It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally given up on Meetup.com as an organizer. I’ve been a member since 2013 and I’ve met some great people and learned a lot from the various groups I’ve been a part of. Meetup.com has been falling apart for years. Bugs, service degradations, dark UX patterns… and I’ve had enough. Here’s why I’m done:
- Way too expensive for what it offers. Especially for organizers of small groups.
- Your group is at the mercy of the platform. They can change the rules at any time, and they have some wild ones - like allowing anyone to take over your group if you stop paying and do whatever they want with it.
- Broken support. Report processing is a hassle and is ineffective, email templates/messaging are extremely broken.
- Ads, upsells, and interface traps everywhere. Both from meetup and some organizers on the platform.
- You can’t delete your own group. If there’s a way, I never found it and it wasnt obvious to me.
Leaving Meetup
When I decided to stop paying, I let our members know and launched a replacement website for the group. We’d already been using Discord as our main hub, so the transition was pretty smooth. My other groups on Meetup were inactive and I was fine with them lapsing.
I tried to shut down the Monterey Bay Tech Meetup group, but couldn’t find a way to actually delete it. Meetup would rather keep it alive in hopes that someone else steps in and picks up the tab. So I figured I’d just let it die naturally. I mean, who would want to pay $200/year for a small local tech group?
The Hostile Takeover
To my surprise, someone did want to pay for our little local tech group. At first I thought this was great! Maybe this person will help maintain a Meetup.com presence or even organize a few events and we can coordinate with our Discord group. I was very wrong.
Turns out they wanted to take the group in a completely different direction. And of course that would’ve been totally fine. More energy around the local tech scene is a good thing, and if he’s paying for the group, he can run it however he wants. Our community had already moved off Meetup and had our own independent website up.
But there were some problems:
- He didn’t consult with any of our organizers.
- He didn’t change the name or branding of the group - making it look like the same community under new management.
- He didn’t announce a leadership change. (Meetup.com apparently doesn’t notify members when someone new takes over.)
- He kept our photo albums from previous events! This was the worst because its my friends and family advertising his new group. People visiting the page would see photos and think we are affiliated.
Members started reaching out to me, confused. The group’s about section had been replaced with AI slop, our mission to educate and connect the local tech community gone and there was a new organizer nobody recognized.
I found the new organizer on LinkedIn. I actually remembered meeting him at one of our last meetups and asked if he could change the name, take down our branding and photos, and let members know it was a different group now. I suggested we coordinate together more in the future as well. I figured this was a simple, reasonable ask.
It was not. He told me I was entitled and that Meetup.com allows him to take the group over and he doesn’t have to do anything I ask. To his credit, he did eventually change the name. But he didn’t remove our photos, and he kicked me and my brother out of the group right after my ask so I have no idea if our event albums are still up there. (Reported to meetup.com but never heard from them.)
The Real Problem
He’s not wrong that Meetup lets him do all of this. That is very correct. Is it the right system for a platform supposedly all about community? I spent many hours of my free time building Monterey Bay Tech up to 80 local members ~ over a hundred outreach messages, event planning, and hosting. He shouldn’t be able to change the direction of the community (“Monterey Bay Startups” last time I checked - with a completely different mission from Monterey Bay Tech).
If Meetup built even basic safety features into group transfers, most of this could be avoided. Or make it easy to remove a group even! I tried to remove it after we migrated. If you sign up for a group, you sign up under its original vision and leadership. If any of that changes, members should be explicitly informed not just hit with spammy “Save this group!” messages.
I chose not to engage further. I let our Discord community know what happened, reached out to a few trusted members for advice, and shared the details in an announcement to our 70-member Discord. The priority was simple: make it clear we had no association with this new group, and be transparent about how this Meetup-sanctioned coup went down.
Building a Replacement
Well before any of this happened, I had already started building a new website for the group using our Discord server as a sort of CMS. Now we can post events to Discord and its posted to our own domain calendar. We lack the discoverablity of Meetup but I much perfer having control over our own website. I’ve written about the walled gardern problems of Discord as well but for now this is working out just fine for us.
Alternatives to Meetup.com
Ready to leave Meetup? Here are some options I looked into:
- Luma — Modern event platform with a clean UI and good community features.
- Guild — Has a dedicated Meetup migration path for moving your group over.
- Devrelish — Built specifically for developer communities.
Self-hosted / open source options:
- Cactoide — Open source event management platform.
- Mobilizon — Federated, privacy-focused alternative to Meetup from Framasoft.
I hope this helps anyone else who’s been frustrated with Meetup.com and is looking for a way out.