Hacker News Reader

Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

Meetup majorly pissed me off. I've never been back.

I was going to the monthly IoT meetup up to about 2 years ago. The current maintainer was moving across the US, and wanted to transfer the group (nonprofit) to me. Seemed simple enough.

We go through the steps and then I get hit with the gotcha: pay $15 a month! Uhhh, $15 a month for what amounts to a email list and a webpage? I don't think so. Perhaps I could export the list and use my own platform? Nope! But they do offer great suggestions, like charge dues.

In the end, I "let" the group die.

View on HN

That's honestly not a bad price for the service they render. It's not just about emailing people, they can recommend your group to users, host a whole discussion forum, etc. Shame that you can't export the contacts, but I really don't think that's an unreasonable fee.

Isn't the fact that without meetup, the group died, proof that they provided some value? It's not like you couldn't send an email to the group saying "let's organize through this google groups mailing list instead", so I assume you needed the marketing features of meetup.

No, I wasn't able to do anything until I paid $15/month to use it.

I would have been happy in exporting the contact list and running it on my own mailserver and webserver. A single list of 200 people isn't hard. But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid.

The group wasn’t worth paying $15 one time to save? You realize this story makes you sound bad, not Meetup?

Read the last sentence, and please reconsider your comment.

"But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid."

In case you’re wondering why you’re wrong; you could have passed the group to someone else, you could have started a discussion of where to move the group, you could have done any number of things rather than just killing the group because you didn’t want to cough up $15/20.

I'm not sure you can actually just pay for one month...

wait. looks like you can - or at least I'm grandfathered in to some scenario where I can, but it's $19.99. $14.99 is for 6 month block prepayment.

The value is not the tech, its that new people who know of meetup.com can discover the group, and people who prefer an app with notifications/calendar integration over a mailing list will use it.

meetup.com is part of the "sales pitch" - sure.

But this is sheer lock-in. They play the game of a roach-motel. You data checks in, and it doesn't check out. I had initially no problem -IF- I could get the data. And further digging, that's just not true.

And in the end, they were doing 1 meeting a month, and 1 email stating that a meeting is happening. And there was a webpage with a paragraph blurp on it. So yes, even though I'm getting downvoted on my decision, I still stick with that it wasn't a good financial deal for $15/month.

ANd yes, it seems they're now at $20/month, payable in 6 month increments. Yipes. And yet he downvotes on my "bad decision" still come in.

You are being down voted because the you let community die to prove your point.

You could've found someone else or got people to contribute. But ensuring the survival of the community wasn't your priority.

Services cost money to run. Clearly this service delivered value to you and your group. You could have just asked everyone to donate $0.25+ at each meetup to keep it going. $15 is very reasonable, especially because IoT has many business/professional facets to it, so the group could be augmenting people's careers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com