Free Services Strategy – Free Results Posting

A couple of years ago when we started RunSignUp, our basic strategy was to charge a processing fee when it cost us to process a transaction.  We uplift our cost for the charge to pay for our salaries and infrastructure and hopefully make a profit.  We figure this is a pretty decent way to associate value with cost for races – meaning larger races pay us more than smaller races.

We also came up with a strategy to not charge for our services that cost us relatively nothing to deliver on an incremental basis.  As an example, you can let volunteers sign up for free since there is no charge.  Or you can enter paper registrations for free.  It basically costs us some money for storage and processing, which is really, really cheap.

We are getting around to putting together some pretty cool services now that we have the basics of registration covered.  Right now we are putting a lot of effort into Race Results.  We will write more about this over the next month.  But so far we have Simple Results posting, and are testing Mobile Timing.  We will be having full results posting for races and timers over the next month with lots and lots of cool features that will be great for runners looking for fast results and mobile access, as well as making it easy for timers and race directors to give that to them!

While we are doing a lot of interesting and tough development work on this, we will be providing this for free to any race.  We now give races the ability to create a Race Info page on RunSignUp WITHOUT having to do registration.  If you do registration on Active.com, that is fine – we will even point to Active.com for you.  Once you have a race on our website, you will then be able to post results – for free.  No strings attached.

Of course we hope you like our services so much you start using us for registration, so we can continue to develop cool stuff and provide runners with an easier, better, less intrusive and lower cost way to register online!