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Most timing systems are cheap to buy and expensive to run. The reader is the bait; the chips are the hook. We have never sold it that way.
Since 2001 · no contracts · no mandated chips · no mandated software
The thing nobody puts in the brochure
A timing system is not a one-off purchase. It is a reader you buy once and consumables you buy forever, and the second number is the one that decides what timing costs you over five years.
A closed system
They are the same chips, from the same manufacturers everyone uses — coded so they will not read on anybody else's reader, and priced accordingly.
Ours
We do not code our chips to our readers, because the only reason to do that is to stop you shopping around.
Do the sum on your own numbers
This compares a chip you are obliged to buy from one supplier against the same chip bought on the open market. It is not a comparison with our price list — the point is that you can shop at all, not that you shop with us.
Defaults are a mid-size contract timer at open-market rates. Chip prices vary by type and volume — put in the ones you are actually paying. If you time a few hundred people a year this sum will not move you, and it is not meant to.
You keep
every year, on chips alone
In plain words
Not a philosophy. Four specific things we will not do to you.
Any compliant UHF chip from any supplier reads on our boxes. We sell chips because it is convenient, not because you are cornered.
The protocol is documented and it is not going to change under you. Keep whatever you already time on.
Every release, free for the life of the product. Not a support contract, not a subscription, not a paid upgrade.
Every manual and firmware release is downloadable by anybody, customer or not, with no account and no serial number.
We have written our own timing software now. It changed nothing about this page. Our boxes hand reads to the established packages exactly as they always have, and they always will — a company that locks you in at the chip is not going to be trusted when it says you are free to choose your software.
Why we bother
Hardware gets copied. Features get matched. The one thing a competitor cannot follow us on is the business model, because theirs depends on the consumable. We have been making this argument since 2001 and it has never needed updating.
If you are timing on somebody else's system right now and the chip invoices are what brought you here, the calculator above is the whole pitch. Put your real numbers in it. If the answer is small, we are probably not worth the change — and we would rather you worked that out here than after a sales call.
Nine questions about your event and you get the system, the quantities and the price — before you have spoken to anybody.
