Meetup has been dying for a while. I have been part of few meetups and almost all of them died due to low participation. I doubt meetup is doing well as a company and this is probably their last shot at trying to stay afloat. I would jump ship.

Meetup was just acquired in January - no doubt their new owners are seeing how they can make their investment profitable.

Give Luma a try. Free tier has fairly generous for now and the UI for community & event management isn't ancient. It also offers an embed, so you can chuck it on your site.

Used to use meetup for a few years before going with Luma this year. Sure discoverability is a bit less if Meetup is the go-to in your area, but you can still get a core group of attendees in other ways and then grow the group from there.

Were you grandfathered in at a lower rate or something? I was paying $89.99 for 6 months back in 2018. Which was a completely ridiculous rate for a few meetups a year with a dozen or so people.

Cancelled meetup shortly thereafter and migrated the regulars to a Facebook group.

Then COVID basically killed the group anyway.

I'm surprised your price started that low.

Back in 2019 they were charging me 89.94 USD per 6 months. In 2023 it went up to 108.99 USD.

I'm expecting to be charged 178.99 USD at the next 6 month renewal, from their web page, https://www.meetup.com/blog/new-organizer-pricing-key-improv...

From my point of view it's a big increase, but nowhere near triple.

Hi.

I'd made a small app for events and such a long time ago.

Would anyone be interested to try it if I dusted off that project and re-launched it?

I would be happy to share it on Show HN in the next few days.

There is a newer meetup replacement called Heylo, which makes its money from you charging for your meetups. They get a percentage. It seems much more sustainable than Meetup. I'm going to start my next Meetup on it. I'm so done with Meetup.

I did a quick search. I think the price went up a while ago.

I would gladly pay a buck or two a month per group to attend. Have you asked your members?

There was a post here recently on replacements for meetup.com

What’s an alternative to meetup? Facebook?

Wow. I was going to start kicking an old gaming Meetup back to life, but looks like I'm going to invest my sanity elsewhere.

Likewise, I've only used Meetup for non-profits/community organizing, and frankly I can get most of the same features from a Wordpress/Jekyll website, a couple of plug-ins, and maybe Mastodon.

Is there not any alternative viable for this? With the same features and cheaper?