← Journal

Meetup alternatives in 2026: what people actually use instead

By Matthew Firth, founder of NexSpark Friends · Sep 7, 2026 · 9 min read

Meetup didn't get replaced by one app. It got replaced by five different habits, and which one fits you depends on what you actually needed Meetup for.

Nothing single replaced Meetup — it fragmented. People who hosted or found public events moved to Eventbrite, Luma, or Partiful. People who wanted an ongoing group chat moved to Discord, Facebook Groups, or a Meetup-style organizer tool like Heylo. People who wanted to meet others in person without organizing anything moved to a curated format like Timeleft or a swipe-based one like Bumble For Friends (now BFF), and plenty gave up on the public-event model entirely and built or joined a small standing group instead. The exodus tracks two changes on Meetup's own side: organizer fees that have risen more than once (Meetup's Standard plan runs $29.99/month, $99.99 per 6 months, or $174.99/year as of this writing, after Meetup raised the organizer fee from roughly $24 to $45 a month back in June 2024, a jump Morning Brew reported on in March 2026) and two changes of ownership — WeWork to an AlleyCorp-led investor group in 2020, then to Bending Spoons in January 2024.

Is Meetup dead? Does anyone still use it?

No — Meetup is still running, just smaller-feeling and pricier to organize on than the version a lot of people remember. It reached roughly 50 million members at its pandemic-era peak, and Morning Brew reported in March 2026 that new registrations were up 20% year over year under current owner Bending Spoons, the Italian firm known for buying and reviving legacy apps (it also owns Evernote). So people do still use it, mostly for one specific job: finding a public, searchable local group with a real event calendar, in categories like hiking, tech, and hobby clubs where Meetup still has the deepest existing inventory of any single site.

What changed is the price of running a group on it. Morning Brew's March 2026 reporting put the organizer-fee increase at roughly $24 to $45 a month, the first such jump since 2019, alongside features that used to be included moving behind a paywall. As of this writing, Meetup's own pricing page lists a Standard organizer plan starting at $29.99/month ($99.99/6 months, $174.99/year) and a PRO plan starting at $55/month ($47/month on a 6-month term) — exact figures move by plan, term, and promotion, but the direction is consistent: it now costs real, recurring money to run a group there, which mostly wasn't true for Meetup's first 15-plus years. Regular members can still browse and RSVP for free; it's organizers who've been priced out.

The field, compared

None of these is a one-to-one Meetup replacement. Each one covers a piece of what Meetup used to do in a single app — which is exactly why "replacing Meetup" now means picking two or three tools instead of one.

Pricing as published on each company's own site, checked 7 September 2026; Meetup and Timeleft figures per the reporting and in-house review cited elsewhere on this page. Prices change — check the source before you pay.

Hosting or finding a public event

This is the piece of Meetup most people mean when they say "alternative." Eventbrite is the closest thing to a direct swap for the ticketing and discovery side, though since March 2026 Eventbrite is owned by Bending Spoons, the same company that owns Meetup: free events are free to list and publish with no platform fee, and paid tickets carry a published service fee plus payment processing, absorbed by either the organizer or the attendee. Luma has become the default in tech and creator circles for its cleaner event pages and RSVP flow; its free plan covers unlimited events and guests, and only charges a fee when you're collecting money. Partiful sits at the informal end — free, invite-first, built for a birthday or a hangout rather than public discovery, with an optional ticketing feature bolted on for anyone who wants to charge for entry.

Keeping a group talking between events

Meetup's event calendar was never the only reason people opened the app; a lot of the value was the discussion boards attached to each group. Discord has absorbed most of that for tech, gaming, and hobby communities that want daily conversation, voice channels, and topic-specific chat, all free. Facebook Groups does the same job for people who are already on Facebook and want to reach a broad local audience without asking anyone to download a new app, though the algorithmic feed makes posts easy to miss. Geneva, the group-chat platform Bumble bought and built its BFF app on top of, is a third option built specifically for offline-first communities: free channels for chat, events, and photos organized by group rather than by individual friendship.

Meeting new people in person, with nothing to organize

Two very different formats have picked up the people who wanted Meetup to just hand them a room full of strangers. Timeleft matches you into a dinner table of strangers by personality quiz, every week, for a subscription of roughly $20 to $26 a month or a single ticket around $20 to $35, with the meal itself always paid separately at the restaurant. It removes all the coordination Meetup left to the organizer — you book a seat, dinner happens — but the table resets every week, so nothing you build there carries over to the next one. BFF does the same job for free, on a swipe-to-match model with community Groups layered in since Bumble rebuilt the app on Geneva's technology; the tradeoff is the one every swipe-based app shares, that matching is easy and turning a match into an actual hangout is on you.

Hyperlocal: your actual block

Nextdoor never really competed with Meetup on interests, but it's absorbed some of the same "meet people nearby" intent by narrowing the radius to your verified street or neighborhood instead of a topic. It's free, and it's the only entry here that confirms your address before you can post. The tradeoff is content: Nextdoor's feed leans toward packages, lost pets, and local complaints more than it leans toward friendship, so it's a better tool for knowing your block than for building a social life on.

Skipping the search: recurring offline formats

The last group of people just stopped looking for a public group altogether and built or joined a small one that meets on a schedule — a run club, a board-game café night, a standing supper club. These formats solve the exact thing Meetup's open, one-off events never solved well: the same people, showing up again, so you're not re-meeting strangers every single time. In Atlanta specifically, we keep a checked, dated directory of 26 verified recurring group runs by day and neighborhood, and a broader guide to where to actually make friends in Atlanta that covers board-game spots, supper clubs, and other standing groups outside the running-specific list.

Common questions

Keep reading