steverezhener non-profit

Goodbye Eventbrite (for User Group) and Hello Meetup!

We are officially moving our LA Data Platform User Group meeting platform from Eventbrite to Meetup. This change will be finalized by April 30, 2024.

We started using Eventbrite a decade ago. Back in 2013, our user group was called SQL Malibu, was led by Julie Koesmarno, and we had a physical venue. Eventbrite was completely free to use for free events, and it was a great solution that we kept using beyond the user group meetings. We used that for the 2017 SQL Saturday in LA event and for all the events that followed after that, paying a small percentage of revenue for non-free tickets. In total, we have managed well over 100 meetings using Eventbrite.

Fast forward to today, Eventbrite is asking for money even for free events. While in theory, it’s still free (up to 25 free tickets), practically it’s no longer free. Even with 50% off for nonprofits, it’s still more than $0 that we used to pay before.

Given that our user group is already on Meetup and we don’t have to pay for it due to a partnership with Microsoft, it looks like a win-win. We can save money on Eventbrite and have less overhead publishing the same event on both platforms.

Feel free to join our Meetup page here – https://www.meetup.com/los-angeles-data-platform/

Feel free to join our Mailing list here – https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/l0u9k0

steverezhener non-profit

Goodbye PayPal for credit cards and Hello Zeffy!

We are officially moving our non-profit credit card processing operations from PayPal to Zeffy (event sponsorship for now). This change will be finalized by April 30, 2024.

Back in 2023, we moved from PayPal to Stripe to only discover that Stripe is charging extra for invoicing. Invoicing didn’t cost us a lot, but this was an extra cost, was not transparent and we went back to PayPal. We are very frugal with our expenses after all.

After our Stripe experience, we tested a few more platforms and finally in 2024, we found our new sweet home. We have finally found a provider that allows our non-profit to keep 100% of all the proceeds. With Zeffy, we pay no fees for credit card transactions and the only downside of Zeffy is the lack of PayPal’s look and feel. The main reason for that is Zeffy’s main purpose is fundraising. A small price to pay for paying zero fees.

Ready to use Zeffy? Click on the link below and forget about fees!

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/referral?referredByOrganizationId=a79a9f31-ace2-47b1-bb99-c027805314a9