I've got about 1200 members for my local CSS meetup and get about 50 RSVPs and 30 actual shows. I'll be paying far too much if I keep this up with the new payment plan.
A couple of things: 1. At no point in this change did meetup suggest they were offering new things for subscribers that would justify a 3x cost increase. 2. Asking our members to start paying would now incur so many logistical costs on us: we'd now have to spend a bunch of time discussing with our members why they had to pay for something that was previously free. We'd also have to create email copy describing the change to them. We'd also have to deal with customer service issues where people thought we were charging them rather than meetup and they'd want a refund if they didn't show up. We'd also have to explain how charging met or didn't met our core values. 3. $2 isn't enough in the part of the world we're in to "prevent people from not showing due to cost". That's less than a cup of coffee so it's not much of a sunk cost to not show up. We could of course charge much more than $2 but that's a radical shift for something that was previously free. 4. Do we now charge or sponsors on an "on demand" basis based on how many members that show up? Or do we overcharge every sponsors based on the fear of how many people will show up? What used to be a $X per event cost has now added more unknowns that make logistics harder.
#1 is a small expense but #2 is a radical shift in the values and relationship between our group and our members. The logistical costs of changing how we interact with our members are MUCH higher than the added subscription fees per year. These kind of changes make almost no sense to us as we can't explain how meetup needs a 3x cost increase to deliver the same product it did yesterday.
In addition, the communications about this were terrible. A total of 0 times did they explain why this was happening and what our increased costs would bring us. They also tried to frame this as "lower subscription fees" but the total cost of the platform went up.
This degraded all trust we had in the platform and kicked off a search for alternatives immediately.
FYI, I told the Meetup focus group the same thing.