Member-only story
Bye-Bye, Meetup
I’ve had an account on Meetup.com since 2008. Thanks to the company that just bought Meetup, I anticipate deleting my account soon.
In 2008, I moved to a new city and initially lived on the outskirts of town. On Thanksgiving Day I was content with being home alone with my cat, but I searched for “vegetarian Thanksgiving” and joined a group on Meetup.com. Since then, I’ve been in many Meetup groups and even ran one for several years.
Earlier this year, the note app Evernote kept nagging me to switch to a paying account. Why pay for an app I’ve used for free since my first smartphone in December 2012? I kept dismissing the pop-up… until Evernote stopped allowing me to use it for free. I transferred my notes from Evernote to Word. I reluctantly and resentfully paid for a month of Evernote — $14.99 for an app that until then was free — while I transferred and deleted my Evernote notes and discovered that my phone came with a free Note app.
After one month of paying for Evernote, I cancelled my paying account and switched back to the free version. At the time, I assumed Evernote had started charging because I used it so much. I not only had notes and lists and not only “jotted down” ideas for stories — I wrote book reviews, essays, and even fiction on Evernote before transferring it to MS Word. After deleting all my Evernote notes, I created two… and they were tiny…