I’m happy to share LaundryRoom.social, a free platform I built for hosting meetups. It was born out of frustration with Meetup.com's steep price hikes and their practice of holding your meetups, images, and messages hostage - deleting them if you don’t pay within a month.

The name “Laundry Room” comes from my early days in Berlin, living in a student hostel. The laundry room became a serendipitous space where I’d meet new people - random connections that often turned into lasting ones. I wanted to bring that same spirit to this project.

I wrote this as a stay-at-home-dad with a baby, so the project is still a bit rough around the edges.

For the future, I was thinking to release a "pod" kind of open source stand-alone version of it where you could host your meetup on your own hardware, but make it discoverable via laundryroom.social - I need to do more research on what standards this could be built on.

Monetization is another thing I need to consider. Hosting isn't expensive and I feel like I'm 50% there in terms of feature-completeness. So I wouldn't need a lot of income to make this work.

I’d love your thoughts, feedback, and ideas. What features would you like to see in a community-building platform?