[CALUG] Meetup Alternatives?

[Chuck Frain]

Greetings All,

Many of you are aware of the state WeWork via recent news articles. If you
are not aware, they are the parent company of Meetup.com. Some changes in
their revenue stream are being seen, as in this post on Meetup's site
https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges?mpId=9038. A couple of the key
points from the post are here:
---
Your new subscription cost is only $2 per month, or $24 per year. That
means you'll be saving at least 80% annually on subscription fees. This
will also distribute costs more evenly between organizers and members.

Members will pay a $2 fee when they reserve a spot at your event.
---
As an organizer/user of Meetup, I have not been notified of any change with
the CAUG (or Splunk UG, which I also run under my Meetup account) that will
alter the subscription fee that I am currently paying. I don't know exactly
how Meetup is rolling this out or what this will mean for CALUG on Meetup
going forward.

My use of Meetup for the group is more an announcement for meetings rather
than getting an accurate RSVP list (that has yet to happen). So if the site
changes to a $2/month subscription for the group, I'll be putting some note
out not to RSVP if you don't want to pay the $2. This will hopefully be
enough to keep using Meetup. (The new subscription fee will be cheaper for
me going forward.)

If the above solution doesn't work for some reason, we'll need to find an
alternative to Meetup. I'm asking this in preparation in case the need
arises. Since Meetup has been the standard for so many years, I haven't
looked for any other platforms for meeting announcements/scheduling. I've
seen https://gettogether.community kicked around as an open source
alternative, and it will be considered. But is there any site(s) that the
members of this list can recommend? My two criteria are low cost for
hosting the group on the site and no cost for attendees to find and/or
register for the meeting.

Obviously, we'll continue announcing meetings on https://calug.org, but I
like having a shared platform that people can find us under general
searches rather than specifically finding our homepage.

-- 
Chuck Frain
GPG Key: B2420431
http://www.chuckfrain.net
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