Tuesday, January 13, 2026

There is no easy way to say this, so here goes. OWASP will be retiring Meetup, effective January 31, 2026. This impacts attendees and chapter leaders. Retiring Meetup in such a short time is not how any of us would have planned to do it, but we must make the best of a tough situation. OWASP’s new website will shortly go live and take over the hosting of all chapter meetings, improving the usability for attendees and chapter leaders, and reducing the complexity of managing chapters to a single platform. Initially, not all necessary functionality that is currently available to organizers will be present, but it will get there in the end.

Calls to Action:

• Attendees. If you want to attend a chapter meeting, you will be able to search for your chapter and find the next meetings through a meeting calendar. We will have further improvements as time goes on, such as finding your nearest chapter, but for now, discovery of new chapter meetings will be straightforward if you know the name of your chapter.
• Chapter Leaders. If you are due to host a meeting in early February, please update your chapter home page on GitHub to include the meeting, as any delays in the new website going live will mean your chapter event may not get noticed. Please notify us in #leaders on Slack so we can prioritize your onboarding so you can publish your meetings on the new website as soon as it goes live. For all other Chapter leaders, please stay tuned in #leaders for more communications and training to help you migrate to our new website. If you need to have RSVPs for your meetings (such as site security needing a visitor list), please use a Google Form for this until we have the functionality built into the website. Only store Google Forms in your OWASP account to ensure that we meet our obligations under the GDPR. Please delete the form and its data once the meeting has passed.

Why must we make this change?

In the last few working days of 2025, we learned that our annual Meetup renewal pricing was due to dramatically increase, tripling our costs by 2027 if we maintained our current group numbers. Our Meetup Pro subscription is already OWASP’s largest single software cost. We are a non-profit organization with limited financial resources, and if we renewed, it would mean cutting other programs sharply, such as projects and outreach, and reducing the number of chapters that have a Meetup group, something that goes against our mission. Renewing would hamper chapter growth, and create two tiers of chapters, create an operational nightmare, and we would still need to come up with something for chapters without Meetup, and then try to work out how to fix the user experience of attending chapter meetings. No matter what, we were going to have to create additional functionality in our website for some of our chapters and then figure out which programs to cut. Renewing creates more work, not less. Not renewing, although painful, we invest once in improving the website to cover all chapters and attendees over time.

As stated above, not all Meetup functionality will be present on launch day, but we will get there with Chapter Leaders’ help by prioritizing the creation of missing functionality. For example, current Meetup functionality, such as attendees joining a chapter, mail outs to past attendees, RSVPs, hidden Zoom links, meeting metrics, and searching for inactive chapters will not be available. We need time to develop and mature the functionality to ensure data security and privacy of attendees is in place and is in line with our obligations under the GDPR and other privacy laws and regulations. In an ideal world, we would have more time to make the change, but OWASP must move off Meetup by the end of January.

Sadly, this is the end of the road for OWASP and Meetup. This decision was mine to make and I did not make it lightly. It will be painful to many. Meetup served our community well for nearly two decades, helping local chapters grow and connect with security practitioners, executives and leadership, and developers worldwide. This parting reminds me of one of my favorite books, from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” This is the farewell message the dolphins gave humans just before they evacuated Earth, just before the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons. I am not suggesting that Meetup will be destroyed; all similes break down if you push them hard. Our farewell is meant with good humor, warmth, and gratitude. We will miss Meetup. I wish Meetup well and hope their new pricing model works for them, even if I have doubts.

If you are an attendee, please continue to use #owasp-community on Slack. If you are a Leader, and have questions or need assistance during the transition, please reach out to #leaders on Slack or the Leaders mailing list.

thanks,

Andrew van der Stock Distinguished Lifetime Member Executive Director, OWASP