Meetup Group Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Meetup ships every group, event-listing, and event-detail page as JSON-in-HTML — a server-rendered Apollo GraphQL cache with no directly callable public API. This Actor takes a group URL (or a location + topic search) and turns it into structured event rows: organizer name, venue, RSVP count, fee, and both upcoming and past events. Our own live meetup-events-scraper covers keyword+location discovery only; this sibling owns group-targeted scraping, organizer identity, and event history.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Event-lead prospecting — pull every upcoming event from a target group with organizer name and RSVP count as an interest signal.
• Community/ecosystem research — track a niche's group activity over time by re-running against the same group URLs.
• Past-event history — audit how often a group actually runs events and how well-attended they are.
• Location + topic discovery — find active groups/events in a city for a given topic without knowing group URLs up front.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
groupUrls	array	no	['chapter-community']	Meetup group URLs or bare urlnames to scrape directly. One of Group URLs / (Location or Topics) is required.
location	string	no	'—'	Free-text location passed verbatim to Meetup's /find/ search.
topics	array	no	'—'	Topic keywords for /find/ discovery, one search per topic.
eventWindow	string	no	'upcoming'
maxEvents	integer	no	50	Cap on total emitted event rows per run.
includeDescription	boolean	no	True	When off, the event description field is emitted as null.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True}	Apify Proxy config. No anti-bot challenge observed as of 2026-07-20; RESIDENTIAL documented as the fallback group.

Example input

{
  "groupUrls": [
    "chapter-community"
  ],
  "maxEvents": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
event_id	string	Meetup Event.id.
event_url	string	Canonical event URL.
event_name	string	Event title.
group_name	string	Hosting group name.
group_url	string	Canonical group URL.
organizer_name	['string', 'null']	Group organizer or event host name.
date_time_start	string	ISO-8601 event start.
date_time_end	['string', 'null']	ISO-8601 event end.
timezone	['string', 'null']	IANA timezone, e.g. America/New_York.
is_online	boolean	True for online-only events.
venue_name	['string', 'null']	Venue name, null if online or hidden.
venue_address	['string', 'null']	Street address.
venue_city	['string', 'null']	Venue city.
venue_state	['string', 'null']	Venue state/region.
venue_country	['string', 'null']	Venue country code.
venue_lat	['number', 'null']	Venue latitude.
venue_lon	['number', 'null']	Venue longitude.
rsvp_count	integer	Aggregate RSVP count — never individual attendees.
max_tickets	['integer', 'null']	Capacity, if set.
is_free	boolean	True when no fee is configured.
fee_amount	['number', 'null']	Ticket fee amount.
fee_currency	['string', 'null']	Ticket fee currency code.
description	['string', 'null']	Event description, null if includeDescription is false.
matched_via	string	'group_url' or 'location_topic_search'.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "event_id": "315673655",
  "event_url": "https://www.meetup.com/chapter-community/events/315673655/",
  "event_name": "Coffee & Conversation in the West Village",
  "group_name": "Chapter Community: A Group for Retirees and Beyond",
  "group_url": "https://www.meetup.com/chapter-community/",
  "organizer_name": "Chapter Community",
  "date_time_start": "2026-07-21T10:00:00-04:00",
  "date_time_end": "2026-07-21T12:00:00-04:00",
  "timezone": "America/New_York",
  "is_online": false,
  "venue_name": "Asano (inside The Noortwyck)",
  "venue_address": "289 Bleecker Street",
  "venue_city": "New York",
  "venue_state": "NY",
  "venue_country": "us",
  "venue_lat": 40.73218,
  "venue_lon": -74.00332,
  "rsvp_count": 7,
  "max_tickets": 10,
  "is_free": true,
  "fee_amount": null,
  "fee_currency": null,
  "description": "Join us in the West Village for coffee, pastries, and a conversation...",
  "matched_via": "group_url",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T14:20:00Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.002	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $2.00. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

v1 reads the first SSR-embedded page only (30 upcoming / 10 past events per group) — no cursor-walking past that. Large groups with deep event history are bounded by that cap; maxEvents governs run cost, not completeness beyond it. No authenticated/private/members-only groups.

❓ FAQ

Does this scrape individual attendee identities?

No. rsvp_count is an aggregate count only — this Actor never emits individual RSVP/attendee PII, matching the GDPR posture of our other Meetup Actor.

How is this different from your meetup-events-scraper Actor?

meetup-events-scraper covers keyword+location discovery only. This Actor is group-URL-first: it adds organizer identity and past-event history, which meetup-events-scraper explicitly scopes out.

Do I need a Meetup login?

No. All four source endpoints (group page, group events, event detail, /find/ search) return complete data unauthenticated.

Why are some venue fields null?

Meetup organizers can hide venue details pre-RSVP, and online events have no venue at all — both are expected, not a scraping failure.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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