meetup.com will start to charge meetup organizers a monthly fee. Not particularly surprising I guess - I've used meetup a little for the Liverpool Java User Group, thought it was a great idea, and it certainly facilitates organizing perlmongers style meetings. But of course as a proprietary service, it was always at risk of charges: in the past only certain "premium" functionality was charged for.
It does surprise me a little that the charges are so high ($19 a month, though they're discounting to $9 a month for existing groups). In any case, I'm not going to pay that much - the convenience of meetup might be worth that amount a year to me, but as a monthly fee, I'd just use a blog/wiki/mailing list to cover most of it.
