Francois wrote:
How come in 2024, Active still takes the lion's share of the market when it comes to signing up for races?
Their interface is terrible, their fees outrageous, and they still can't figure out how to put together a tracking app that doesn't crash within 2hrs.
Given the many IT solutions, I'm just stunned that we still have nothing that can compete, or at least that provides functional solutions.
I've had a goal to make a solution for 5+ years, I've made some very minor progress in that time due to other commitments such as training, working my day job and having a family.
There are a lot of other options out there besides active, some of which have been listed here. The issue is it's a decently complex piece of software with a fair amount of critical parts that all have to function flawlessly to not break the whole thing down, that requires money, which is where the 10%+ comes in.
For example:
1. allow users to register for a race - not very hard, but still time consuming
2. allow users to edit their race registration - still not very hard, but time consuming
3. allow refunds for a race - who's initiating this, the user or the RD, is this allowed for every race or just some?
4. accept payments for a race - integrating this with stripe isn't too difficult, but then you have to keep track of which race it belongs to
5. allow RDs access to the money - how often do you allow this, what % are you taking off from it or is your payment processor taking off? What if the RD gets a payout and then a user wants a refund from the race, how will you handle this?
6. export participants out in a clean format to provide to your timing company and to your packet pickup folks - or is this going to be another piece of functionality allowing packet pickup volunteers to have an easy to use dashboard to check folks in? the participant export is trivial, but it can get complicated in a hurry
I'm sure there's more things that I'm forgetting, and some of that is not necessary to start up the process, but if you are talking to a potential RD and you say oh by the way we have no way to allow or accept refunds through our system you're maybe cutting out 50% of your business? Then what if you tell them you don't allow unlimited payouts, only once or twice a month, some might not like that.
Races are already being run on a shoestring budget so trying to get in and take a piece of that for what seems like such a small part of the process is tough. That being said, I own onlineracesignup.com, which seems like an amazing domain for this thing, and I have it set to autorenew every year. So maybe some day I'll get around to creating the most basic version of this software and releasing it. I've had various plans and dreams for it over the years, but like I said, a lot of other things going on. I'd be happy to chat though if you're serious about an alternative.