If you're a recreational sports Meetup group you could try us at OpenSports (www.opensports.net). We only charge for paid events and don't have monthly fees. We've moved over hundreds of sports Meetup groups such as https://opensports.net/@cfrs, https://opensports.net/@sonsofpitchesfc,
https://opensports.net/@philadelphiavolleyball/. We offer the full gamut of Meetup features along with many others such as support for waivers, discounts, waitlists for paid events, etc. Transaction fees of $5% + $0.30 including Stripe credit card fees.
OpenSports: https://opensports.net - we make it really easy for sports organizers to run their organizations, collect money, handle waitlists, waivers etc.
If people in the Bay Area want to go to SPIN tonight and drink and play ping pong while we wait for the results to come in please comment and we'll see if we can setup a last minute event.
Also, if you want to see our hack from the YC Hackathon last weekend here is a link (https://www.facebook.com/OpenSportsInc/videos/21414657827534...) to Sequel Dan (we made an Alexa app that wrote SQL to query questions against our staging database almost as fast as we thought of them)
With the expansion of AMP, it's crazy to think of Google more likely to undermine the health of the internet than the ISPs in a post net neutrality world.
A serious number of Meetup organizers have been really upset by the changes to the Meetup platform (sudden removal of features / zero customer support / redesign / switch of focus) after spending, in some cases, almost a decade on Meetup and paying thousands in monthly fees. We've been helping move sports and fitness groups off Meetup since the fall and the amount of inbound Meetup organizers just keeps increasing.
Stripe is one of the most intuitive developer facing products that we get to use! We've almost never experienced any sort of issue. To celebrate Stripe this week we made an animated gif about the developer experience of Stripe versus PayPal if you want a laugh: https://imgur.com/VpsnbZF
That's an interesting split regarding the trajectory of public infrastructure given technical advancements. My concern is that the U.S. government no longer has the runway to fund public infrastructure projects. Corporations, today more than ever, have become the new governments.
Besides the net neutrality reality, I reflected on a random scattering of realities:
Apple gets to decide how much tax they pay and to whom they pay it.
Facebook can control who gets elected, how happy your kids are, and how many friends wish you happy birthday. It'll take credit for some of this work depending on which way the wind is blowing.
Twitter decides who Trump decides to punch or blow up.
Google unleashes new species of mosquitoes.
Auto manufacturers tend to lobby CARB more than the other way around with regards to auto emissions.
Meanwhile the U.S. government is spending $67,000,000,000 building a wall that I wouldn't call public infrastructure.
How long will it be until a Stripe-like service gives you citizenship or removes your citizenship from a government? Machine learning-based immigration, the President will personally build the model :(
Shameless plug: if you are a sports organizer on Meetup and don't see Meetup going in your direction, you can check us out. Here's a group that moved over from Meetup as a sample: https://opensports.net/@PhiladelphiaVolleyball
