Active Advantage Membership?

They have a $1.99 trial for a month, you could do that and see what it's all about.

I don't think I use them enough to pay the membership $60 for a year and it gives you $10 of processing when registering, and the kit deals can likely be found many places.

IMO Waste of Money

I'm a member and I see no one on here is fan of theirs.

But I've signed up to do so many races that those fees added up to be more than the membership.  So last year alone I saved money by being a member.  I don't foresee that happening every year but it's just the way it's worked out for last year and this year.

They provide you no benefit that you can see.

For our triathlon we use another service besides active, I think the fee is <$5 for a $60 registration. If I took paper entries and had to do everything our provider does for us, I would have to hire a part time bookkeeper and pass the cost on to participants. Probably much more than $5/participant.

But I've never seen the "advantage" of paying for Active Advantage. Even when I was entering as many as seventeen races a year it didn't really make economic sense to join. IIRC, membership only knocked a buck or two off of each registration fee. Perhaps one of those supporting the service can explain how they saved the $60 over the course of the year?

Agree, but in a lot of cases I find that all the extra "fees" are over the top.  Just like buying an airline ticket.... just tell me what it costs.

Also, out of curiosity, for your races did you do it manually at first?  At what point did you decide that the fee would have to go up or you outsource the registration piece. I only ask because it would seem logical that your statement is correct, but I find that in many cases this just isn't really the case.  It is more a matter of "one less thing to worry about" for RDs/Promoters and is far less about the cost of the "service".

I did a local 5K race for two years and we had over 400 (prob. closer to 450) and we did nothing but mail in and race day registration without any problems.  Now-a-days I still see smallish 5Ks going for $30-40 and Active tacking on their fees.

Feel free to run your races however you choose. If you want to volunteer to run my registration process with paper forms, I'll consider it. But I'll bet you don't volunteer to do it more than once.

After you get done, call your credit card company's fraud division and let them have a crack at Active.

Tell me about it... on so many levels.  Unfortunately I was forced to use them last night when I signed up for a race.  Its no wonder how they dupe so many people into signing up for their "Advantage" membership.  By the time you get through the 436 questions all you want to do is be done with the registration process... that's when the big green button that says "register now" looks so inviting... unfortunately you have to click on the small 10 point font hyperlink that says "no thanks" to register for the race w/o signing up.