.
Email Template Sort Options have been added to easily find pre-built and custom templates for simple reuse and consistency.
Improved Volunteer Email capabilities, including better reply to options and list generation.
We also added more Lottery List options, a number of new pre-built email templates, lots of features and triggers for our Calendar based timed entry ticket product, Simple calendar links, better image handling, and modernized our buttons.
The big two features coming in early 2026 are Fundraiser Email V2 and Super Lists.
Race Day Technology
Lots happened in 2025 with our RaceDay family of products. Perhaps the biggest news was the release of RaceDay Scoring V5 and the scalability improvements (2.5 Million Reads!) to meet the needs of the largest races in the US.
RaceDay Real Time is now live and in customer use. RaceDay Scoring is now sending real time split updates to RaceJoy to allow for Predictive Pace for all participants in races with multiple split points.
Cross Country Scoring and Results improvements were made to help timers, teams and participants.
The Mobile Timing App has also continuously improved. We have added better and more automated backup timing capability that integrates easily with RaceDay Scoring to replace those old Time Machines. The most popular new feature is the Photo capability that allows any phone camera to take and upload photos to our free photo platform where they are automatically tagged with the bib number and matched with results and participants. We have also added an auto-capture capability to take photos continuously are regular intervals.
Timer Dashboard has been a big focus. The RunSignup cloud platform is constantly syncing RaceDay Scoring data, and now we are making that visible in the Timer Dashboard. This allows timers to more easily monitor multiple live events from a single dashboard remotely. It also allows for simple syncing of setup in events – meaning a head timer could load the event setup for a remote race, and then update a report or fix a data check configuration and update the local RaceDay Scoring. This combines the flexibility of local scoring on a PC with the power of collaboration via the Cloud. Here are a couple of screenshots of what we have implemented with data like number of people who started, number completed, estimated first and last finishers, data check alerts and quick ability to make changes.
Medical Tent CheckIn and Out has also been added to the CheckIn App.
Membership
Nearly 1,000 membership organizations have been created since the release of our next generation Membership Platform, including clubs migrating from the legacy Clubs platform, and new Membership organizations. At the heart of Memberships is a simple goal: making Membership sign up and management easier for everyone involved.
New Membership Dashboard as well as much improved Reporting capabilities.
Saved Reports are also now available to create custom reports that can be used again and again.
Private Membership Levels enable special types of memberships that organizations might not want to offer generally. One example might be a Lifetime membership that only certain people are invited to receive. Another example might be a pool or club that requires an initiation fee or bond, and then only people who have that bond can see the yearly membership options.
Membership Organizations – not just individuals and families, can now allow organizations to join. For example companies might join an industry group like the Carwash Association of Pennsylvania.
Membership Self Serve continues to get incremental updates to allow members to make their own edits and print their own membership cards, etc.
P2P
We have made a lot of updates to our membership platform. We recently released an internal video call where Allison, Sean and Nancy review all of the updates and the progress we have made this year as well as show real customer examples.
Fundraiser Milestone Notifications are now automated to thank fundraisers and encourage them to raise more.
New Fundraiser Slideshow Defaults allows event directors to set up nice looking default banner images (and slideshows) for fundraisers that they can customize themselves later.
Donor and Fundraiser Notifications for Manual Donations are also now available.
Improved Fundraiser Milestone Report allows directors to easily see who has met what milestone.
Bring Back My Fundraising Team makes it simple for recurring events with strong ties with their community to renew year after year.
Calendar Based Ticketing
Our Calendar Based Timed Entry Ticketing has been a major investment by the company the past couple of years as we build our features to maturity. The pace of releases has been rapid, and we did this 10 newest features blog a month ago to highlight some of them. Much like the level of depth we have built around race registration with race day technology, participant management, and more, this technology offers us a way to clearly differentiate our offering from legacy vendors like Eventbrite, Showclix, FareHarbor and others.
As this blog is being written in October, 2025, we have over a dozen fairly large Haunts using this new technology. They will sell over 250,000 tickets in October alone. The fact that 70% of our platform is shared code, this additional revenue allows our company to continue to grow and invest in technology advances for all events.
Payment Processing
A new FTC national rule makes fee transparency and all-in pricing a requirement for audience-based events nationally. RunSignup led the charge on this giving customers many options to configure their pricing. The good news is that we have not seen any material effect on signing up.
Probably our largest project of the year was an upgrade of our payment processing system to Adyen’s new Balance Platform. We had moved to Adyen as our payment processing platform in 2021. Adyen actually processes more in total transactions ($1.4 Trillion) than Stripe, and had a much more robust mechanism for payment facilitators like RunSignup. There were several benefits of moving to the new platform, including new features that allow us to lower our payment processing costs (part of the reason we can afford free email, websites and now AI Chatbots!). We were also able to improve our onboarding experience. While many of our competitors outsource to Stripe for payment processing and onboarding and payments, as a Payment Facilitator we are able to be much closer to the rails of the payment infrastructure. This allows us to provide highly reconciled payment financials so you can match payments to transactions exactly.
Infrastructure
We continue to make our remarkable run of only 6 minutes of downtime since 2015 – that averages less than 40 seconds per year. All while we make 2,000 releases of our software each year, and do major upgrades of our infrastructure like moving to new, faster hardware, and upgrading complex subsystems like databases and operating systems. We proved our fault tolerance this past week when many websites like Delta, Netflix, Disney, Eventbrite, Race Roster and others were down much of the day due to troubles at AWS. We also host servers in AWS East, but configuoure our infrastructure across Availability Zones and Regions with automatic failover.
API Infrastructure improvements was a big infrastructure project this year as we implemented the OpenAPI specification to prepare for AI. In fact, it allows our customers to use vibe coding tools more easily, and is what underpins our MCP Server (which is still only being used internally).
We also successfully upgraded to PCI V 4.0 for our Level 1, fully independently audited infrastructure.
Summary
Obviously, it was another busy year for RunSignup. We continue to increase the functionality gap and are now the obvious choice in the endurance market in the US with over 50% market share. Combined with new and fast growing revenue sources in P2P and Ticketing, this allows us to continue to build the best event technology for our customers.
We love building technology for events, and we will keep pushing forward. We appreciate the support our customers show with continued loyalty and referrals to new customers.