I recently got an email from the Meetup.com that starting soon they are going to start charging fees for their service. Basically, the organizer of the group is going to get dinged $19/month to have a group, no matter what the size of the group is. I am the organizer of one group that has yet to have a successful get together even though there are a few members. There’s no way I can justify this cost, even if the group was active.
They’re doing it because they say they need to pay the bills(fine and understandable) and because they want to bring a more personable touch to organizers(fine, but not really needed IMO).
Here’s the part I don’t understand. According to their home page, right now they have 194,001 groups. Now they’re going to charge each group $19/month. I’m no math major, but with a calculator I can see that it would bring in $3,686,019/month or just over 44 million in a year (unless someone can find error in my calculations). Wow, they must have some pretty big bills!
Now, they have a grandfathered initiative in place saying that all current groups get a special rate of $9/month to give time to start charging fees to their group members, but from looking at the sign up sheet, that’s only going to be for one month.
To me, this sounds like certain death for Meetup.com, unless they come to their senses and fast.