Every year I pay $39.99 for a one-month subscription for Punchbowl, which allows me to easily manage RSVP's for my son's birthday party.
For that price, you get the normal stuff you'd expect and also:
- no ads
- ability to set each invitee as an adult, a child or an infant (useful when planning food and activities)
- ability to group invitees into families, so that any adult in the family can edit the RSVP for any/all family members
- single place to manage all messages with attendees
- easy to start this year's invitation as a copy of last year's
- app that displays the total 'yes' folks, split by adult, child, infant
It's totally worth the money for the time it saves and the ease of use for guests.
But I'm surprised that AFAIK there's no open source thing that's as easy to use, and that includes all the features I listed.
Looks really nice for it's niche.
I very recently started considering the options around and really wanna give a shot to the federated version called Mobilizon. It seems to be gaining quite some popularity according to the stats but it's mostly in Europe.
There is a US instance though with some decent amount of activity.
It's still a little rough around the edges but the devs (french nonprofit that made peertube) just got money to fix that up so I really hope they make good headway. I'm gonna start a group on there soon and hopefully that'll lead to some useful bug reports and feedback.
Semi related, but has anyone else noticed a massive surge in Meetup comment spam in the last few months? All my local groups are pumping out spam, mostly offering work from home employment opportunities. I keep wondering what has changed.
Great idea, congrats.
Upon seeing this mastodon popped in my head. If a service like this was federated it could let everyone run their own and depending on how it was managed, still be tied together?
This looks promising! I help run local meetups for systems programmers [0] in cities across the world. We've been looking for a self-hosted RSVP system for ages (and haven't had the time to build one.)
We'll take Cactoide out for a spin for our September meetups! I'll open up some GitHub issues if any blockers show up.
This is great, and really needed!
Whenever someone sends me a luma or partiful link that asks me for personal info which will undoubtedly be bundled into some data broker when the VCs start putting pressure on the founders to cash out, I balk.
I would much, much rather see people just link me to a little no-signup widget without a platform attached <3
There's https://smokesignal.events/ for event stuff on Bluesky / At Protocol too. IMO really sweet how your Personal Data Store can handle all different manners of data.
There's still no standards for Private Data though, so, pretty limited use at the moment.
I think there is room for an open source version of Luma, but this ain’t it.
Trying to do better than Meetup or Eventbrite is setting the bar so low you can hold a limbo contest. If you’re going to vibe code a competitor, I would at least aim to replicate the gold standard.
This seems useful, but I don’t think this could replace most use cases for Meetup or Eventbrite.
This actually sounds more similar to Partiful, which I like for one-off events. I would describe this as an open source Partiful, but not specifically geared towards parties.
Reminds me of my site Partey.io but with a bit of a different vibe. Congrats on launching!
The only reason for me to be on meetup.com was the reach to get more people to my events (e.g. eBay Tech Talk Germany). I didn't care about the event management etc.
Great start!
My first action after creating the event was to try to edit it and I realized I couldn't do that cuz I don't have an account or authorization to edit it.
Is editing in the works?
Is this hosted as a free service anywhere? The thing all my friends in NYC are using is Partiful. It’s free and I don’t have to host.
No Hassle, No Sign-Ups - Skip registrations and endless forms = spam.
I’m building PartyGem AI intended to tackle virtually all the issues I’ve read here and more.
I’ve been working in silence but progress has been made and my work will surface soon.
No nonsense ads, vaporware, data brokers, nor VCs own me. I’m going to make something that threatens all those apps which started great and sold out.
Meetup.com is just BEGGING to be replaced. The UI looks like Classmates.com had a baby with a Windows 95 dialog box. The interstitial ads are as annoying and useless as fake recruiter texts. Organizer pricing has skyrocketed like eggs in 2024, and now they're paywalling BASIC features for attendees (like seeing who's actually coming). Classic PE "we hate our customers" BS.
Cactoide looks great for one-off events - nice work! But it doesn't replace Meetup for recurring groups that need subscriptions, notifications, member management, etc.
The best alternative I've found so far is https://guild.host. Just launched Svelte Chicago on it (shameless plug - come join us!) and our first event yesterday went smoothly. Guild has some rough edges but a smart founder with the right priorities.
What's still missing, as TheAdamist mentioned, is discoverability. I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.
Meetup was great until it became so expensive to run a glorified calendar+ email list. $180+ a year is silly for small groups.
But meetup was awesome for discoverability of small local niche groups.
Manual link sharing doesn't help with local groups.
The alternative was Facebook groups for free, but has awful discoverability and awful event calendars. But most people have Facebook, so thats the default now.
How does this benefit me as an organizer? How can local people find my event without me having to spam it on services(Facebook, etc) that they already have accounts on?