Meetup just announced they'll start charging group members $2 per RSVP. Lol yeah that's not going to fly. Organizations who host free events for their communities, which includes a huge number of developer meetups, are not just going to start charging members money out of nowhere.
If you want the full story, Quincy Larson from FreeCodeCamp does a great job of telling it here: WeWork is Desperately Squeezing Cash Out of Meetup.com by Taxing 225,000 Communities.
But there is more to gain than lose here. Meetup organizers represent an awesome community in their own right. Organizers have been stepping up in a big way, announcing plans to build replacements or shedding light on viable alternatives. Here's a few I've come across so far.
Chapter
FreeCodeCamp is going to build Chapter, which is a way to "let every organization host their own Meetup.com in a box." Chapter is open source and already has over 600 stars on GitHub despite being a day old. ⭐📈
freeCodeCamp
/
chapter
A self-hosted event management tool for nonprofits
Welcome to Chapter
After several years of being dissatisfied with existing group event tools (Meetup, Facebook events) we decided to build our own.
This will be a self-hosted Docker container deployed to the cloud with a one-click and then configured by the owner. No coding required.
Your organization can host an instance of Chapter under a sub-domain of your website, such as chapter.sierraclub.org or chapter.womenwhocode.org.
All of an organization's user data will remain under their control.
Our Vision statement provides more details on the reasons for Chapter.
Terminology
To better communicate and more easily build an API and UI, the current contributors have decided on a collection of terminology to clarify discussions surrounding the Chapter project:
| Term | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| instance | a web server deployment of the Chapter application, managed by an organization. | a Docker container running on a web host |
| organization | a non-profit with |
Chapter even has a data model already! 🤓
meetingplace.io
Egghead.io instructor Chris Achard is building a Meetup.com replacement called meetingplace.io.
Chris seems very open to input about how this should look, so if you've spent sleepless nights dreaming of what a great event-hosting experience should look like (I know I have!) then this is your chance to make those dreams a reality.
Active projects
This GitHub repo by coderbyheart contains a solid table of open source meetup alternatives, including a field for maturity.
coderbyheart
/
open-source-meetup-alternatives
Open-Source Alternatives to Meetup
Open-Source Alternatives to Meetup
ℹ️ Pull-requests are welcome!
| Name | Source | Maturity¹ | Tech² | License | ActivityPub³ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agorakit | GitHub | mature | PHP | GPLv3 | |
| attendize | GitHub | inactive | PHP | Attribution Assurance | |
| Calendar.social | gitea | inactive | Python | AGPLv3 | |
| Chapter by freeCodeCamp | GitHub | inactive | JavaScript | BSD 3-Clause | |
| Communecter | GitHub | inactive | PHP | Apache 2.0 | |
| Create Third Places | GitHub | new | Java | GPLv3 | |
| Epicyon | GitLab | new | Python | AGPLv3 | ✅ |
| eventoL | GitHub | inactive | Python | GPLv3 | |
| Events Made Easy | GitHub | mature | PHP | GPLv2.0 | |
| Friendica | GitHub | mature | PHP | AGPLv3 | |
| Gancio | Framagit | mature | JavaScript | AGPLv3 | ✅ |
| Gathio | GitHub | mature | JavaScript | GPLv3 | |
| GetTogether | GitHub | inactive | Python | BSD 2-Clause | |
| Gospeak | GitHub | inactive | Scala | Apache 2.0 | |
| Hi.Events | GitHub | mature | PHP | AGPLv3 | |
| Hubzilla | Framagit | mature | PHP | MIT | |
| Human Connection | GitHub | inactive | JavaScript | MIT | |
| joind.in | GitHub | inactive | PHP | BSD 3-Clause | |
| Lauti | Codeberg | mature | Golang | AGPLv3 | |
| Meetdown | GitHub | inactive | Structr | Apache 2.0 | |
| Meetup Alternative | GitHub | inactive | JavaScript | unlicensed | |
| Mobilizon | Framagit | mature | Elixir | AGPLv3 | ✅ |
| on_ruby | GitHub | mature | Ruby | (extended) Beer-ware | |
| Open Event |
Some notables on the list:
- Mobilizon crowdfunded €58k and has released a beta written in Elixir
- on_ruby is fairly mature and powers usergroups like the Ruby User Group Berlin
- Agorakit is written in PHP and supports multiple groups, calendars, notifications, and shared files
For more options, including some that are SaaS, check out this great article by Nicolas Goutay.
Last resorts
You could always use Eventbrite. Their share priced dropped 39% yesterday but it could easily recover if they would just replace this impossible-to-use 90's-era rich text editor with something better 😛
Update: community suggestions 👯♀️
Here on dev and on twitter I got some additional suggestions of alternatives to include. Here they are:
Final word to the wise
Don't make unpredictable and unreasonable pricing changes if a non-trivial portion of your users are developers, designers, and product builders. They might just get motivated enough to build you out of their stack. 😘