
Meetup.com alternatives - phacks
https://phacks.dev/meetup-com-alternatives
======
jborichevskiy
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.

~~~
Cshelton
I'm actually building something right now.

I'm building it because it is a problem I've faced among my friends and well..
the "millennial" generation to begin with. I'm building it first to be used
among myself and friends.

I don't want to say too much because to me the solution seems so obvious and
I'd like to have something out there and tried on a small scale first, but...
the key is not to focus on events directly, but people.

If anyone would like to know more, my twitter is on my profile, DM me there!

Right now it is just me. I'm also currently torn on focusing on the consumer
social space (not social network) or the business space. Both seem pretty
promising targets but vastly different approaches to marketing.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Let's talk, i'm building one too.

But with some different use-cases probably.

Nico at Sapico dot me

I have a marketing plan ready which is dublicateable for every city.

Belgium and Netherlands is reserved for me ;)

~~~
com2kid
I'm working on a similar problem,
[https://www.thawd.net](https://www.thawd.net)

Thawd focuses on getting groups of people out to events, not just one at a
time. The idea is you tell the app what you want to do, and Thawd will find
other people interested in the same thing and use personality matching to
create groups of people who can hang out and have a good time together.

Hoping to get submitted to app stores by EOW.

(and yes, turns out getting users is easy, getting events is the hard part!)

~~~
nprateem
I built a site like that focussed around adhoc events for people of similar
interests. But when I looked at the business model I saw a few difficulties:

* If it was effective users would probably stop using it and switch directly to something like whatsapp

* Judging by meetup, a few people actually create events and greater percentage attend. This seems common across many platforms - 5-10% of users are actually producers, but a much larger are "passive" consumers. My site focussed on adhoc events and I wasn't sure enough users would create them

* The real issue was needing to promote it hyperlocally, meaning each new location needed marketing. A site focussed around groups can build a history of events for each group which aids discoverability/SEO. But a site that's all about adhoc events doesn't have that benefit in the same way if members are more amorphous (my site was all about creating e.g. an event to play tennis that afternoon, so depended on locality).

I couldn't solve these issues and abandoned it. Good luck though.

~~~
com2kid
Originally I was algorithmically generating events using Google's wait time
information, but I switched models to having local businesses post up events.
If it takes off I'll let people post their own events as well, but that has
some serious safety concerns in comparison to events at public venues.

------
olegp
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!

~~~
axman6
So, uh, how do we go about adding new locations? Specifically, Canberra,
Australia would be great =)

~~~
olegp
You have to ask me :) Canberra added.

~~~
daurnimator
Please add Melbourne! I have a couple of meetups that I would like to move off
meetup.com ASAP.

~~~
olegp
Added

------
degenerate
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?

~~~
jabvigWe
[https://gettogether.community/](https://gettogether.community/) free
software, works well.

~~~
aedocw
I'm really surprised to see GetTogether is not better know. I think it's one
of the best alternatives available.

------
emptybits
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
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
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).

~~~
hdpq
I would have been OK with We buying Meetup if they offered their space for
meetups ... but alas ... they did literally nothing and likely we'll see that
the product was killed in the end.

~~~
bboreham
Meetup.com does let organisers book WeWork spaces. Free.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Yeah, they kept hassling me for months trying to get me to use 4-8 people
spaces for our meetups which have 60-80 people.

------
adrianmonk
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, ...

~~~
joe_the_user
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
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.

------
nickjj
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.

~~~
olegp
I've started a few meetups and a format that works well is the following:

\- have one company as the sponsor, providing venue, food and one _technical_
talk - this ensures that the organizers don't need to deal with money which is
a big admin headache \- have around 3 talks total, but keep them short, to
around 20 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A \- start the event 15-30 mins late to
allow for people to show up late and giving those that turned up early the
chance to talk to each other \- make sure you end quite early, leaving time
for people to mingle afterwards

We also built our own Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit
([https://meetabit.com](https://meetabit.com), see my other comment to this
post) and to promote it wrote a few blog posts which go into more detail,
which you can find here:
[https://blog.toughbyte.com/tagged/meetup](https://blog.toughbyte.com/tagged/meetup)

~~~
reustle
Why do you limit Meetabit to specific locations? Give us a free form search
area and let me start a group anywhere :D

~~~
olegp
We soft launched it in a few cities only and it was easier to implement that
way. I've added Tokyo for you now though. If there are any others you'd like
me to add, post them in a comment here please.

~~~
franciscop
"I've added Tokyo"

But for Tokyo, these are the results:

> Events

> No events in your city

> Communities

> No communities in your city

> Sponsors

> No sponsors in your city

Or do you mean that now we can create events, communities and sponsors?

~~~
olegp
That's right, you can now start adding them.

~~~
franciscop
BTW, as a non-english native having "sign in" and "sign up" is a bit
confusing. It took me a couple of seconds of thinking to know which one to
click.

I do front-end, and didn't realize of this until now that I was on the
receiving end.

~~~
olegp
Good point, didn't think about this myself either. Will take this into account
when we update that part of the flow next.

------
Geeflow
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...

~~~
rossdavidh
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
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.

------
brianbreslin
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.

~~~
avinium
I co-organize a handful of Meetup groups, and we already pay a non-negligible
annual fee. There's definitely money to be made.

Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per
attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that.

It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring"
tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" offer (2-3x fee
hike) more "reasonable".

~~~
brianbreslin
So we started our meetup group before meetup.com existed and rely more on
eventbrite. If I had been running our events through meetup only and on this
fee structure, I'd be paying $400+/month vs the $15 I was ok with paying
before to offer a secondary listing of my event. I think the ceiling of fees
people are willing to pay is closer to the $15 though.

------
saboot
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
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 :(

------
koolba
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.

------
ziftface
> 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
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
A meetup with Twitter users sounds like a nightmare.

------
hamslamwich
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
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
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).

------
whsheet
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

~~~
thearn4
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.

------
bdr
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
This looks very nice -- like a long-overdue replacement for crush3r.com, which
I was very fond of ca. 2011. Keep it up!

~~~
bdr
Thank you!

------
schlagetown
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.

------
muricula
[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
Calagator is open source. You can run your own if you want.

[https://github.com/calagator/calagator](https://github.com/calagator/calagator)

------
intrasight
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
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.

~~~
intrasight
I still don't get the "discovery" thing. I hear about events either via word
of mouth or from posts on Facebook. Or if I'm looking for an event I Google.
How would I "discover" events on meetup.com or another event service?

~~~
morningseagulls
>How would I "discover" events on meetup.com or another event service?

Meetup has a search engine that allows you to find events by date, location,
or subject matter. So I could

\- look up events near me for this coming week.

\- look up events within a certain radius from a location.

\- look up events based on my interests.

> if I'm looking for an event I Google.

That's the fallback. I think what Meetup provided was a single site that
people visit to find local events that fit their interests, which also allowed
community-building.

------
peterwwillis
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
Is there a standard data format for recipes? That sounds interesting.

~~~
nradov
Yes there is a standard data format for recipes.

[https://schema.org/Recipe](https://schema.org/Recipe)

------
iso-8859-1
[https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-
alternati...](https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-alternatives)

------
sitkack
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.

------
opensports
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.

------
rexreed
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
>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)

------
akimaru
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
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)

------
bdukic
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.

------
Endy
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.

------
willart4food
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.

~~~
Santoshpanda
Meetup is heading Ning way => [https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-
founded-ning-cuts-s...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-founded-ning-
cuts-staff-free-service/)

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)

------
sytelus
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?

------
sershe
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? :)

------
derkoe
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.

------
zaiste
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/)

------
greggman2
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.

------
jarofgreen
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)

------
arcalinea
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.

------
merqurio
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
Mobilizing[1] seems like it's already implemented using ActivityPub !

[https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/](https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/)

------
starpilot
> 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
OP here, I’ve updated the article to include that new information (wasn’t
there earlier). Thanks!

------
k_bx
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
Adding/editing meetups and events added.

------
timotitas
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

------
kabacha
$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.

------
navs
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
>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.

------
chrisa
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
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
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!)

~~~
starpilot
My idea would be to clone Meetup.com as much as possible and aggressively
pitch it as a "Meetup alternative." Use similar color scheme and branding, and
have a Meetup.com migration tool to import existing groups and user accounts.
The changeover has to be as smooth as possible, there are many non-technical
Meetup organizers. It needs to stand out from the other Meetup clones. People
don't know where to go.

Really though I don't think Meetup is going to die. WeWork is selling it,
there's no way the market would just let this huge captive audience of active
users implode. Maybe FB wil buy it.

------
JoshMnem
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.

------
zeristor
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.

------
paul7986
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)?

------
notelonmusk
Recent AskHN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21253620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21253620)

------
hojung1996
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
before I built : [http://foxie.cool](http://foxie.cool) Gathr was the name we
had haha

------
jameszol
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.

------
gherkin1
Linkedin grabs the chance and debuts their alternative, currently free
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/15/linkedin-gets-physical-
deb...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/15/linkedin-gets-physical-debuts-new-
events-hub-for-people-to-plan-in-person-networking-events/)

------
davidjnelson
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
>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
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
>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.

~~~
Santoshpanda
One important factor to add here is the free network effect which influenced
hosts to use Meetup. With this pricing, Meetup is closing the door to free
network effect and not letting the host benefit from own efforts too.

I believe Meetup is heading Ning way =>
[https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-founded-ning-
cuts-s...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-founded-ning-cuts-staff-
free-service/) Andreessen-founded Ning cuts staff, free service.

You should check [https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-
explara](https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara)

------
3dprintscanner
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)

------
rShergold
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.

------
mikece
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...)?

------
jl2718
This feels like a trend: investors forcing startups to find a real business
model. Expect more of this.

------
iskander
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.

------
robbiemitchell
If a meetup is not even worth $2 to attend, is it really worth an hour+ of
your personal time?

~~~
joe_the_user
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
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.

------
aabbcc1241
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.

------
taude
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.

------
pera
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
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
I guess you advertise on Meetup.com and direct users to confirm on a different
site. ;)

~~~
symlinkk
Which costs money and is exactly what everyone here is trying to avoid ;)

------
psteinweber
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.

------
arielm
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.

------
diminoten
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.

------
sjdb77
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.

------
poof_he_is_gone
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.

------
mrfusion
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.

------
sambalbadjak
I use the Dutch Erbij app to organize meetups myself -
[https://erbij.app](https://erbij.app)

However, for browsing I still use meetup.com

------
giongto35
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
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.

------
timwaagh
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.

------
gowld
Interesting timing on the Meetup $2/attendee fee, coming right after parent
company WeWork collapsed.

------
edisonjoao
[http://foxie.cool](http://foxie.cool) check us out!!

------
_hardwaregeek
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.

------
ausjke
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

------
kins
I was banned from meetup today for posting this link to one of my meetup.com
groups.

------
lovetocode
Adios Meetup.com you had a good run but this may be the end of you.

------
tw1010
Isn't eventbrite the most popular one of these alternatives?

------
cryptofits
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.

------
jabvigWe
A free software alternative:

[https://gettogether.community/](https://gettogether.community/)

All the ones on the page look like more proprietary junk.

~~~
suyash
This looks the best! I'm considering moving my community here now.

------
bizdevsg
For those on Asia - Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, you could
consider [http://peatix.com](http://peatix.com)

------
blackflame
I was always on the fence about meetup but now they made my mind up for me.

------
Muuuchem
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.

------
Dowwie
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
>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.

------
scjody
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.

