Meetup Payment Changes

I am an organizer of a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for > 6 years (https://www.meetup.com/Web-Engineering-Duesseldorf/). We run the event every month, with 50 up to 90 people. Indeed, our no-show rate is something between 40% and 50%. This is heavy, but we know it and calculate it in.

We run the complete meetup non-profit. Never put a euro in. Never got a euro out — everything based on sponsors. Our motivation is to learn, share knowledge, and have fun together. And we want to make it accessible for everyone to learn about web engineering.

Switching to the new cost model will reduce the no-show rate, but makes it 1000% times less accessible. In my opinion, Meetup.com is creating a higher barrier to enter a community. If we, the organizers, would pay for the attendees, we would pay 100$ up to 180$ every month. We have no interest to afford this.

Furthermore, what I don't get: Meetup is charging a lot of money for thousands of groups. The web platform is stale for>2 years. The last major feature was a facelift in design. But no feature that helps the organizers or users. The iOS app had some releases, but the app is far from a great UX. Flaky everywhere. I ask myself: What is this company doing? Where does all the money go?

Friends who run similar groups are thinking already to move away. Many people from the US think the same.

I think this tweet sums it up: https://twitter.com/obfuscurity/status/1183831607821656068

While there is definite truth that paying even $1 to RSVP for an event cuts RSVP no-shows significantly, I don't see this flying when members of meetups are accustomed to paying exactly ZERO to attend events.

If there isn't an open source alternative to meetup.com now would be the time to create one, and if you want to create The Winner then have your meetup replacement able to federate with other (using ActivityPub?) to replace the "members of this group also join these groups" network effect that makes meetup.com so popular.

I help run a discussion group that meets twice a month and gets about 30 people each time. We have no problem with no-shows (partly because some people turn up without RSVPing!).

Charging attendees a fee will keep people away in droves, not because they can't afford it, but because who can be bothered to go through a payment flow just to go to a meetup?

If we choose the "cover members’ fees" option, that's an extra $120 a month in fees. Which makes the "you'll be saving at least 80% annually on subscription fees" particularly insulting.

Probably what we'll do is keep the Meetup page, and just tell people not to bother RSVPing. We can always run a Google form for that if numbers are a problem.

Thanks to all the people posting alternative / open source solutions!

What is often missed, though, is that Meetup provides more than the software. The real killer feature of Meetup is the audience.

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...

Buried at the bottom of their FAQ:

"This change won't affect a number of groups such as Pro Networks and Non-Profits."

Assuming this means that most of the small community-driven groups will be unaffected by the change.

Still, this is clearly a communication fail, as well as a cardinal sin for usability:

By charging users to RSVP yes, they are literally putting a tax directly on a key engagement activity for the whole site.

I also agree with the comment that Meetup has done a poor job of improving itself. The "design facelift" they did 2 years ago negatively affected the growth of our group, and they haven't added much value since then.

A better approach would be to take 15% of ticket sales done through the site in a way that could improve engagement and revenue.

Meetup may have a well-deserved PR hailstorm for this.

I run multiple local meetups.

This is a crazy change, and definitely bad.

The overwhelming majority of members I've spoken to say they are going to stop RSVP'ing, which would basically kill the platform.

I know with WeWork circling the drain, Meetup is desperate for additional revenue, but this seems like a bad move.

I'm organizing Flutter meetups in Munich, Germany, for almost a year now (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...

I've started to collect the open-source alternatives here: https://github.com/coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-alternati...

Making members of groups pay may have an unintended side effect on RSVPs: organizers have payment info attached to their accts. However, as a user, even if I’d be willing to pay, entering my CC data will make me much less likely to go through.

Exciting, i miss the time when Meetup wasn't so dominant and you had small no show rates there.

The new platforms that come up will bring new people in, always great!

A friend of mine posted https://kommunity.com/

So, October 1, 2020? We use "years" here. That will be $2.