Introducing Open Meetup: A Free Website for Every Bitcoin Meetup

Your Bitcoin meetup deserves a website. Not a Linktree. Not a Facebook group. A real, full-featured website — with events, a blog, Bitcoin donations, a photo gallery, and more. And now you can have one up and running in about five minutes.

Meet Open Meetup — a free, open-source website template purpose-built for Bitcoin meetup communities.

Why We Built This

At Bitcoin Bay Foundation, we spent months building out our own website — events management, Lightning donations, a blog, newsletter, admin dashboard, the works. Then we looked around and realized something: every Bitcoin meetup in the country needs this exact same stuff.

So instead of keeping it to ourselves, we ripped out the Bitcoin Bay-specific details and open-sourced the whole thing. Now any meetup can have what took us months to build — in one command.

What's Inside

Open Meetup isn't a bare-bones starter template. It's a production-ready website with everything a Bitcoin meetup needs baked in. Here's the full rundown.

Bitcoin Donations with Zaprite

We have to shout out Zaprite here — they made this integration an absolute joy. Their typed SDK and clean API meant we went from zero to a working donation flow in minutes. Not hours. Minutes.

Here's what your donors get: a clean donate page with quick-select amounts ($10, $25, $50, $100) or a custom amount. They click donate, pick their payment method — on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning, card, or bank transfer — and when they're done, they land back on your branded thank-you page showing exactly what they paid, the method, the status, everything. No getting stranded on some third-party receipt page.

On the backend, Zaprite webhooks fire on every completed payment, so you can pipe notifications to your team's Slack or Telegram channel. Your team knows the instant money comes in — amount, donor name, payment method, sats received. For a small nonprofit team that can't check a dashboard twice a day, that's a game-changer.

Bitcoin Merchant Map with BTC Map

Shoutout to BTC Map — one of the most underrated public goods in Bitcoin. Their API is completely open: no API key, no rate limiting, no auth tokens. Just open data, open source, free to use.

We built a full searchable directory from it. Set a radius around your city and pull in every Bitcoin-accepting merchant in the area — restaurants, barbers, ATMs, car shops, real estate agents. The data includes addresses, coordinates, payment info, opening hours, and community verification status. There's category filtering (food & drink, retail, services, ATMs, etc.), text search, and an interactive Google Maps view with custom markers. Click a pin and get a slide-out drawer with all the business details.

This matters because it shows your community that Bitcoin adoption is real and local. It's not just meetups — it's actual businesses accepting sats. And it's all possible because BTC Map maintains this data as a public good.

Events & Meetup.com Sync

Running a Bitcoin meetup means you live on Meetup.com — that's where people discover you and RSVP. But your own website is where you control the brand. The problem: keeping both in sync is tedious manual work.

Open Meetup solves this with a dedicated Meetup sync engine. Browse your Meetup.com events from the admin panel, preview descriptions and attendee lists, and import them to your site with one click. Someone RSVPs on Meetup.com after you've imported? One click to sync the latest attendees. Make changes on your end — updated description, new time — and those edits push back to Meetup.com automatically. Bidirectional sync, one source of truth, two platforms.

You also get full CRUD for events in the admin panel, RSVP tracking, and a clean public events page with upcoming and past events. Use Meetup.com, don't use it — either way, your events are covered.

Blog & Content Management

A full blog system with a rich text editor in the admin panel and markdown rendering on the public side. Slug-based routing, SEO metadata per post, featured images, tags, reading time estimates, and social sharing. Upload images inline through the media manager. Everything a meetup needs to share recaps, announcements, and educational content — without reaching for a separate CMS.

Admin Panel

The whole site is managed from a built-in admin dashboard behind secure authentication. Email/password login with two-factor authentication (TOTP with QR code setup), role-based access, and a forgot-password flow powered by Resend.

From the dashboard you manage everything: posts, events, media uploads, newsletter subscribers, resources, contact submissions, and user accounts. There's a media explorer for uploading, browsing, and organizing assets with an image optimization pipeline (Sharp) that bulk-optimizes uploads to save bandwidth. And a "doctor" page — a health check that validates your entire setup and tells you exactly what's configured and what's not, with links to setup guides for anything missing.

Newsletter & Contact

A subscribe form lives in the footer site-wide, collecting subscribers that you manage from the admin panel. Send newsletters and transactional emails through Resend.

The contact form pipes submissions directly to your team via Slack webhook or Telegram bot — rich formatted messages with the sender's name, email, and full message. Your team sees it instantly in the channel they already live in. Every contact form submission also auto-subscribes the sender to your newsletter. One form, two outcomes.

Education & Resources

A dedicated education page with a tabbed interface and a curated resource library — documentaries, books, articles, websites, podcasts — organized by category with tags. Full CRUD in the admin panel so you can keep building out your community's learning library over time.

SEO & Discoverability

Nobody's going to find your Bitcoin community if Google doesn't know it exists. Open Meetup handles this out of the box: per-page metadata with Open Graph images, dynamic sitemap generation that includes your blog posts, robots.txt configuration, canonical URLs, JSON-LD structured data on blog posts, and a NonprofitOrganization schema on the root layout with your tax ID, founding date, area served, and social links. Your site is optimized for both traditional search engines and AI-powered search — so when someone asks an AI assistant "where's the Bitcoin meetup in my city?", your structured data is what gets you cited.

Give Your Site an AI Agent

This is the one we're most excited about. Open Meetup ships with a full REST API and a ready-made skill so you can plug an AI agent directly into your site. Your agent gets autonomy to create blog posts, publish events, add educational resources, upload media, manage newsletter subscribers — all programmatically, all through your site's API.

Here's how to set it up.

Step 1: Create an API Key

Head to the Agent Keys page in your admin panel. Give your key a name (like "claude-agent"), and the system generates a key with a bb_ prefix. Copy it immediately — it's only shown once. You can also attribute the key to a specific user so that anything the agent creates is tracked under that person's name.

From the admin panel you can see every key's status, when it was last used, and how many requests it's made. Revoke a key with one click if you need to.

Step 2: Install the Open Meetup Bot Skill

The bot skill teaches your AI agent how to talk to your site's API. Install it with:

npx skills add bitcoinbayfoundation/skills --skill open-meetup-bot

Once installed, your AI agent — whether it's Claude Code, OpenCode, Hermes, or whatever you're running — knows every available endpoint and how to authenticate with your API key.

Step 3: Let Your Agent Work

With the skill installed and a key configured, your agent can:

• Create and update blog posts — title, body, excerpt, featured image, tags, SEO metadata, publish status
• Manage events — create events with venue details, dates, pricing, and host info; update existing ones
• Add educational resources — books, articles, podcasts, documentaries, websites — with categories and tags
• Upload media — images get auto-optimized and stored in your media library
• Add newsletter subscribers — grow your list programmatically

Every action goes through the same API key authentication, and every piece of content the agent creates is attributed to the user you assigned the key to. Full audit trail, full control.

This means you can build workflows like: "summarize our last meetup and publish a recap post," or "find three new Bitcoin educational resources and add them to the library," or "create next month's event from this description." The agent handles the publishing — you just review and approve.

Photo Gallery

A public photo gallery pulling from your media library with drag-and-drop uploads and a lightbox viewer. Show off your meetup events, community moments, and venue shots.

Every Integration is Optional

This is important: every single integration — Zaprite, Meetup.com, Resend, Slack, Telegram, Google Maps, BTC Map — is optional. The site gracefully degrades if you haven't configured something yet. Start with just a basic site and add donations, event sync, or newsletters whenever you're ready. Nothing breaks if you skip a step.

Get Started

Open Meetup runs on Vercel — hosting, database, blob storage, analytics — it's all Vercel under the hood. The free tier is generous enough for most meetups, and it means you don't have to cobble together separate services for hosting, a database, and file storage. One account, one platform, everything just works.

If you don't already have one, create a Vercel account first. Then pick whichever setup path fits your style.

Option 1: The CLI

Run one command and the interactive CLI walks you through it — org name, location, contact info, branding — and scaffolds a complete website ready to deploy on Vercel.

npx @bitcoinbay/open-meetup my-meetup

No dev experience required. Want to skip the questions and go with defaults? Just run npx @bitcoinbay/open-meetup --yes.

Option 2: Let Your Agent Set It Up

Install the setup skill and let your AI agent walk you through the entire process:

npx skills add bitcoinbayfoundation/skills --skill open-meetup-setup

Your agent handles the scaffolding, configuration, and deployment — asking you questions along the way and filling everything in for you. It'll help you connect your Vercel account, set up the database, configure your environment, and get the site live. Same result, but your agent does the heavy lifting.

Once You're Live

Your admin panel lives at yourdomain.com/admin — there's no button to it on the public site, so bookmark it. That's where you manage everything: posts, events, media, newsletter, agent keys, and more.

For documentation on setting up each integration — Zaprite, Meetup.com, Resend, Telegram, Google Maps, and the rest — head to yourdomain.com/docs. Step-by-step guides for every service are built right into your site.

Built for Meetups, by a Meetup

Open Meetup is built on Next.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL. It's MIT-licensed, free forever, and designed so that improvements from one meetup benefit every meetup using it.

We didn't build this to sell. We built it because the Bitcoin meetup ecosystem shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time a new community pops up.

Try It Out

1. Run npx @bitcoinbay/open-meetup my-meetup in your terminal
2. Deploy to Vercel
3. Start running your meetup like a pro

Star the repo on GitHub, open an issue if something's broken, or submit a PR if you want to make it better. This is a community project — and we want your meetup to be part of it.