Our business model has always been to share in the success of our customers by charging a processing fee. And that model has served us very well – we do well when our customers do well. We make an increasing set of free capabilities to help our event customers expand their business and create more successful event experiences. This means the pricing is simple and easy, measured on registration dollars instead of adding additional fees for every incremental service. We invest heavily in this with our customers and partners.
In addition to helping our paid customers, part of the strategy of offering free services is to serve our community and grow our business over the long term. This includes things like free registrations and tickets for free events, free Imports, free Websites, free Email. Free services help us provide more services to our paid customers – a virtuous cycle.
There are a wide range of examples that are very synergistic with our Guiding Principles and help our business so we can help our customers. For example:
- Free for Free Events. We do this to help the event community, and these non-paying customers do wind up referring paying customers to us.
- Timers using RaceDay Scoring to time a combination of events using different registration platforms. We want to help timer partners who are trying to grow with us. If we make great products some of those races on other platforms will eventually move to us.
- Volunteer Events. A number of events use us just for volunteers, but we have had a number of those move over to our platform eventually.
The basic idea is that by providing free services, we win customers in the long run.
Bandits and New Wave of Competitors Change the Equation
In 2025, I wrote about competitive bandits. Organizations who were using the free parts of our technology while avoiding the paid parts. I wrote:
“Like runners who do not pay an entry fee but jump into a race, we have bandits. 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.”
There is a new wave of competitors who are leveraging our free services. Small startups who are using AI to develop their software, and individual races or timers who are developing their own registration software.
In February of this year I wrote a blog about the coming wave of AI DIY. I estimated that AI DIY would account for about 10-20% of the market over the next 5-10 years. I recounted how I had spent an hour and 10 minutes creating a simple race website with registration.
Obviously, there is a large gap between us and the small startups who announce a new feature every couple of weeks (copying features we have had for years). There is an even larger gap with the vibe coded registration websites that individual events and timers are playing with. Our strategy is to embrace AI even better than these competitors so we continue to provide the best, most solid solution for our event customers built on our collective knowledge of 550 years of combined experience.
We Can Not Support Competitive Bandits
Our business model is based solely on processing fees, aligning our success with that of our customers. Our primary costs are software development and the infrastructure required to provide our free features and services. We simply can not sustain a model where competitive bandits capture the revenue source for themselves while still using the rest of our free services that the revenue funds.
Some people have asked if they could pay for a feature, and that just does not work with our business model. We operate at scale and can afford the features and support we have because of the large community that has gathered using our product. Pricing individual product features is a path to doing custom software, and we are not in that business. And timers who think they pay $199 and it covers our cost of our race day team are significantly undervaluing the $2 Million we spend each year on our event day development team.
Not only is it unfair to take advantage of our employee-owners, it is not fair that paying customers support non-paying customers with direct intent to leverage the community for their own benefit. This is far different from us providing free registration to a free race or helping a timer support races that might not be on RunSignup (yet).
We will be introducing a variety of new mechanisms to ensure we are not supporting these competitive bandits. One of the first will be instituting a new registration requirement to use our API. This will allow us to track who is using our platform. It is also necessary as we are seeing a large spike in AI slop applications calling our API (last week we had a legitimate customer using a new AI app they had written to call our API 785 times in under a minute). The new API registration will also include new bandwidth limitations and metering (which will also help us with bots and DDOS attacks).
Free for Good
Rest assured that we still have our original spirit of being free and open that has made us so popular. Free events will be free. Customers and partners that work in cooperation with us will be able to leverage our free services. We are here to keep building for the good of us all.