23 ms·

Meetup.com alternatives

• pera 7y ago
  Here in Seattle the local Haskell meetup has just "migrated" to a mix of GitHub, Slack, and Google Groups. The reason was the price of Meetup.com ($20/month IIRC). I guess with this announcement many other groups will follow.
  • robjan 7y ago
    The problem is that how do new members discover this meetup? One of the really cool uses of Meetup I have found has been meeting new people and discovering new groups when moving to a new city. That discovery will disappear if everyone does their own thing.
    • darkarmani 7y ago
      I guess you advertise on Meetup.com and direct users to confirm on a different site. ;)
      • symlinkk 7y ago
        Which costs money and is exactly what everyone here is trying to avoid ;)
• emptybits 7y ago
  I fear this $2/attendee grab by Meetup will drive more people to Facebook for finding and planning and advertising events. Sadface. The understandable reason: Facebook is "free" and most of these better alternatives will be fragmented and mainstream unknown for a long time. Maybe one overarching event-search service could help the fragmentation problem, if it doesn't already exist.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    A per-person charge makes free/volunteer-organized events largely a non-starter. Any charge is a huge friction for people signing up for something. And unless it's a corporate sponsored event (and often even then), the $5 or so per person who actually ends up attending is significant. Probably people/companies will just depend on word of mouth and other channels to promote events and not depend on discovery through a specific service.
    • disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      Yup, if this goes through, we'll need to move all our meetups to email notifications, which will kill virality but given that no-one's going to pay for a meetup, is probably the better solution. I fucking hate WeWork (i was really worried when Meetup.com was acquired, and it appears that I was correct to be).
      • em-bee 7y ago
        one group i am in uses meetup for event announcements, but manages the event on their own website. it's really just to enable people to find them on meetup. meetup never sees any rsvps except some that rsvp by mistake. the only thing that virality helps with is event anouncements. finding all events in the same place, that is what makes meetup.com useful. the actual registration, and what not can be done anywhere else without causing to much friction.
        • dorfsmay 7y ago
          For smaller group, people updating attendance is really useful. I've cancelled meetings when not enough people could attend, or change venue if more than I initially anticipated acknowledged. This is not easy to do on a simple github.io style static site.
          • em-bee 7y ago
            oh, of course, but it doesn't have to happen on meetup.com, you can use any other service, from the many suggested in this discussion. of course having two sites is more complex than having it all-in-one. that was the whole benefit of meetup.com, but that benefit is now going away. one reaction is to reduce the dependency on meetup.com for groups. we need meetup.com to help get the word out, but we can use other tools for the actual group management.
  • francisofascii 7y ago
    Right, I really hate to admit it, but Facebook Events works pretty well for this. (Except for those without Facebook accounts.)
  • gowld 7y ago
    They already walking back their massive own-goal: https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges UPDATE October 15, 2019 1:30 pm ET This payment change is currently only a limited test for a small number of groups. Organizers of these select groups have the option to opt-out of this test. We will not be making any significant payment changes in the near term. We are committed to providing advance notice before any changes go into effect. We’ve also updated our FAQs below to address specific questions.
    • joe_the_user 7y ago
      It is nice to see that walked-back. Meetup is a resource for me. My guess that this change would complete end every single meetup I know of except for a few tech meetups - and these probably have alternatives and so wouldn't want it either. It seems like this also illustrates a complete misunderstanding by the meetup company of how the meetup app is used by their users/customers. Among other things, it's standard for people to find group, sign-up maybe once and then not sign-up further but continue to attend regularly - the group I run and the group I've previously run were like that. Meetup was/is about discovery. Expecting potential attendees to pay is absurd, regular attendees wouldn't feel obligated to register and so wouldn't pay. The confusion is complete.
      • theanalyst 7y ago
        Agree very much. I do attend a few non tech meetups, like movie meetups & hikes for eg. 2€ fee over the movie ticket rarely makes any sense. While proper tech style meetups may actually have organizer costs and such, a meetup where the whole point is meeting a bunch of people over a coffee or so with minimal organizational requirements doesn't make sense with the fee.
  • KajMagnus 7y ago
    Doesn't Meetup also "ban" itself from development countries, where $2 is a lot? In some places, $2 is like $26. — Or will Meetup charge less, based on local purchasing power?
• saboot 7y ago
  They are what?? $2 to just to say I'm attending an event? What a blatant shakedown. I should also become a corporate executive and steal a bunch of money if this is the level of thought the job requires.
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    I rarely even say I'm going unless there are a limited number of slots. I just show up. Hopefully they won't hide the location or ical download unless you pay the $2. That would be super shitty. This is a pretty big shakedown, and I don't see it ending well for Meetup. Sadly I agree with others that people will just moved to Facebook events :(
• degenerate 7y ago
  The list: https://emamo.com https://emamo.com https://kommunity.com https://kommunity.com https://joinmobilizon.org/en https://joinmobilizon.org/en https://cete.io https://cete.io (not yet launched?) https://eventy.io https://eventy.io (not yet launched) And the not-yet-build one by FreeCodeCamp: https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1183845054449930241 https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1183845054449930241 I've never heard of any of them. Opinions?
  • semiotagonal 7y ago
    I've never heard of them either. Meetup's demise will be a great opportunity for them, but I think a lot of them will be hobbled by having off-putting names.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • emredurukn 7y ago
    https://kommunity.com https://kommunity.com +1
  • sdiepend 7y ago
    To add to the list: https://gettogether.community/ https://gettogether.community/
  • opensports 7y ago
    https://opensports.net https://opensports.net :)
  • spartas 7y ago
    https://upcoming.org https://upcoming.org
    • elandrum 7y ago
      Developed stopped 2 years ago, despite the successful Kickstarter. :( https://github.com/upcoming/upcoming-www https://github.com/upcoming/upcoming-www
• Geeflow 7y ago
  I am wondering which of these alternatives has a similar audience like meetup.com. The audience is the real killer feature of meetup.com. I know of no other place where it is so easy to gather people. Just post a new event and people will notice and sign up. If you switch to a self-hosted solution you will have to find an audience through other channels. Which, for many Meetups, is quite the challenge. Remember "build it and they will come"? Same applies to events. "Set a date and they will come" - doesn't work that way unless you have an existing audience. Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. The old/existing pricing model seemed much smarter for everyone involved though. Organizers pay to get access to the audience. The audience pays nothing so that the audience, the real value, can be maximized. I hope that they won't destroy their value with this move...
  • degenerate 7y ago
    I have the opposite hope - I hope they do destroy their audience. Meetup.com hasn't had any real change or innovation in 10 years and it's time for some new players to shake up the space.
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    I think the risk to meetup.com is that the established meetups for groups like programmers or other career/professionals, the ones most likely to be important enough that people would pay $2 to attend, are also precisely the ones least in need of meetup's audience, since they are established. Also, charging $2/person means about $0.25 goes to Visa/Mastercard/PayPal/whoever does the payment processing, which is about 12.5% of your revenue skimmed off the top immediately. Charging the organizer more, and everyone else nothing, works better from that point of view even if the attendees chip in a few bucks each to compensate the organizer. Of all the business models one could imagine for this site, this seems like one of the less well thought out.
    • noneeeed 7y ago
      As an organiser, I'm genuinly stunned by how poorly thought out this model is. It fundamentally changes the relationship between me and my attendees. Suddenly they are paying to attend. The fact that I get non of that money is irrelevant to the person paying. That's a big psychological shift for free events like mine.
• ziftface 7y ago
  > I’m considering alternatives to Meetup.com for our meetup (should it still be called like that?) It should be. It's just an English word that predates the app, and is also used in the same setting/context as the use of the word within the meetup.com app, so I really hope there wouldn't be any trademark issues. Kind of a clever name, since it causes this confusion. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but the effect is interesting nonetheless.
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    If there are trademark issues, it's important for all of us to use it as a generic term immediately. I remember years ago some people organized a meetup using Twitter and called it a Tweet-up. Make sure that if Meetup ever goes to court over a trademark, there's enough evidence of generic usage out there that it's not defensible.
    • lone_haxx0r 7y ago
      A meetup with Twitter users sounds like a nightmare.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  I was thinking of an alternative that would allow anyone to publish a meeting with a standard data format (similar to recipes) and get picked up by a massive meeting indexer. But then I realized that event coordinators want a lot of control over RSVPs, sending messages to attendees, and the ability to collect money ahead of time to pre-pay for event supplies, etc. It really is annoying that you need a platform to handle this, but anything else might end up being too complicated.
  • leggomylibro 7y ago
    Is there a standard data format for recipes? That sounds interesting.
    • peterwwillis 7y ago
      It's a combination of this Google data format (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/recipe) and these WordPress plugins (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-recipe-maker/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-recipe-maker/, https://www.wpultimaterecipe.com/ https://www.wpultimaterecipe.com/). Every recipe blog you have ever seen is probably a combination of these two. I think there's one additional format, but I can't find it, because all the search results are just random shitty recipes.
    • nradov 7y ago
      Yes there is a standard data format for recipes. https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe
  • james_impliu 7y ago
    This would be cool - an RSS feed for meetings, sort of. You could even display it in your calendar app directly.
• jborichevskiy 7y ago
  Somewhat related note: as someone living in a major city I find it increasingly hard to discover relevant events happening soon/around me. Events I'm looking for span a range of interests, artists, bands, topics, hobbies, and causes - hence no one central location has a list of everything relevant to me. So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, individual web pages, AXS, Spotify Concerts, email newsletters, etc. Building another event organization platform isn't the solution - getting people, venues, and organizers onto it would be an expensive uphill battle, and would further fracture discovery. But a thought of a decentralized open-source aggregation of a bunch of feeds has been popping up in my mind lately. These could be sourced from all of the above mentioned sources and somewhat standardized into a format with name, description, price, location, time. From there, it should be a simple matter to add filtering, subscriptions, and even a recommendations engine. Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work? I haven't found anything yet.
  • pera 7y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking about this too: why not try to implement the "Who is hiring" model (i.e. a quasi-standarized text format) to events using social networks that allows to search by tags, such as Twitter and Mastodon.
  • jborichevskiy 7y ago
    Mobilizon looks like it's on the right track but my biggest concern is seeding it: the first version of any such aggregator should pull from existing repositories of events to allow discovery (while still forwarding actual registration to the original source site). I do like the fact that they have an event-publishing tool and the option to self-host. > Framasoft wants to create Mobilizon: free/libre software that will allow communities to create their own spaces to publish events, in order to better emancipate themselves from tech giants. We want to develop a digital common, that everyone can make their own, which respects privacy and activism by design. https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• nickjj 7y ago
  This is a good reminder of why I stopped going to most local tech meetups ran by meetup.com. Not because of the upcoming $2 fee, but because most of the time it's a 2 hour tech meetup where you spend 15 minutes mingling at the start, then 1 hour and 30 minutes listening to advertisements disguised as talks where you sit down and remain silent and then another 15 minutes mingling at the end. It feels so corporate and non-human. You get lured into a business' office with free food and drinks or stickers but then you have sign up forms, recruitment pitches and vendors giving talks about some technology but it's all focused on using their service around that tech. I miss the good old days of 2600 meetups in the late 1990s. Everyone meets in a public place. There's no set schedule other than where to go and when it starts. Then you actually meet up with people and talk about things that you have in common. You can leave in 30 seconds or stay all night. There's no commitment, agenda or sales pitches.
  • somehnguy 7y ago
    So this is the norm? I thought the only meetup.com thing I ever want to was just a bad one. Was advertised as a meetup on a very specific hobby I had recently taken up. When I got there it turned out to be more like 10 minutes of discussing that hobby and an hour of listening to a pitch about joining their hackerspace. It was pretty disappointing and I left with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
  • gyre007 7y ago
    On top of that large majority of the Meetups now seem to be run by companies trying to sell you stuff of recruitment companies trying to poach people
    • flurdy 7y ago
      I am ok with recruitment companies organising meetups. But mostly as it is in their interest to attract plenty of relevant people to the meetups over and over again. So it is a fine balance between good talks, and how much they will advertise their recruitment business. I can stand a little, but not too much. The ones I have been to have had a good balance. LJC in London is/was organised by one and seemed to have a good balance. But I have been a little annoyed at other companies creating rival meetups on the same topic in the same location. Especially if the original group is not oversubscribed. It just creates some confusion and people miss out on some meetups.
• cryptofits 7y ago
  tl;dr 1. cete - https://cete.io/ https://cete.io/ 2. emamo - https://emamo.com https://emamo.com 3. kommunity - https://kommunity.com https://kommunity.com 4. eventy - https://eventy.io/ https://eventy.io/ 5. "FreeCodeCamp is currently building an Open Source alternative to Meetup.com. They are looking for contributors, head to this Discord channel to get involved!" (In my opinion this article was made to feature this paragraph tbh) Anyhow I'm using meetup for a while Been extremely useful (especially when i lived abroad. It's a great way to meet some new friends with similar hobbies.
• opensports 7y ago
  If you're a recreational sports Meetup group you could try us at OpenSports (www.opensports.net). We only charge for paid events and don't have monthly fees. We've moved over hundreds of sports Meetup groups such as https://opensports.net/@cfrs https://opensports.net/@cfrs, https://opensports.net/@sonsofpitchesfc https://opensports.net/@sonsofpitchesfc, https://opensports.net/@philadelphiavolleyball/ https://opensports.net/@philadelphiavolleyball/. We offer the full gamut of Meetup features along with many others such as support for waivers, discounts, waitlists for paid events, etc. Transaction fees of $5% + $0.30 including Stripe credit card fees.
• starpilot 7y ago
  > The pricing change is currently only a limited test for select groups in a small number of locations. We will not be making any significant pricing changes in the near term. We are committed to providing advance notice before any changes go into effect.
  • phacks 7y ago
    OP here, I’ve updated the article to include that new information (wasn’t there earlier). Thanks!
• hamslamwich 7y ago
  Great list! (tweeted at you too!) We've been cranking away at a better group event/planning platform on https://guestboard.co https://guestboard.co for a while now (basically Slack meets Evite), but with this news, we're switching up our product roadmap to include recurring events much sooner. Would love the input from any/all. Possibly considering an interim solution of simply cloning an existing event and carrying over the guest list from previous? We'll also be prioritizing a "discovery" search tool to be able to find public events without needing to encounter an invite link from an organizer. And before you jump down my throat(!) a common feedback point has been improving the RSVP function to allow attendees to join without a full registration, and this new invite/onboarding flow will be releasing in a week or so :)
  • elandrum 7y ago
    I saw someone from your team post on r/Sasquatch awhile ago and I meant to check it out. Seems like a lot of great features... but yeah, discovery is really important.
    • hamslamwich 7y ago
      yeaa, that was us! For public events, discovery is supreme - totally agree. We started as a planning tool for groups to cut down on massive email chains and group texts (hence the festival/Sasquatch use case :) We've got more cooking, especially with this change of events (ha).
• ausjke 7y ago
  what about just the old way, google groups or email lists? otherwise, I still see certain business model shall work for meetup, how about when meetup charges a fee for its members then it shares some percentage of that fee with meetup? otherwise it will be free. and what about eventbrite.com
• Endy 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing this article. I was not aware of WeWork killing Meetup until now. I've already told three groups I'm in that I will be deleting my account by 10/30.
• derkoe 7y ago
  I guess this will be the end of meetup.com. Nobody will be willing to pay the $2 reservation fee and organizers will move their events somewhere else.
• koolba 7y ago
  I think it's insane that Meetup thinks they can get attendees to pay $2 per event when a lot of those same people only show up at events to grab a free slice of pizza. I suppose it's still economical if you plan on eating more than two slices but I doubt it'll work out for them.
• chrisa 7y ago
  I co-organize a React meetup, and seeing the price change update last night made me so... upset and confused - that I decided to build an alternative. My plan is to charge organizers (like meetup does today) to cover costs - but never to charge members to attend free events. I've been looking for a solid project to spend time on, and this just became it. I put up a landing page this morning, and I've already started coding: https://meetingplace.io/ https://meetingplace.io/
  • starpilot 7y ago
    There are many other Meetup alternatives being started or in use, included some not listed in OP article. This is not good. There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass, and cross-pollination across communities that made Meetup.com effective. I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.
    • chrisa 7y ago
      Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? One of the things I liked about meetup was that many (most?) groups were hosted on it, but I think what this has shown is that meetup had a kind of monopoly in that way (which wasn't good!)
      • ativzzz 7y ago
        > Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? Create an API that allows any site to be a front-end for meetups, you just store the data. Not sure how willing other sites would be to use this though.
      • iso-8859-1 7y ago
        > any ideas about how to fix it? Mobilizon supports federation. https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
      • starpilot 7y ago
• olegp 7y ago
  Another alternative aimed at technical meetups is https://meetabit.com https://meetabit.com which we built at Toughbyte. I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc. It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members. I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at oleg@toughbyte.com and I'll add it. PS. Nicolas has added us to the linked post since I made this comment, many thanks for super quick responses!
  • olegp 7y ago
    I also posted this as a Show HN and there's a discussion in the comments there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21261397
  • axman6 7y ago
    So, uh, how do we go about adding new locations? Specifically, Canberra, Australia would be great =)
    • olegp 7y ago
      You have to ask me :) Canberra added.
      • justinclift 7y ago
        Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth in Australia too please. :)
• iso-8859-1 7y ago
  https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-alternatives https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-alternati...
• aabbcc1241 7y ago
  There are more than enough alternatives. One could just organize meet up in Facebook group or telegram group as well. You just need a place that many people sharing the similar interests gather to spread the meet up time and location.
• arielm 7y ago
  The technical aspect of creating an event list an way to manage RSVPs isn’t hard to compete with but it’s meetup’s community that made it a destination for new organizers. That, is hard to compete with.
• JoshMnem 7y ago
  I've organized about 500 events through that site. Charging attendees is a terrible idea that will kill Meetup.com and damage communities around the world in the process.
• timwaagh 7y ago
  i always thought facebooks greatest strength was their events. i never attended anything through meetup so far. it should at the very least be mentioned as an alternative. not everybody likes sharing data with the Zuck, and that's legitimate, but it's arguably the market leader. and it's free.
• _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  Reddit or HN are actually ideal platforms for meetups. All you need is list of links for tech meetups. Either a subreddit like /r/nyc_meetups or just a weekly "What's Going On" post where people can post about events. We're already on the network. I don't see why we need a separate website just for the physical act of coming together.
• rShergold 7y ago
  Our meet up has been running for a decade. This has only been possible by making attendees aware that they own the event. Over the years people have moved on and others have stepped in to keep the thing alive. By effectively charging at the door our meet up becomes a product people buy not a community they take part in. If we allow that to happen it won't survive another decade.
• zeristor 7y ago
  Isn’t the network effect the main problem in trying to replace Meet-up? Perhaps Meet-ups for various niche interests is an option. But it’d be great to have some sites with better usability.
• jabvigWe 7y ago
  A free software alternative: https://gettogether.community/ https://gettogether.community/ All the ones on the page look like more proprietary junk.
  • suyash 7y ago
    This looks the best! I'm considering moving my community here now.
• sjdb77 7y ago
  I feel like every YC batch must get 100 applications for a Meetup alternative. I wonder why nothing has sticked or worked. I find every aspect of Meetup to be very 2010 and hard to use.
• intrasight 7y ago
  So many posts say "Meetup.com sucks but they have 'the community'" I don't understand this sentiment. Your town or city is the community - not some random web site. And your town, if it's like mine, has one ore more newspapers that maintain community events calendars. And Google manages events now with Google search. I google "beer event pittsburgh" and Google shows me the results. What exactly is the value-add of meetup.com? An honest question. I attend all kinds of events and I almost never come across meetup.com.
  • donretag 7y ago
    The value add is discovery. Since many meet already be on meetup.com, they then discover another meetup which also might suit them. All these alternatives might have the functionality that meetup does, but none of them provide exposure. Everyone loves to hate on ads nowadays. They do not want to be tracked, etc, but I would love to see an ad-supported version of Meetup. It is too expensive at $15 a month for many small groups.
    • notyourday 7y ago
      I keep being amazed at this attitude. "I do not want to be tracked" + "$15/mo is too expensive for many small groups". Big Mac in Philadelphia is $3.99. 15/mo is 4 Big Macs. That's expensive for a small group in the US?!
      • donretag 7y ago
        $15 a month is $180 a year. Imagine you want to have some small hyper local group such as Memorial Park Dog Owners. Obviously, members will not pay for such a group, but the organizer is on the hook for almost $200 a year. Hard to create community with such prices. Active groups of over 250 members? The pricing starts getting better.
        • notyourday 7y ago
          > Imagine you want to have some small hyper local group such as Memorial Park Dog Owners. Obviously, members will not pay for such a group, but the organizer is on the hook for almost $200 a year. It is 4 big macs a month. It is 3 Starbucks coffees a months. It is 3 cans of soda bought as singe units in a super market a month. If a group cannot afford it, then maybe stop pretending that the group needs RSVPs or other services. Use a paper and a pen and pin an announcement on the bulletin board of a park.
• timotitas 7y ago
  This is disappointing. I've been using meetup to join mountain bike group rides in my area, they are scarce and not many people show up, but it's been a good experience. Adding a 2$ fee just to confirm assistance will completely make them go extinct. Any good alternatives for non tech activities (sports/social)? I'm already in some facebook/whatsapp groups but there's not much going on. The alternatives listed on the post seem to have either no user base or catered towards tech/corp events
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• sitkack 7y ago
  I hate meetup so. damn. much! They have now become the shty equivalent of the yellow pages, needed but detested at the same time. The rents they seek with the desert of functionality conspires to boil my blood. I will dance in the street when they are replaced by anything, anything at all. We need a community run service, not a for profit company.
• scjody 7y ago
  A decentralized approach that doesn't depend on one corporate service remaining profitable (or one nonprofit remaining viable) would be great. The Zot protocol https://zotlabs.org/page/zotlabs/home https://zotlabs.org/page/zotlabs/home can do distributed event invitations but the leading implementation Hubzilla has horrendous UX and an unpalatable (PHP + JQuery) tech stack. I'd love to have time to reimplement it in a more developer and user friendly way - focusing on events only to start with could make this a reasonable task.
• adrianmonk 7y ago
  People skipping the RSVP and just showing up "unofficially" is already a problem with Meetup. This is going to create the exact wrong incentive for that. Next up: movie theaters that charge $2 to anyone who doesn't talk during a movie, gyms that charge $2 if you put dumbbells back on the rack instead leaving them strewn around the floor, traffic cops giving tickets for properly using your turn signal, ...
  • ryanlol 7y ago
    Ah, so it’s kind of like taxes which you only have to pay if you snitch on yourself?
  • joe_the_user 7y ago
    The thing is, as a meetup organizer, I prefer someone who shows up but doesn't sign-up to someone who doesn't show up at all. At least for ongoing attendees and I host weekly and monthly "hobby" events when once someone shows up once, they don't have much incentive to sign-up for future meetup events and that's fine for everyone. I still don't mind paying for meetup because it's a way for new people to find the event. But in that situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd but in just about any situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd. Meetup already has an option to have attendees to pay the organizer for attending. They might consider that for the events where this option isn't used, it is realistically because this could not work, you can't get money from people for that stuff.
    • adrianmonk 7y ago
      Depending on the event, showing up without doing an RSVP can be worse than not coming. I think generally it depends on whether the RSVP is being relied on for something, for example an accurate headcount for a restaurant reservation. For a regular meetup, it's not nearly as important to RSVP. Maybe even overly formal. I go to a weekly thing that's organized through Meetup, and I still RSVP every time, though, for a few reasons. One is it puts it on my calendar automatically. Two is it helps newbies feel comfortable that somebody is going and they won't be the only one there if they show up.
    • 7y ago
• bdukic 7y ago
  I remember thinking that things like these will happen with Meetup.com more and more ever since they got acquired by WeWork -- and I've personally heard many organizers around me say that Meetup.com is getting worse and worse, but there's really not much to be done with the discovery dimension as they have the grand majority of the users. I've since been working on an alternative: https://blinkmeet.com https://blinkmeet.com, but that didn't really account for much for various reasons. I really do think that it's only a matter of time before Meetup.com goes down, this way or another.
• bdr 7y ago
  I'm building Mixily.com as a general event-organizing tool. Like an alternative to FB events, but with better styling, features, and privacy policy. It launched in July and works great for one-off events. For recurring events, we have some features in private beta, like pre-set guest lists and a forum. Email me at andrew@mixily.com if you want to try it out!
  • jboynyc 7y ago
    This looks very nice -- like a long-overdue replacement for crush3r.com, which I was very fond of ca. 2011. Keep it up!
    • bdr 7y ago
      Thank you!
• giongto35 7y ago
  Every business needs money. Why we are so bitter every time a business charging for service fees? the society is so familiar with free stuff and ads.
  • mrkurt 7y ago
    Meetup was profitable long before Wework acquired it. People aren't bitter about service fees, they're bitter that Meetup is adding friction for _attendees_ when it's already incredibly difficult to get people there.
  • teslafanboi 7y ago
    the people who sit here and scream OMG WHY DOES GOOGLE SELL ADS JUST LET ME PAY are the same ones that aren't willing to pay for anything and feel entitled to everything on the internet
  • AlexandrB 7y ago
    While I sympathize with this line of thinking, it's a question of value. Meetup is already charging organizers, while providing what is a pretty bare-bones app and mass email service. It's also a change that fundamentally changes the dynamic and incentives of the communities already built up on Meetup. It's like if your local dry cleaner changed their pricing from $5/item to $1/square foot of fabric.
• muricula 7y ago
  https://calagator.org/ https://calagator.org/ is a calendar for tech meetups and events happening in Portland, OR. I'm still curious if there's something similar for Seattle.
  • faster 7y ago
    Calagator is open source. You can run your own if you want. https://github.com/calagator/calagator https://github.com/calagator/calagator
• lovetocode 7y ago
  Adios Meetup.com you had a good run but this may be the end of you.
• jl2718 7y ago
  This feels like a trend: investors forcing startups to find a real business model. Expect more of this.
• whsheet 7y ago
  OT: Am I the only one who thinks that most meetups are crap? The idea of meeting like-minded people is tempting but the reality is always different: Crowded places, stuffy air, weak talks, lame sponsors, 1-to-n presentations, no real interaction, stale drinks out of thin plastic cups, odd devs
  • biztos 7y ago
    I've only ever been to a few, but I found at lest two really nice: a Perl meetup in SF that wasn't really social at all but had great tech talks; and a Perl dinner (at a conference) in Vienna that had Very Odd Devs who were also super fun to talk to. People working at small regional banks can be way more eccentric than you'd guess! It seems like all the problems you list are easy to solve, except odd devs, and I'm not sure that's a problem. Admittedly, I'm too busy/lazy/unmotivated to solve them myself, but I can't believe there aren't some fun ones out there.
  • thearn4 7y ago
    It's been a random mix for me. The non-tech meetups (hiking, board games, etc.) that I've attended were often better experiences on average than tech-related ones, which were often a bit too focused on business interests.
  • cableshaft 7y ago
    I mostly don't go to tech meetups, or any meetups where the only reason it exists is for networking. Those usually aren't that fulfilling. Sometimes if it's an interesting topic it'll get me, but usually not. I mainly use meetup for board game nights, hikes, hack nights, game jams, movies, dinners, crafting, karaoke, and exploring new hobbies (there's a photography one I just joined recently). None of those are usually in crowded places, stuffy air, have any sponsors or presentations, and have plenty of interaction.
• notelonmusk 7y ago
  Recent AskHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21253620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21253620
• gowld 7y ago
  Interesting timing on the Meetup $2/attendee fee, coming right after parent company WeWork collapsed.
• sambalbadjak 7y ago
  I use the Dutch Erbij app to organize meetups myself - https://erbij.app https://erbij.app However, for browsing I still use meetup.com
• navs 7y ago
  A lot of the alternatives posted look like they'd be a good fit for my group. However, I feel the discoverability isn't there. The local UX meetup will likely choose one platform. The local frontend developers meetup will choose another. Reliable, consistent members will follow the group regardless of the platform but I've always liked how easy it is for a local developer to just stumble across my group. The best part about running these meetups are the random devs that decide to come to one event and stick around.
  • morningseagulls 7y ago
    >However, I feel the discoverability isn't there. The local UX meetup will likely choose one platform. The local frontend developers meetup will choose another. I think discoverability can be had via Google events search, Facebook, Eventbrite, etc. Yes, there will be fragmentation, but I know people have found out about Meetup events via Eventbrite, and people have mentioned these on HN as well. So fragmentation is status quo anyway. >I've always liked how easy it is for a local developer to just stumble across my group. You could do what some organizers have been doing: advertise your events on multiple channels.
• tw1010 7y ago
  Isn't eventbrite the most popular one of these alternatives?
• robbiemitchell 7y ago
  If a meetup is not even worth $2 to attend, is it really worth an hour+ of your personal time?
  • joe_the_user 7y ago
    How could someone pay even $2 for a meetup they've never attended? How would they know that someone would even show up? Especially if the organizer is now only paying $2/month to keep it going. And once someone has attended a meetup, they're exchanged contact info with the organizer and so there's reason they'd have to pay meetup to attend the event.
    • robbiemitchell 7y ago
      It doesn't work that way in practice. People use Meetup because it handles everything from reservations to ticketing to email announcements to messages boards and things in between. A mailing list is not a replacement.
  • morningseagulls 7y ago
    >If a meetup is not even worth $2 to attend, is it really worth an hour+ of your personal time? Considering it's mostly organizers who've been the most vocal about it, this is a pretty strange question.
  • Santoshpanda 7y ago
    I believe each group has unique power due to its efforts in building a group, growing, and nurturing members. With this pricing, Meetup is closing the door to free network effect and not letting the host benefit from own efforts. You should check https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
• willart4food 7y ago
  WOW! This is interesting. I belong to 2 large-ish meetups that in the past few months have been migrating to a Facebook page. I have run meetups of all kinds, from tech to social; and I am now running 3 meetups and IMO this is not only a disaster for meetup.com but offers an incredible opportunity to take the cherry for: * Facebook * EventBrite * a new startup taking over this space Unless meetup.com rever its course, this is going to go down as the worst decision ever. I am sorry if We spend a lot of money on it, stil.... 2 wrong don't make one right.
  • greggman2 7y ago
    I'm sure I'm in a small minority of the general public (though maybe not HN?) but I don't want Facebook to know about my meetup/event interests. It's not so much that I hate being tracked by Facebook though I do. For me it's more about just not wanting event stuff mixed in with my friends and family feed. They're separate things to me. I could also be I might not want to share what meetups I'm going to with friends and family.
  • Santoshpanda 7y ago
    Meetup is heading Ning way => https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-founded-ning-cuts-staff-free-service/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-founded-ning-cuts-s... I run the Explara Community Software, which powers smaller to the largest community like https://hub.tie.org/ https://hub.tie.org/ Explara Community Software has super advantages to group owners who don't need Meetup network effect as such. More on https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
• Dowwie 7y ago
  Considering the value I get from Meetup, I think that paying a $2 attendee fee is reasonable. I appreciate the services that meetup provides. This seems like a very fair deal. Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get.
  • morningseagulls 7y ago
    >Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get. Perhaps you can't relate because "the people here who are screaming bloody murder" are mostly not attendees: they're organizers. And they've been doing a lot of giving ever since Meetup started charging organizers.
• poof_he_is_gone 7y ago
  As someone who organizes several Meetup groups, I really hate this. I am going to continue to promote on meetup, but move the registration to our wordpress site to get around this.
• Muuuchem 7y ago
  Weird, a lot of meetups that I see have fees set up and say that you get into the meetup free if instead you register on Meet More You www.meetmoreyou.com So they are trying to get people on the platform by putting up a paywall on meetup so that nobody that is tech literate would actually sign up on meetup. I am surprised that this site hasn't been mentioned once. It seems pretty decent.
• schlagetown 7y ago
  Very interested to see all these Meetup competitors developing! Seems there are kind of two main buckets here: simple tools focused on organize events, and platforms that are more a two-sided market where event discovery / matching interests and attendees is a factor as well. For hosting small dinners and learning events, I'm looking mostly for the former, and one tool that's quite new but looks very promising is Mixily: https://www.mixily.com https://www.mixily.com It's a nice streamlined tool, prioritizes privacy, and has a number of solid features like messaging and event reminders, date polling (like doodle), comments wall, variety of privacy settings. Also some other very cool things in beta, like contact lists, and ticketed / donation-based events.
• davidjnelson 7y ago
  These are interesting. Premise is a bit perplexing. Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance. Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...
  • morningseagulls 7y ago
    >Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance. One could counter that these people are the ones who've spoilt the market for the rest of us. And really, it's not attendees who're complaining, it's organizers who believe in keeping their events free for attendees.
    • davidjnelson 7y ago
      Interesting. When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world. Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard. I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
      • morningseagulls 7y ago
        >When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world. >So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved. Under the new model, organizers will be paying $2/mo for every attendee that RSVPs. For meetups attracting a large audience, this easily comes to >$200/mo, which is a 1000% increase. >I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. >Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard. Many large meetups are run by volunteers who have to seek out companies to sponsor the space, which you've already acknowledged is hard to do. $20/mo is affordable for them and can be done without seeking out additional sponsorship; $200++/mo isn't. Ultimately, I think organizers will self-select: those who can afford Meetup.com's model, or who're already charging attendees, will stay; those who can't afford the new charges and don't believe in charging attendees will leave. This dissatisfaction isn't an overnight thing anyway, and the new pricing policy will be a push factor for some to do their own thing.
• iskander 7y ago
  I've been using Mixily (http://www.mixily.com http://www.mixily.com) for events with friends and would happily use it to schedule individual meetup events. It's missing a main community landing page though.
• blackflame 7y ago
  I was always on the fence about meetup but now they made my mind up for me.
• diminoten 7y ago
  What I'm missing in a service like meetup is the creation of events. Got 50 people in an area who are all fans of something? See if they're interested in getting together.
• edisonjoao 7y ago
  http://foxie.cool http://foxie.cool check us out!!
• merqurio 7y ago
  I would happily work on implementing a Meetup.com alternative based on ActivityPub and push for a federation of instances, much like Mastodon. Each community has very different needs, but a federated network would help making the multi-community reality we experience much easier.
  • merqurio 7y ago
    Mobilizing[1] seems like it's already implemented using ActivityPub ! https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/ https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/
  • Santoshpanda 7y ago
    Have a look at https://hub.tie.org https://hub.tie.org in 60+ cities powered by Explara Community. You will love it. Map your domain, bring multiple groups under one network. Why switch from Meetup to Explara Community=> https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
• mrfusion 7y ago
  A feature I really want is to just show me every possible event in a given radius happening today. I figure a miss a lot just searching for my interests. I’d rather just see everything nearby.
• taude 7y ago
  So, since there could be a fee now, will we not officially be the product for whatever behind-the-scenes data mining they're doing with our PII? I'd probably actually be OK paying a couple bucks/meetup for this.
• 3dprintscanner 7y ago
  As a small side project I've been working on a tool to find interesting events in London that also have some food or drink provided, I found that there was sometimes too much choice and not an easy way to pick the best upcoming events. https://onlythebestevents.com https://onlythebestevents.com
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bizdevsg 7y ago
  For those on Asia - Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, you could consider http://peatix.com http://peatix.com
• jameszol 7y ago
  I used to run a local web marketing meetup in East Idaho. It grew to about 260 people! We used meetup.com and I loved that... Then I discovered that Facebook Groups and setting up events there worked just as well for us. RSVPs, reminders, notifications, etc all built in. I since retired that meetup due to moving out of the State for a short time, but if I were to start again I would probably still use Facebook.
• brianbreslin 7y ago
  There is some irony that everyone is rushing to build their own competitors because Meetup decided to charge $2. Let that sink in. You're effectively limiting yourself to a LTV of a customer of less than $2 per attendee of their events now. You'll end up in the same vicious cycle of needing to charge for something if you want your platform to survive. Meetup was making money before they took VC funds and eventually sold to Wework. Their old model of charging $15+ to organizers seemed to work. I paid it for years because of the extra traffic and not wanting my events to be hijacked. They never let you own your own audience though.
  • erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Meetup has taken at least 18M of funding. That means sustainability is not enough, they have no choice but to bet the farm on being a $100M company. A competitor can take no money, and they can re-use much of Meetup’s product-market-fit research. The economics are totally different. From a technical standpoint there’s no reason you couldn’t run a “meetup-lite” for a couple hundred bucks a month. It’s just web forms. Without VCs to impress you could get by with a lot less razzle-dazzle.
    • amayne 7y ago
      Meetup is owned by WeWork. So it’s even more problematic than that.
  • khaledtaha 7y ago
    You’re assuming there’s only one business model.
  • zelly 7y ago
    And people wonder why every company is based on collecting data now. What else can they do? No one wants to pay for digital goods and services.
    • mprev 7y ago
      People already pay for Meetup.com. As an organiser I think I'm paying around $180 a year and that limits me to three meet-up groups under my ownership. From what I've seen, no one is complaining about paying for Meetup's services. It's the unfairness of the charge that is the problem. Why is it unfair? For one, meetup attrition is often in excess of 50%. So, 100 people RSVP, you pay $200 for that one event (more than the previous annual fee), and maybe 50 people show up. It's also out of scale with what similar services charge. Another problem is that it makes running a free/community meet-up unpredictable financially. I'm happy to stump up $180 a year if it means Meetup.com makes it easier to grow the audience for a group I run as a hobby. I'm not happy for that to become, potentially, 12 times that. People are demonstrably willing to pay for Meetup.com. They're not willing to open themselves to unpredictable and, frankly, wildly higher fees just because Meetup's parent company is going through a hard time.
• paul7986 7y ago
  Hiking groups used to plentiful in the mid-Atlantic region on meeetup. Though it's been pretty dead in that regard for a year or two. Also similarly with tech meetups. Like the New York Tech meetup was or used to be a huge event that helped launch a good amount of well known startups. Where did that community go to (had the pleasure demoing there once with other fellow unknown startups at the time like Tumblr & Vimeo)?
• greggman2 7y ago
  Meetup has a spam issue for lack of a better way to describe it. One problem is there are people that post the same event multiple times. I documented one where they posted the same event 22 times. I'm not sure how they even do that. One way they do it is just to post the same event 5 minutes apart so looking at the list of things to do the same event appears over and over. All of these are the same event: https://i.imgur.com/o4fAxjA.png https://i.imgur.com/o4fAxjA.png and there are plenty more of the same event further down the page. But it's not just different times. https://imgur.com/C1gMleC https://imgur.com/C1gMleC I've seen one event which is clearly fake. It's always full at 101 attendees from the moment it is posted. I'm not even sure what the point is except maybe to harvest names from a waiting list? Like maybe the idea was if the meetup looks popular people will try to join? The event is clearly a marketing event (not about marketing itself, but an event designed to sell attendees on a service) Another issue is just bars effectively listing that they're open. I don't know how to solve that. It's one thing if it's really a "meetup" like "model rocket talk at Bar ABC" but some listings just come across as "we're open" The other big issue with Meetup.com is email spam. They have like 40 different things they can send you email for PER meetup and attending any meetup signs you up for all 40 things. I get that I might want to know about meetups I've been to before so maybe that's okay? But... They also end up signing you up to categories of similar meetups and so if you ever attended a new meetup you'll get added back to the category. Which I also get. And it might be fine except at literally 65% of the email I get daily is from meetup.com at this point. So it feels like something is clearly not working. The finally issue I've seen is fraud? I've seen a meetup where the user kept posting things like 250 people have signed up! Hurry now! And then the next day 350 people have signed up for our party!!! The final count they claimed was 600 people but the venue only legally allowed 200 people. I brought it up the venue only held 200 people (listed on their website) and the guy just asked if I was attending his awesome event with 600 people.
• kabacha 7y ago
  $2 per atendee - what a brilliant way to kill the platform. No one is going to pay the fee and just migrate to facebook events and a million of other alternatives. This is hilarious.
• sytelus 7y ago
  It is surprising they couldn’t think of any business model where they don’t need to kill the chicken laying eggs. People participating there already gave away their contacts, location, interest. How about just ads with sponsors with matching interests? How about rev share where organizers support sponsors? How about recommending interesting audience to sponsored events? May be users can opt out of ad supported model if they pay subscription?
• rexreed 7y ago
  Meetup.com is a truly horrible site and corporation. They hold your meetup group hostage if you're an organizer. What do I mean by that? Since you have no contact information for any of your attendees, you can't reach out to them to move them to another platform. You can't shut down your Meetup either. Instead, you can simply resign as an organizer. This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else. It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members and also allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in. In this way, they hold your group hostage, not allowing you to leave, and thus committing you forever for their fees, even if you never run another event again.
  • morningseagulls 7y ago
    >Since you have no contact information for any of your attendees, you can't reach out to them to move them to another platform. >It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members Meetup has a spam problem, as greggman2 has pointed out.[0] Your proposal would make that worse. >This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else. Believe it or not, some people think this is a feature. I know of groups where the original organizer(s) had to leave the locality for various reasons, but designated successor(s) to keep the group going. >allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in. Yes, that'd be good to have. >They hold your meetup group hostage if you're an organizer. Yes, all these contributed to lock-in, but some of these were features that some people wanted in the past, or at least that's my impression from using the site for many years. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21266422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21266422
• k_bx 7y ago
  I've developed myself a minimal alternative at https://meetup.events https://meetup.events when I was not allowed to run my Elm Study Group at meetup.com. It doesn't even have means to create events yet, but if you're interested in developing it further (Haskell + Elm), or contribute a design, or you are a potential user and need something – please contact me (via creating an issue on GitLab) and I'm happy to actually feature-complete the thing as needed by actual users. UPDATE: actually, let me add the means to add/edit events there today...
  • k_bx 7y ago
    Adding/editing meetups and events added.
• sershe 7y ago
  So I am a member of a number of boardgame groups with meetups that each happen at the same place either regularly or on a different date each month. When they do happen, I just go there, and never RSVP anymore because nobody cares. In fact, one of the weekly meetups would regularly have 2-5 people RSVP but 15-25 show up. What prevents everyone without a headcount limit from doing more of that? :)
• jarofgreen 7y ago
  A plea to anyone working on a meetup.com alternative - make sure good Open Data Feeds are baked into to whatever you do. There is already a industry standard in ical/ics - this should be your first feed. Another reason to add this one - regular attendees of a group who are keen can import this straight into their personal calendars and get details of all upcoming events. After that, I'm less opinionated on what format you should use. https://schema.org/Event https://schema.org/Event will help your SEO so that's a plus. Do others have comments on what open data format to use? As someone who has worked on an event aggregator for years, getting good information out of event organisers is very difficult. If they are taking the time to update your site with info, making it so it can be passed on is really helpful. (If they want of course, privacy controls, but in my experience almost all events want more publicity)
• akimaru 7y ago
  I'm a meetup organizer as well (over 3.5K members and over 500 attendees to our mostly free events) so this is hitting us hard. My team is working on a virtual event spaces app called Morphus, https://www.morphus.ai https://www.morphus.ai. We aim to create a 2.0 Meetup that helps anyone to spin up a virtual space and allow mobile, desktop, and VR users to join events. As an organizer myself I'll be focusing on helping communities better manage their members and also create a more interactive and fun environment for everyone. Any feedback appreciated :) https://www.morphus.ai https://www.morphus.ai
  • akimaru 7y ago
    By the way we aggregate meetups from different sources and map them in the 3D world inside the app. We've been working on it for the past 2 years and are now finally fundraising. If you can connect us with interested parties to create futuristic next generation event platform do let me know, very curious. (I know it's self promotion but I'm sick of meetup at this point)
  • akimaru 7y ago
    Oh and it's free because we suck at monetizing XD
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• gherkin1 7y ago
  Linkedin grabs the chance and debuts their alternative, currently free https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/15/linkedin-gets-physical-debuts-new-events-hub-for-people-to-plan-in-person-networking-events/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/15/linkedin-gets-physical-deb...
• kins 7y ago
  I was banned from meetup today for posting this link to one of my meetup.com groups.
• hojung1996 7y ago
  Oh man... I actually saw Scott Heiferman speak at a Community 2.0 event yesterday and he seemed heartbroken about everything that's happening. We made a pretty simple mobile app for social events called gathr (App Store and Play Store). Feel free to try it and see if it's what you're looking for. Ping me here: hojung@gathraround.com or request a Circle in app if you think it'll be useful. www gathraround.com
  • edisonjoao 7y ago
    how was Homecooked: Social Dining?
  • edisonjoao 7y ago
    before I built : http://foxie.cool http://foxie.cool Gathr was the name we had haha
• arcalinea 7y ago
  Adding another alternative to the list - have been working on https://happening.net https://happening.net, a site to make event hosting easier. It will be gradually getting more features to support Meetup-like functionality.
• zaiste 7y ago
  Yet another alternative, focused on technical events is Eventil [1]. It's born out of my experiences as a organizer of PolyConf [2] and RuPy [3] conferences. It's a side-project built to scratch my own itch. There is still plenty to be improved with bugs here and there. Several large conferences use this tool successfully to improve their workflow. There is group management, ticketing without fees, call for proposals management, mailings, invoicing, sponsorship management et more. We charge 49/199 USD on per-event basis (no monthly fee, no % off ticket sales) depending on the event size. Free events are free and non-profit are 50% off. [1]: https://eventil.com/ https://eventil.com/ [2]: https://polyconf.com/ https://polyconf.com/ [3]: http://13.rupy.eu/ http://13.rupy.eu/
• mikece 7y ago
  There are already several alternatives to meetup.com; what we need is a standard like ActivityPub could be leveraged to allow for federation, discovery, and searching for user groups by interest, topic, location, and affinity (people in my user groups are also members of these groups...)?
• psteinweber 7y ago
  The mentioned $2 fee was just a test. Check out the offical statement from meetup.com (linked in the posted article): https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges >We are not, I repeat not, in the process of making a massive payment change for our existing customers. The confusion was triggered by a limited test to a few hundred groups in two U.S. states. The payment options shared on social media will only apply to organizers who are part of this test. We apologize that the language on the page caused alarm and confusion. We would never make such a change without giving our customers advance notice.