For over a decade, Bike Index has been the place to go to register your bike. We’ve grown into the world’s most widely used bicycle registry. Today, we're launching a membership program and we’d love for you to join.

When we started Bike Index in 2013, we were pretty sure that we’d be registering the majority of the bikes that were sold within 2 or 3 years (5 at the most). And then, because serial numbers would be widely known and everyone would have a registration, selling stolen bikes on online platforms would stop being easy, people would move on to stealing other things and you'd be able to lock up your bike with a cable lock or just some rope and a tricky knot. We also made a bunch of things with QR codes as a joke, sure they'd soon be the digital equivalent of penny farthings.

Registering every bike has turned out to be difficult - but we've made a huge amount of progress! We have easy integrations with the leading bike shop point of sale services and hundreds of shops use those integrations to register every bike they sell, automatically (for free). We've registered over a million bikes and keep speeding up the pace that we register more. We're the official registry for over a thousand universities, law enforcement departments and municipalities and have significant user bases in other countries (shout out to Edmonton and Calgary!). Most importantly, we've done what we said we'd do and we've been around for long enough that people know about Bike Index and trust us.

Also, in that time we got married and won a gold medal at the Olympics and became internet famous experts on gravel biking and bike theft.

But the world is weird now - far from disappearing, QR codes are everywhere. More importantly, online marketplaces are much better places to fence stolen bikes than they were 11 years ago (run an international theft ring with Facebook marketplace, make millions! US law enforcement and Facebook will just shrug).

Part of the problem is that the only time most people look at Bike Index is when their bike is stolen or if they see something particularly suspicious when shopping for a used bike.

What if we made a secure place to sell bikes and made it even easier to sell them than it is anywhere else (because we already have all your bike's info)? Not only would that help fight bike theft, but it would help fund Bike Index–and if it's successful, we'll get to spend time on some of the cool ideas that we've had over the past 11 years, like more OEM parts and stock images, bike versioning, improving the iOS app, automated bike classification from serial numbers, serial number parsing from photos, etc.

We have a lot of ideas for other membership benefits and we'd really like to make Bike Index more useful for everyone (particularly you, reader of long wordy blog posts from Bike Index). We promise if you join as a member, that we'll make a cool new place to go shopping for bike stuff on the internet. And provide some surprise perks. And design some new Bike Index t-shirts to sell you. (And also keep recovering stolen bikes.)

The initial inspiration for the marketplace was the Radavist's Rad Bazaar and the membership program over there. Similarly, we're an organization that we think is important for the bicycle world and we need your support to be able to do cool things.

We’re really proud of what we’ve built so far. We’re grateful for all your support and the opportunity to make an open source, non-profit bikes registration and recovery platform. We want to make Bike Index more useful, to more people, more of the time and this seems like an exciting way to do that.

Bikes are the most reliable source of freedom and fun that we know of. We want to spread the pleasure that we get from riding bikes, even when things are rough.

So join up, it's only $4.99 a month for basic membership. And tell all your friends - we're pretty sure if you and everyone you know signs up, we'll really end bike theft and get to trade out our U-locks for twine.