Comment by stavros

That’d not a meetup.com problem but a „in person meetup“ in general issue.

All the groups I attended and the one I organized basically never restarted after the pandemic.

meetup didnt pause subscriptions during pandemic so we canceled all meetups and then never started them again.

> They want $10 a month just to check who will be attending.

Looks like this has been rolled out only recently. That's frustrating to say the least, you want to know who is active and the age/profile of attendees before you'd attend certain events. Or maybe there is someone you want to avoid.

Also yet another app looking a $10 per month subscription for basic features. Outrageous.

After the most recent price hike ($16 to almost $30/mo for the "basic" organizer plan) I decided to quit Meetup as the host of two groups after more than a decade. It's not just the money, since you were asking about pain points:

* Notifications I get on iOS are pretty much the opposite of how I set them up; I ask for relevant notifications about people RSVP-ing and commenting on my events, instead I get notifications about their own AI / crypto virtual events. * When I do get notifications about a new comment in the 'event chat', I tap the notification, but the app just lands me on the event main screen. When I navigate to event chat (which is surprisingly hard to find) there will be an unread symbol but more often than not the actual comment is nowhere to be seen. * Meaningless functionality being added (start an event with AI!) while pain points such as the above, and the core organizer experience overall, haven't seen meaningful fixes or improvements in years. * No way to slice / analyze member data. * Related to the above, you can download the member list, which gets you a file with an .xls extension but in reality is a broken csv file. * Increased focus on having group members pay, which is hard to manage and also very hard to get any metrics on (who has paid, when, how much?)

I could go on.

Overall, from an organizer perspective, Meetup is a buggy, stagnant and increasingly expensive platform that becomes a poorer value for money with every change they make. The only reason I've stuck with it for as long as I did is that it's really the only way for me to have people organically find my group without significant effort on my part. (I am in the U.S.)

I always set up the same event, at the same place, etc, yet it's hard to just say "use all the values from the previous one". It doesn't have many ways to communicate with members, so I've set up a Discord server instead, which is fine. The UI is a bit confusing if you need to do anything other than set up an event. Most crucially of all, members complain that emails don't reach them, which is terrible, because then they don't know to come to the event.

A push notification system would be nice, but...

I did, it can only email 500 people on the free tier (my meet-up has hundreds of people subscribed but only ~20 come to each event) and the paid tier costs $700/yr, which is way too much for a free meet-up.