Meetup

Over the past 8 years I have had a few meetup accounts to have meditation classes and other similar stuff. In about 2017 everything changed. I think it was when they were bought out by WeWork. Since then the prices have all gone up and the visibility of the group has gone down. First they highly suggested we charge, and we tried it and lost about 70% of our followers, we then did a purge of participants that never showed up and got it way down to less than 100 (we once had over 1,000 members!) There is no real way to market or advertise or cross mention in any other social media platform. I am disbanding the whole thing this month and will likely go to other social media... I can pay half of what I pay to Meetup and get a far greater reach. I hate that the format was re-tooled to be better for hand held devices and the interface is terrible compared to pre 2017... Change is good, but not all change...

Horrible horrible, no service support whatsoever, basic service not even done
Ceo should be embarrassed with such a poor product that it has become, please some new tech person make a better app to use!

This is the age of social media and Meetup is the new way to supposedly "meet" people. Although it is easy to sign up, some groups are excessively exclusive to join. Some group leaders also suffer from mental problems or drama and will block/remove you from their group for unexplained reasons. Some groups are just plain phony where you pay to attend an information seminar and the hosts are just charlatans who use it as their way of making a living.
Meetup has not helped me find real friends, yet there have been some good free events worth attending. Your Mileage Will Vary.

Since changing the interface, it is very difficult to figure out where the meetup will be and what time the event is. Meetup no longer has any technical support whatsoever. If you call their number, it gives you an email address for urgent billing issues only. They will ignore any emails that are not specifically "urgent billing" issues. For all other support, they direct you to their help page, which is basically no help at all, and I have never found a single answer to any question I have had.
Was an organizer for over 3 years, but have finally decided that and email/SMS list is far superior to what meetup.com com provides, especially considering how expensive the site is.

I've been an organizer on meetup for 4 years now and now have over 1300 members - i've worked hard to build up this group. Since the changes last month - I am so very frustrated along with many other organizers as the new system is barely usable. Its a terrible upgrade - i'm hoping that another company/developer will come up with a new system and roll out something that is user friendly and scalable as well. Shame on meetup for doing this - they will go down!

While we pay around 36.00 Canadian dollars per month for the service it has many technical issues and very poor to little tech support.

Many members have told us they often can't open the app on mobile devices. After having reported this issue many time's, not even a reply to our last reports. Members tend to get frustrated and even leave meetup completely. It affects our ability to retain existing members or obtain new ones. Our group has events everyday and unresolved tech issues over the past year frustrate members who often don't bother with meetup anymore.

After almost 4 years of paying for this service and over 1.400 events held, time to look for something else. They don't even reply these days to tech support tickets created.

In my Personal opinion and experience, don't waste your time building anything with this platform. Waste of your time and resources.

In short, meetup.com is like a prison where you cant interact with other prisoners. You can pay for the one hour break i. E. event where most of the interesting people never show up!
I joined meetup as I am a very shy person. There were few groups for singles and I decided to interact with a few before I would show up at a overpriced boring event with strangers. I never go to an event alone and reason for interaction with another member was to make sure the company will be worth it. After I began to receive messages back from other interested members, meetup.com deleted my account stating as spam messages! Is it really spam if members are talking to each other or basic networking? In this age and day meetup.com might be the only site not allowing online messages. Truly bizarre & complete waste of time.

"You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave"... I registered a group on MeetUp to run some informal evening meetings with our community but it never really got off the ground. It's expensive... there's no "free" option and if you cancel their subscription, they'll email everyone in the group and tell them you've stopped paying and ask them to take over and pay for the group. You can't just close the group. Avoid at all costs.

I took over a group that was started in 2013. We meet for volleyball and keep an average of 500 members in the Raleigh, NC area. What we get from meetup.com is an app for a couple hundred dollars a year that does just about what Facebook does for free. Honestly, I have been too lazy to move the group... until now.
They are raising their rates, which is not the big deal as much as I tried contacting customer service to learn more about the increase. Meetup customer service is TERRIBLE, and pretty much nonexistent.
So, if you have a couple hundred dollars to burn for nothing more than a posting site, it is stable. We will most likely be moving to Facebook.

I've been using meetup for almost 5 years and the newest updates are just awful. I cannot find where to schedule a meetup on the iOS apps and it is very hard to find on their web interface.

In addition, the old web interface allowed one to schedule a recurring meetup with a specified end date, e.g. meet every Wednesday for 3 months. I cannot find that functionality on then new web interface.

Finally, meetup has removed or effectively buried any means of communicating with them directly about these issues.

We have a 1,000 person group and are looking for an alternative.

It's ok for finding interest groups but the individual customers receive little support if an organiser turns against them for any reason and there's no appeal process allowed. I have had contact with the membership team in NYC over being unfairly banned from but group I'd helped create but meet up are only interested in urging you to set up new groups instead in that area! I appreciate that organisers are busy people but without the individual members, there's no meet up!