Meetup.com alternatives

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.