Vision & Roadmap
Mission
Racetrim's mission is to build professionally crafted, privacy focused, and simple infrastructure that connects sim racers and empowers them to build opportunities for fun, competition, and community.
Servers Are a Utility
Notice, the mission is not to make a lot of money by exploiting the difference between what you're willing to pay for a server and how cheaply I can run it. In fact, I don't expect to make meaningful money from running servers at all. Race servers are the foundation of all online racing, and the barrier of entry to run and ship a high-quality server for a game like Asssetto Corsa Competizione (ACC) is way too high. I don't anticipate it being any easier for AC EVO. I want to make spinning up a server something any sim racer can do on-demand. I'm charging for it only to cover costs. If I find more cost-effective ways to run servers at the same performance level, you'll see monthly rental prices drop. The market of players who want to rent sim racing servers is small, and the margin on servers is low. In my opinion, this is a difficult market to build a sustainable business. Doing a quick search shows you there's no shortage of services to rent game servers, and usually it's their entire product. I'm not going to compete in that space. I'm going to offer servers as a public utility so I don't have to compete. I want to offer higher quality servers, at lower costs, with more flexibility, and a better UX because race servers should be something anyone can spin up with ease.
Business Hypothesis
Hopefully, I have explained well enough why servers are essential, but also why I don't think they're a stand-alone business. In order to achieve the stated mission above, there must be value for individual race drivers. If a populated server has 20-30 drivers, there needs to be something here for each one of them.
If you've read the racetrim.pro home page, you'll know that I won't do click advertising or sell user data to advertisers. That's not an option. If servers bring people here, I won't make people the product. I will need to discover features and services they love enough to pay for, and build those.
While in early development and early access, everything I build beyond server administration will be made available to everyone without any subscription or payment. This will allow for quick feedback and learning. If there emerges a coherent set of features that people like, I may put in a "choose your own price" subscription model for those that want to support continued development. If we switch features to a paid subscription model, it will be because they are mature, clearly valuable, and unsustainable for us to continue offering for free. If and when we get there, there will be at least one month of notice.
This, and the roadmap below, are hypotheses and are not set in stone. I reserve the right to be completely wrong. Creating any software product is a scientific process to find a fit between what you have, a problem to be solved, and a customer who will pay for it. I hope you're intrigued enough to help me find that fit. If you have suggestions for sim racing services you'd pay for, please get in touch will@racetrim.pro
Roadmap
This year is about offering a solid platform for ACC players to establish what works well in anticipation of the AC EVO release.
2025-01 - 2025-02: Minimum Viable Product
Players can sign in with their steam accounts, make ACC server settings, launch and configure small and medium public and private ACC servers in the US and Europe. I would like to get 10-20 key people on the platform running servers at no cost, in exchange for helping me test and learn about resource needs. These would ideally people who can get servers populated, and are willing to build a relationship with me where they can share feedback and help me learn from their real usage of the platform. If you think this could be you, please email will@racetrim.pro.
2025-02 - 2025-06: Essential Server Management
Our biggest priority in early development is to make sure the server provisioning experience on racetrim is second to none. Post-MVP development will primarily be focused on improving server administration and adding more features based on feedback.
- Add medium and large instances
- Add more regions
- Support ACC entryList.json and bop.json
- Capture and live stream server logs
- Capture, persist, and display session results
- Improvements to server administration UI and UX
- Bug fixes
2025-06+: Down the road
- Expand the platform for AC EVO
- Scheduled / League races that require registration
- Full Leagues: Divisions, ELO, Safety rating, stewarding, and required license.
- Shareable race results analysis and data visualization
- Driver data using race results, lap and sector times.
- Discord or XMPP integrations (every server has a chat and voice channel?)
- Edge acceleration to improve server performance
- More advanced DDoS protection
It's hard to know what we'll learn. I don't expect any of these things to be easy. We'll see what happens. Thank you for reading, let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from anyone who is here for it!