Why It's $10

It's supposed to be invisible

Register, show up, ride, have a beer and a brat, make some new friends, go home. If you never think about any of the rest of this, it worked.

Everything below is what it took. It's here for whoever went looking.

Why it's $10

Entry fees keep climbing. Fifty dollars is standard. Plenty of rides run into the hundreds. At least one local event asks for a $1,000 fundraising commitment before you get a number.

Every one of those dollars is a filter. It decides who is allowed to show up.

I could charge more. I'd raise more. I'd also have a different ride.

All ten dollars goes to Sauce Milwaukee

Not proceeds. Not a portion of. All of it.

Sauce is a small charity and that is on purpose. Money does something at that scale. At a large organization the same amount is a rounding error.

The brat economics

Most people assume Eagle Park donates the food. They don't. I pay roughly $12 a head for the beer and brat, which is a fair price for what riders get.

So the math looks broken. Ten dollars comes in, all ten goes to Sauce, and $12 a head goes out the door for food.

Merch covers it. I silk screen everything myself, so a $20 shirt costs me about $8. Hoodies and tie-dye run about the same margin. Merch covers roughly 70% of the food and the swag. The remaining 30% is mine, and that's fine.

The koozie story

2026 finished with more riders than I had koozies printed. I ordered for a smaller number and 137 people registered.

There was a box left over from prior years, so riders got a choice between the 2026 koozie and an older one. A lot of returning riders picked the year they rode. That held until the box ran out. A couple of people didn't get one.

That's a supply miss and I could have left it off this page. It's here because a page like this one is only worth reading if the small stuff is in it too.

Shirts you'd actually wear

Not cheap blanks with a sponsor wall on the back. Decent cut, distressed ride logo, hand screened.

I wanted something you'd wear to the bar, not something that ends up in the lawn-mowing drawer.

The only branding on any of the merch is the Poovey Farms Racing logo on one side of the koozies. This is a Poovey Farms production and I'll say so. I'm just not turning you into a billboard for it.

Nobody's on a payroll

I do about 95% of the work and automate the rest, so I don't have to ask anyone for their Saturday.

Other events run paid staff through promotion and production. That is real work and those people should get paid for it. But every person on a payroll is a person the entry fee has to cover.

Honest note: I have never been great about volunteering my time to charity. This is what I have instead.

The 501-c-suite rule

This one is mine, not the ride's. If anyone in your C-suite clears $501,000 a year, I don't consider you a charity. I give no time and no money. I call them c-suite skimmers.

I'm not naming anybody. Every nonprofit files a 990 and those are public. Look them up and decide for yourself.

East Side focus, and what that means on a map

The East Side is genuinely hard to define. The city map doesn't draw one. People disagree about the boundaries and about whether it's one word or two.

For this ride, going off the city's own neighborhood map, the East Side is eight neighborhoods: Lower East Side, Northpoint, Riverside Park, Murray Hill, Upper East Side, Lake Park, Cambridge Heights, and Downer Woods.

Sponsors are brick-and-mortar businesses in that area. I keep the organizations working to improve these neighborhoods in the loop. I still control where the checkpoints go.

Sauce is in Riverwest, and that's fine

The money gets raised on the East Side and goes to work in Riverwest. Saying it here before somebody else notices it.

Neighborhood lines are for organizing a bike route. They aren't for deciding who is worth helping.

No app, no tracking

The rider interface runs in your phone's browser. There is no app to install, no cookies, and no trackers. Nothing gets collected while you're not looking.

The only data that exists is what you typed into the registration form. Name, email, phone number. Photos during the ride are optional, and you pick what happens with them when you register.

It keeps growing

2026 sent $1,390 to Sauce Milwaukee. That is $20 more than the registrations came to. A rider donated an extra twenty.

Those are unique rider registrant counts. They are not verified ridership and this page isn't claiming they are.

The cheap ride is the one that keeps growing.

Facilitator, not host

I facilitate the money to charity and I facilitate the day. I don't skim either one.

Every genre of cycling has a dress code and a quiz. Sock height. Sunglass brand. E-bike or not. Do you even race bro? Have you done the ride you're supposed to have done. None of it is about riding a bike.

There's no dress code and there's no quiz. Show up on whatever you've got, wearing whatever you own. The checkpoints and the brat are provided. What you make of the day is yours.