I'm organizing Flutter meetups in Munich, Germany, for almost a year now (https://www.meetup.com/Flutter-Munich https://www.meetup.com/Flutter-Munich). I was so

I'm organizing Flutter meetups in Munich, Germany, for almost a year now (https://www.meetup.com/Flutter-Munich https://www.meetup.com/Flutter-Munich). I was so excited about building the largest Flutter community in Germany. We have plenty of upcoming events already in the pipeline. I didn't even think about their organizers' fee, I just paid it and considered it a small investment in my career and a fun experiment. The events were always free for the attendees. I'd organize the event for free, the hosting companies would provide dinner and free drinks. The speakers talk for free and my co-organizers help me out for free. No money changes hands ever. The hosting companies were never pushy about their team or product. My biggest fear with corporate moves like this isn't that people wouldn't be able to afford the two dollars. It's less than a coffee in a cheap bakery. My fear is that users just stop using meetup because of the "micropayments UX", then management decides one day that they shut down in 2 weeks. It's not the two dollars. It's about potential attendees having to go through the annoying payment process (and based on the current meetup.com user experience and feature set on all platforms, I bet they won't get it right). And no, I'm not going to pay 200 dollars/month from my pocket. Attendees will stop visiting their website soon enough, anyway: I already received emails from other meetup groups that they are shutting down. It's a spiral: fewer groups want to deal with this, fewer users will register, fewer events will get organized, the users who didn't mind paying originally will have less events to choose from, they stop visiting the site and so on... I'm not interested in running a self-hosted open-source clone. I don't want to handle user data, run servers (even if it's just firing up a container). I'd also miss out completely on the network effect. Nobody would find my clone website. The no-show rate was never an issue and I organized small study jams with 20 attendees to tech meetups with 80-100 people. You just count the number of people that registered and that actually showed up, and use this number for future events. You've got 100 registrations, you'll have between 50-70 people showing up. Very easy to plan with it. I also find it dishonest saying that it's going to actually save us money. Yeah, because there will not be a group to lead, so yeah...