Meetup Event Scraper — Groups, Organizers & RSVP Leads

Scrape upcoming public events from Meetup.com by keyword and city. One row = one upcoming event, carrying title, eventUrl, dateTime, endTime, eventType, description, rsvpCount, maxTickets, rsvpState, venueName, venueAddress, venueCity/State/Country, groupName, groupUrl, groupTimezone, groupRatingAverage, groupRatingCount, hostName and hostMemberId. Filter by keyword, place, in-person/online/hybrid, date window, minimum RSVPs and radius — or paste a Meetup /find/ URL straight from your browser.

12 keyword+city searches returned 1,124 unique upcoming events — 51 to 191 per search — containing 729 distinct groups and 595 distinct organizers (measured live through Apify Proxy on 2026-08-12, not quoted from a marketing page). 95.5% of rows carry a real group rating (mean 4.61 of 5).

No login. No API key. No cookies. No CAPTCHA solving. Click Try for free and hit Start — the Actor ships prefilled and returns rows with zero edits.

{
  "keyword": "tech",
  "location": "New York, NY",
  "maxResults": 100
}

That is literally the shipped default. It returned 100 events in 22 seconds using 4 HTTP requests on the run that produced the numbers below.

---

Highlights

• 🎟️ One row per upcoming event, 28 flat columns — no nested JSON to unpack for CSV or Sheets.
• ⭐ Group ratings on 95.5% of rows — groupRatingAverage + groupRatingCount, straight off the group's public profile.
• 🧲 Organizer on 87.5% of rows — hostName + hostMemberId, plus the group URL you can open and pitch.
• 📄 Deep pagination, not page 1 — Meetup's own totalCount said 52 for tech in New York; the cursor walk returned 191 unique events.
• 🚫 Duplicates dropped before billing — 52 repeats in a 1,176-edge contiguous walk (4.4%) were dropped, so you were never charged twice.
• 🎛️ Server-side filters — event format, date window and minimum RSVPs are applied by Meetup before it sends results, so filtering makes a run cheaper.
• 🌍 Anywhere Meetup works — free-text places, or exact lat/lon when a city name is ambiguous.
• 📉 Cheap transport — datacenter proxy only; 42 of 43 requests returned a clean 200 with no residential proxy.

Copy to your AI assistant

scrapersdelight/meetup-scraper on Apify.
Call: ApifyClient("TOKEN").actor("scrapersdelight/meetup-scraper").call(run_input={...}),
then client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items for results.
Key inputs: keyword (string, default "tech"), location (string, default "New York, NY"),
startUrls (array of meetup.com /find/ URLs), eventType (ANY|PHYSICAL|ONLINE|HYBRID),
startDate/endDate (ISO date), minRsvpCount (int, 0), radiusMiles (int, 0),
sort (RELEVANCE|DATETIME), maxResults (int, 100), maxResultsPerSearch (int, 0),
searches (array of {keyword, location}), lat/lon (string).
Output: one flat object per event with id, title, eventUrl, dateTime, endTime, eventType,
isOnline, description, rsvpCount, maxTickets, rsvpState, venue*, group*, hostName, hostMemberId.
Full actor spec: GET https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/scrapersdelight~meetup-scraper (Bearer TOKEN).
Get token: https://console.apify.com/account/integrations

Meetup API alternative — scrape Meetup without the API

Meetup's official API is gated behind an approval process and a paid tier, and it does not hand you a keyword+city search you can schedule. This Actor is the drop-in Meetup API alternative: it reads the same public data Meetup shows a logged-out visitor, returns flat JSON/CSV on demand or on a schedule, and needs no key, no OAuth app and no approval. What it cannot do is anything Meetup keeps behind a login — attendee identities and private groups are simply not available, to us or to anyone else without an account.

How to scrape Meetup events (step by step)

1. Create a free Apify account.
2. Open this Actor and click Try for free.
3. On the Input tab, type a Keyword and a Location — or leave the prefilled tech / New York, NY.
4. Optional: set Event format, a date window, Minimum RSVPs, and Max results (your cost ceiling).
5. Click Start. The default run finished in 22 seconds.
6. Open Storage → Dataset and export JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or pull it from the API.

Three to four minutes from signup to a downloaded CSV.

What you get — one row per upcoming event

Group	Fields
Identity	id, title, eventUrl
Timing	dateTime, endTime, groupTimezone — ISO-8601 with the event's local UTC offset
Format	eventType (PHYSICAL / ONLINE / HYBRID), isOnline
Content	description (plain text, trimmed at 5,000 chars)
Attendance	rsvpCount, maxTickets, rsvpState
Venue	venueName, venueAddress, venueCity, venueState, venueCountry
Group	groupId, groupName, groupUrl, groupTimezone, groupIsNew, groupRatingAverage, groupRatingCount
Organizer	hostName, hostMemberId
Provenance	searchKeyword, searchLocation (the place Meetup actually resolved), scraped_at

Dates are ISO-8601 with the event's local offset (2026-08-15T15:30:00-04:00). groupRatingAverage is a 0–5 scale, never a percentage. Missing values are null and are never dropped, so your CSV columns stay stable across runs. Three dataset views ship with the Actor: Events, Group & organizer leads, and Venues.

Why scrape Meetup? Use cases by role

Who	Goal	How this Actor helps
Sponsorship / community sales	Find communities worth sponsoring	Rank by rsvpCount + groupRatingAverage, pitch hostName via groupUrl
Developer relations	Find live tech communities in a city	keyword: kubernetes, one run per metro, sort by RSVPs
Event-marketing agency	Build a city calendar to pitch against	sort: DATETIME + a 7-day endDate window
Venue / catering / AV vendors	Find organizers who book rooms	eventType: PHYSICAL → venueName + venueAddress on 78.9% of in-person rows
Events aggregator	Populate an events feed nightly	Apify Schedule + dedupe on id; 4.4% intra-run repeats already removed
Technical recruiter	Source niche skill communities	Keyword by stack, then work groupUrl + hostName

Worked example. A DevRel lead runs keyword: networking with lat: 51.45 / lon: -0.24 (London, UK), eventType: PHYSICAL, endDate seven days out and minRsvpCount: 10. That exact run returned 16 events from 1 HTTP request, every one in-person, every one with a street address, the smallest at 12 RSVPs — a one-week shortlist of London meetups worth showing up to, for $0.014.

Read this before you run it

1. Meetup's keyword search is fuzzy, not strict. A deliberately nonsense keyword (zzqxwvpq nonexistent topic) in New York still returned 200 unrelated events — Meetup falls back to nearby events rather than returning nothing. Treat keyword as a relevance hint and check title yourself; a narrow keyword does not guarantee narrow rows.
2. Bare city names are ambiguous and Meetup picks for you. In the measured census, London resolved to London, Ontario and Berlin to Berlin, Connecticut; a later probe resolved Amsterdam to Amsterdam, NY. Write London, UK / Berlin, Germany, or pass exact lat/lon. Every row carries searchLocation with the place Meetup actually used, so a bad match is visible in the data rather than hidden.
3. totalCount under-reports — that is why the Actor paginates. For tech in New York, Meetup reported totalCount: 52 and the contiguous cursor walk returned 191 unique events. Do not size a run from the number in the log line.
4. Upcoming events only. Meetup publishes no historical events. A past startDate is ignored (the run logs that it used "now"); a past endDate stops the run with an error rather than delivering an empty dataset.
5. Online events have no address. 40.8% of measured rows were ONLINE; none of them carried a venueCity, and their venueName is literally the string Online event. Set Event format = In-person if you are buying addresses.

Sample row

A real row from the measured run — nothing prettified:

{
  "id": "315547591",
  "title": "Toronto Founders and Entrepreneurs Networking at 5 Elements Espresso Bar",
  "eventUrl": "https://www.meetup.com/toronto-founders-hub/events/315547591/",

  "dateTime": "2026-08-15T15:30:00-04:00",
  "endTime": "2026-08-15T18:00:00-04:00",
  "eventType": "PHYSICAL",
  "isOnline": false,

  "description": "Join the Toronto Founders Hub every other Saturday at 3:30pm for our regular meetup at 5 Elements Espresso Bar.\n\nSit down with other entrepreneurs to network and discuss business ideas or strategies.\n\\- Broaden your network\n\\- Get critical feedback\n\\- Socialize in low pressure setting\n\nI look forward to seeing you!",

  "rsvpCount": 35,
  "maxTickets": 35,
  "rsvpState": "JOIN_OPEN",

  "venueName": "5 Elements Espresso",
  "venueAddress": "131 Avenue Road",
  "venueCity": "Toronto",
  "venueState": "ON",
  "venueCountry": "ca",

  "groupId": "37109317",
  "groupName": "Toronto Founders and Entrepreneurs Hub",
  "groupUrl": "https://www.meetup.com/toronto-founders-hub/",
  "groupTimezone": "America/Toronto",
  "groupIsNew": false,
  "groupRatingAverage": 4.67,
  "groupRatingCount": 64,

  "hostName": "Brandon Mills",
  "hostMemberId": "294353236",

  "searchKeyword": "marketing",
  "searchLocation": "Toronto, Ontario, Canada",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-13T01:40:57.640Z"
}

Fields people misread:

• groupRatingAverage is 0–5, not a percentage. 0 with groupRatingCount: 0 means nobody has rated this group — that is 4.5% of rows, and it is not a scraping failure.
• rsvpCount counts RSVPs, not attendees. Median is 3; it is a popularity signal, not a headcount.
• maxTickets is null when the organizer set no cap (73.0% of rows), not 0.
• hostName/hostMemberId are the publicly listed event host — name and numeric id only, exactly what a logged-out visitor sees.

Field fill — measured on 1,124 unique events

Sample: 12 keyword+city searches (tech/New York, startup/Austin, ai/San Francisco, yoga/Chicago, networking/London, javascript/Berlin, hiking/Denver, marketing/Toronto, crypto/Miami, book club/Seattle, music/New York, business/Los Angeles), walked contiguously to exhaustion or 20 pages, on 2026-08-12 through Apify Proxy.

Field	Fill	Note
id, title, eventUrl, dateTime, endTime, eventType, isOnline, rsvpCount, rsvpState, searchKeyword, searchLocation, scraped_at	100.0%	Never missing
groupId, groupName, groupUrl, groupTimezone, groupIsNew, groupRatingCount	100.0%	Every event names its group
groupRatingAverage	100.0% present, 95.5% non-zero	51 rows (4.5%) are unrated groups: 0 with groupRatingCount: 0
description	89.5%	Mean length 1,571 characters
hostName, hostMemberId	87.5%	85.5% on in-person events, 90.4% on online
venueName	86.3%	Includes the literal Online event placeholder on online rows
venueCity, venueCountry	47.4%	0% on online events
venueState	47.3%	Blank in countries with no state field
venueAddress	46.7%	78.9% of the 662 in-person events
maxTickets	27.0%	null = organizer set no cap

The headline that could mislead you: this is not an address product unless you filter for in-person events. 40.8% of rows are online, and every one of them has an empty venueCity and venueAddress. Set eventType: PHYSICAL and the address fill goes from 46.7% to 78.9%.

Row mix in that sample: 662 in-person (58.9%), 459 online (40.8%), 3 hybrid (0.3%). RSVP distribution: 25th percentile 1, median 3, 75th percentile 11, 90th percentile 23, maximum 1,036 — 309 events (27.5%) have 10 or more RSVPs and only 30 (2.7%) have 50 or more, so set minRsvpCount with that in mind. rsvpState breaks down as JOIN_OPEN 936, JOIN_APPROVAL 166, CLOSED 12, JOIN_DUES_APPROVAL 7, NOT_OPEN_YET 2, CANCELLED 1.

Every run prints its own measured fill in the log, so you never have to take this table's word for it.

How to run it

1. Keyword + city (the default)

{ "keyword": "tech", "location": "New York, NY", "maxResults": 100 }

100 events, 4 requests, 22 seconds, $0.09.

2. Paste a Meetup find URL

Run the search on meetup.com, copy the address bar, paste it in:

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=hiking&location=us--co--Denver"],
  "maxResults": 20
}

The keyword and place are read out of the URL. Only /find/ URLs carry a keyword — a group URL like https://www.meetup.com/denver-hiking-group/ is skipped with a warning that names the URL, rather than being silently dropped.

3. In-person only, next 7 days, 10+ RSVPs

{
  "keyword": "networking",
  "lat": "51.45",
  "lon": "-0.24",
  "eventType": "PHYSICAL",
  "endDate": "2026-08-20",
  "minRsvpCount": 10,
  "sort": "DATETIME",
  "maxResults": 25
}

Meetup applies all three filters server-side. This run returned 16 rows from one HTTP request, all with street addresses.

4. Several cities in one run

{
  "searches": [
    { "keyword": "startup", "location": "Austin, TX" },
    { "keyword": "startup", "location": "Denver, CO" },
    { "keyword": "startup", "location": "Miami, FL" }
  ],
  "maxResultsPerSearch": 50,
  "maxResults": 150
}

maxResultsPerSearch stops one busy city from eating the whole budget.

Input

Field	Type	Default	What it does
keyword	string	tech	What to search for. Required in practice — Meetup's search needs a keyword.
location	string	New York, NY	Free-text place. Qualify it (London, UK) — bare names resolve unpredictably.
startUrls	array of strings	[]	Meetup /find/ URLs; keyword + place read from the URL. Extra searches on top of the fields above.
eventType	select	ANY	ANY / PHYSICAL / ONLINE / HYBRID. Server-side; narrowing costs nothing.
startDate	datepicker	empty = now	Events starting on or after. A past date is ignored (Meetup has no history).
endDate	datepicker	empty = no bound	Events starting on or before. A past date stops the run with an error.
minRsvpCount	integer	0	Server-side RSVP floor. Only 27.5% of events reach 10 and 2.7% reach 50.
radiusMiles	integer	0	0 = Meetup's default radius, which is what every number here was measured with.
sort	select	RELEVANCE	RELEVANCE or DATETIME (soonest first).
maxResults	integer	100	Your cost ceiling. Duplicates never count against it.
maxResultsPerSearch	integer	0	Per keyword+location cap. 0 = only the total applies.
searches	array	[]	[{ "keyword": "...", "location": "..." }] for multi-city runs. Added to the fields above.
lat / lon	string	empty	Exact coordinates; skips geocoding entirely. Must be supplied together.
proxyConfiguration	proxy	Apify Proxy (datacenter)	Datacenter is enough — see the transport numbers below.

Pricing

$0.0009 per event returned — $0.90 per 1,000 events. Charged on the event-scraped event. There is no actor-start charge and no monthly platform fee from this Actor.

You are charged for events delivered to your dataset, never for a request, a retry, a page that turned out to be all duplicates, or the same event twice. Duplicates are dropped on id before anything is pushed. Rows are charged as they are pushed (Actor.pushData(items, 'event-scraped')), so if you hit a budget cap you get whole rows and stop — never a half-billed dataset.

Run	Events	Cost
The shipped default (tech, New York)	100	$0.09
One city walked to exhaustion (tech, New York)	191	$0.17
The 12-search census on this page	1,124	$1.01
A nightly 10-city feed for a month	10,000	$9.00

maxResults is the dial: set it to what you are willing to spend × 1,111.

Honest limits

• There is no groups mode. You get group data — name, URL, timezone, rating, rating count — as columns on every event row, and 1,124 events yielded 729 distinct groups. What you cannot do is search Meetup for groups that have no upcoming event, and there is no memberCount or organizer social-link field, because event search does not return them. If a standalone group product is what you need, say so on the Issues tab.
• Meetup's keyword search is fuzzy and bare city names resolve unpredictably — both measured, both detailed above. Filter on title if you need keyword precision, and qualify the place or pass lat/lon.
• venueAddress is 46.7% overall and 78.9% on in-person events; online events (40.8% of rows) carry no address, city or country at all. That is Meetup not publishing one, not a scraping failure.
• 4.5% of rows have groupRatingAverage: 0 — the group has never been rated. 0 and null are different things here: 0 means rated by nobody, null would mean Meetup returned no rating object.
• No attendee lists, ever. Meetup keeps attendee identities behind a login. You get RSVP counts and the public host. There is no workaround that does not involve logging in, which this Actor does not do.
• Upcoming events only. Meetup exposes no historical events, so there is no way to backfill last month.
• maxTickets is 27.0% — most organizers never set a cap. It is not a capacity estimate for the other 73%.
• One run deduplicates within itself. Across runs, dedupe on id, which is Meetup's own stable event id.

How it works, and the transport ladder

Meetup renders its find page from an Apollo cache, but the same data is served far more cheaply by Meetup's public GraphQL endpoint at POST https://www.meetup.com/gql2, which accepts plain un-persisted queries with no authentication. Two operations do the work: locationSearch(query) geocodes your free-text place into the lat/lon the event filter requires, then eventSearch(filter, first, after, sort) returns a Relay connection whose after cursor gives genuine deep pagination. No browser, no cookies, no login and no CAPTCHA solving.

Measured 2026-08-12, through Apify Proxy (a home-broadband result would not be shippable — no Apify container has a residential home IP):

Rung	Result
Apify Proxy, datacenter, fresh session per request	42 of 43 requests returned HTTP 200; the single failure was a proxy-level UPSTREAM502, recovered by the built-in fresh-session retry
Searches completed	12 of 12 keyword+city searches returned events
Residential	Not required, not the default — it would only make a run cost more

Sustained load in that census: 30 contiguous pages, 1,176 edges, 1,124 unique events, zero HTTP 403s and zero rate-limit responses. The shipped default run used 4 requests for 100 rows.

Uniqueness and dedupe

Measured on contiguous cursor pages — sparse sampling would have hidden this. Across 30 pages and 1,176 edges, 52 edges (4.4%) were events Meetup had already returned on an earlier page of the same search. Every one was dropped on id before pushData, so the dataset held 1,124 unique events and your bill would have covered 1,124, not 1,176. The default tech/New York run dropped 7 repeats out of 107 edges the same way.

The mechanism is Meetup's own recurring-event consolidation and cursor overlap, not a bug in the Actor. The dedupe key is Event.id, Meetup's stable id — the same key to use for cross-run dedupe on a schedule.

When a run fails

• Zero rows throws. A run that scrapes nothing stops with the scope it searched and the HTTP counts: No events scraped. Scope: "…" @ …. HTTP: 2 gql2 request(s), 2 OK, statuses {"200":2}. If the counts look healthy, the search matched nothing — that is a filter problem, not a block, and the message says so.
• Schema drift fails loudly. If Meetup changes its GraphQL schema, the query fails validation and the run stops with the GraphQL error text. It never degrades into a quiet empty dataset.
• A past endDate errors instead of returning nothing, because Meetup has no historical events.
• An unusable lat/lon stops the run — one supplied without the other, a value that is not a number, or one out of range — rather than silently falling back to the geocoder and searching somewhere else.
• An unusable pasted URL warns with the URL and the supported shape, so you can see which of your inputs was ignored.
• Transient proxy/network failures retry on a fresh session up to 4 times before that request is given up on.

Who buys this

• Community and DevRel platforms (Common Room, Orbit-style tooling, developer-tool vendors) — groupUrl + hostName + rsvpCount is a ranked list of live communities to sponsor or speak at.
• Event sponsorship sales — groupRatingAverage (mean 4.61, 95.5% coverage) plus RSVP counts separates the 27.5% of events with real turnout from the long tail.
• Venue, catering and AV vendors — eventType: PHYSICAL gives venueName + venueAddress on 78.9% of rows: who is already booking rooms in your city, and where.
• Event aggregators and city guides — a scheduled sort: DATETIME run with a 7-day endDate is a clean weekly calendar feed, deduped on id.
• Technical recruiters — keyword by stack, then the group URL and organizer name for the communities that actually meet.
• Market researchers tracking a category — RSVP counts and event cadence per keyword per city, sampled weekly.

Sibling Actors

Actor	What it is	Why you would use it instead
Eventbrite Scraper	Ticketed events by city and category	Ticket prices and organizers; Eventbrite skews commercial, Meetup skews community
PartySlate Scraper	Event venues and vendors across 119 US metros	You want the venue company as the lead, not the event
Giggster Scraper	Bookable film, photo and event spaces	Hourly-rate spaces with host contacts, not scheduled meetups

Meetup is where you go for the organizer and the community; Eventbrite is where you go for the ticket price; PartySlate and Giggster are where you go for the venue.

Run it from your code

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('scrapersdelight/meetup-scraper').call({
    keyword: 'tech', location: 'New York, NY', maxResults: 100,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.length);

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("scrapersdelight/meetup-scraper").call(run_input={
    "keyword": "tech", "location": "New York, NY", "maxResults": 100,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], item["rsvpCount"], item["groupUrl"])

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/scrapersdelight~meetup-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "keyword": "tech", "location": "New York, NY", "maxResults": 50 }'

Results also push straight to Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, webhooks and the Apify MCP server for AI agents.

FAQ

Does this need an account, login or API key? No. It reads Meetup's public GraphQL endpoint with no authentication at all — the same data a logged-out visitor sees.

My search returned 0 results — what now? The run stops with an error naming the scope and the HTTP counts. If the counts are healthy the search genuinely matched nothing: widen the keyword, drop minRsvpCount, raise radiusMiles, or check that endDate is in the future.

The wrong city was matched. Bare names are ambiguous — London resolved to London, Ontario in our measured run. Write London, UK, or pass lat/lon to skip geocoding entirely. searchLocation on every row shows what Meetup picked.

Why do I get events unrelated to my keyword? Meetup's search falls back to nearby events when a keyword matches little. A nonsense keyword returned 200 events in New York. Filter on title if you need precision.

Can I get attendee lists or member emails? No. Meetup keeps attendee identities behind a login, and this Actor does not log in. You get RSVP counts and the public host name plus member id.

Can I scrape Meetup groups directly, with member counts? Not today. Group name, URL, timezone and rating come attached to every event row (729 distinct groups in 1,124 events), but there is no standalone group search and no memberCount. Ask for it on the Issues tab.

Can I scrape past events? No — Meetup publishes upcoming events only. A past startDate is treated as "now".

Two runs on a schedule — will I get duplicates? Within a run, no: 4.4% of edges were repeats and all were dropped before billing. Across runs, dedupe on id, Meetup's stable event id.

Do I get charged for duplicates or for filtered-out events? No. You pay $0.0009 for each event actually written to your dataset. Duplicates are dropped before pushData, and eventType, minRsvpCount and the date window are applied by Meetup before results are ever sent.

Does it need a residential proxy? No. 42 of 43 requests cleared on Apify's datacenter proxy, so the datacenter rung is the default and residential would only cost you more.

Why are some fields null? Online events have no venue, most organizers set no maxTickets, and unrated groups have groupRatingCount: 0. Nulls are kept, never dropped, so your columns stay stable.

How many events can I get from one city? In the measured sample, between 51 and 191 per keyword+city search. For more, run several keywords across the same city with searches.

Something looks wrong — how do I debug it? Every run logs the resolved location, per-page counts, the HTTP status tally, the duplicates dropped, and the field fill measured on that run's own rows. Paste that log into an issue.

Legal and fair use

This Actor reads only public, unauthenticated Meetup data — the same event pages Meetup serves a logged-out visitor via its own public GraphQL endpoint. It does not log in, does not forge or replay credentials, and does not solve CAPTCHAs. It cannot access private groups or attendee identities.

Rows contain personal data: hostName and hostMemberId identify the publicly listed event organizer. You are responsible for complying with Meetup's Terms of Service and with how you use the data — including the GDPR, CCPA, CAN-SPAM and PECR where they apply to your outreach.

Meetup® is a trademark of its owner. This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Meetup.

Feedback

Found a missing field, or want a filter that is not here? Open an issue on the Issues tab — feature requests are read and acted on.