Paying the Meetup Tithe

The online meeting organization site, Meetup, is charging $9 / month from now on. The Meetup I most regularly attend, The Vancouver Blogger Meetup, is organized by Darren Barefoot, and he's suggesting we ditch Meetup and go with some other service. He says:

I'm not willing to pay CAN $130/year for what amounts to a fancy e-mail list. Has anyone tried Upcoming.org? I figured I'd migrate the list over there, after maybe taking a quick poll as to the future direction of the group.

I have no connection to Meetup, but I think it provides more than a mailing list, namely:
* a flow of new people who find the events geographically and topically
* member data so you know who you're meeting, tied to attendance
* picture galleries
* an easy way to track many meetings you attend per month, instead of each group needing its own system
* automatic email reminders
* suggestions and voting on venues
* an ongoing discussion board tied to the service
* and, dare I hope, more cool features as the service starts earning money

Upcoming.org, Google Groups, and Darren's blog are not adequate substitutes for the full Meetup service, in my opinion.

I hate to buck the trend of "I want my favorite services to be free," but given that we regularly get more than 9 people at a Meetup event anyway, why not just ask everyone to chip in $1 and stick with the working system we have? We pay $8 for beer and tax and tip, and least, so what's the big problem?

Given that we've held at least 5 Meetups already, you can even mentally figure you're paying $0.18 per person for the first six Meetups. That's not a bad deal.

Or we could even ask The Whip to pay the $9 fee -- I mean, they're getting a good chunk of revenue out of the deal...

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