The Price Tag Nobody Mentions When They Tell You to Get Out More

A run club is free. A pottery class is $40 a session. A round of drinks with a new acquaintance is $14 a drink, twice, because the first round is never enough to know if you like each other. None of this gets said out loud when someone tells you to just put yourself out there. But it adds up, and for a lot of people it is the actual reason the calendar stays empty.

This matters because the advice to “join something” assumes a version of a person’s finances that not everyone has. Robert Putnam’s account of American civic life traced how the free or near-free institutions people used to join — union halls, bowling leagues, church groups — thinned out over decades. What has partly replaced them is a market: paid classes, ticketed events, apps that charge a subscription or a per-meetup fee. Ray Oldenburg’s idea of the third place, the café or bar or barbershop where you show up without a plan, worked because the cost of entry was low and the visit didn’t require a booking. A lot of what fills that role now does require one, and a fee.

So the question worth asking isn’t just “what should I do to meet people” but “what does each route cost, per hour of actual connection, and who is it realistically for.” Here’s an honest accounting.

Free, but it costs you organising

Meetup is the oldest mainstream option here, and it is still free to join and attend most groups, with no cap on how many groups you can be part of. Reported at roughly 60 million members, it works on volume: hiking groups, board game nights, language exchanges, professional meetups. The cost isn’t money. It’s the browsing, the RSVPing, the showing up to a room where you know no one, and — for anyone who wants to eventually organise their own group — the admin fee some organisers pay to run one, which occasionally gets passed on as a small cover charge.

The real limitation of Meetup isn’t price. It’s that a single event rarely produces a friendship. Seeing the same people again is what does that, and Meetup only gets you there if you pick one group and keep going back to it, which takes the kind of unglamorous repetition most people skip after the second visit because the first one didn’t feel magic.

Free-ish, and structured around a meal

Timeleft organises weekly dinners, seating small groups of strangers matched by a personality questionnaire, with no messaging beforehand. It has reportedly seated more than three million people since launching in 2020. The dinner itself isn’t free — you’re paying for your food and the platform takes a booking fee — but there’s no subscription, and the structure does something useful that a free meetup doesn’t: it removes the awkward small talk about whether anyone wants to eat together, because that’s already decided. You show up, there’s a table, you eat.

The cost here is closer to a normal dinner out, plus a modest fee for the matching. It’s a reasonable option if what you’re missing is a reason to leave the house on a Wednesday, and you can absorb one dinner’s cost a week without thinking about it. It’s a worse option if a single dinner a month is already a stretch, because the format resets every time — new strangers, new table — so the repetition that actually builds friendship has to happen off-platform, if it happens at all.

Paid matching, one person at a time

Buffet, an app that launched in Los Angeles and was covered by TechCrunch in April 2024, works differently again. A person answers a short personality questionnaire and lists five interests, and the app matches them with one other person and a suggested venue to meet. It runs on a freemium model — free to use, with paid features layered on top — and the actual cost of a Buffet meetup is whatever the venue costs: usually a coffee or a drink, so somewhere between five and twenty dollars depending on where you live and what you order.

That’s a low bar in dollar terms. What it doesn’t solve is the deeper cost problem, which is that one match is one meeting. Like Timeleft’s dinners, Buffet resets each time rather than building toward a standing group, so the financial cost per encounter stays low but the number of encounters needed to actually build something is unclear, and each one still asks you to be socially “on” with a stranger, which is its own kind of expense even when the bill is small.

Free, if you can find it, and this is the catch

The genuinely free version of all this is the third place Oldenburg described: somewhere you can sit for an hour without paying for entry, where the same faces turn up regularly enough that eventually you’re one of them. Eric Klinenberg’s research on social infrastructure makes the case that libraries, parks, and public pools do this job at essentially no cost, and that where they exist and are well maintained, they measurably increase how much contact people have with their neighbours.

The catch is availability, not willingness. Not every town has a library with a regular programme, or a park with a bench culture, or free community classes. Where they exist, they are close to the best financial deal available: the price of showing up is your time, not your card. Where they don’t, or where the ones that exist require a bus fare and forty minutes you don’t have, this option quietly disappears and nobody warns you that it has.

The part that actually determines the cost

The single biggest cost variable isn’t which app or group you pick. It’s whether you go back. A one-off ticketed event — a paid class, a singles mixer, a workshop — costs the same whether you attend once or five times, but the friendship-building value only shows up with repetition, seeing the same people in the same room on a schedule. That means the honest way to calculate cost isn’t “price per event” but “price per relationship,” and a $15-a-week running club you actually attend for three months beats a $60 one-off workshop you never repeat, even though the running club costs more in total.

This has a practical implication: it’s usually cheaper, not more expensive, to pick something recurring and stick with it than to keep trying new one-off things hoping one clicks. Sampling is expensive. Repetition is not.

What to actually do about this

If money is tight, start with what’s free and recurring before anything paid: a library programme, a run club, a recurring free meetup you commit to attending four times before judging it. Give those four visits before deciding it isn’t working, because the first one almost never feels like anything.

If there’s a small amount to spend, put it toward one thing you return to rather than spreading it across several tickets. A weekly dinner or class at $15–20 a week that you actually attend for two months will do more than four different $40 one-off events across the same period.

Reserve the paid matching apps — Timeleft, Buffet, and similar — for filling gaps between the recurring thing, not replacing it. They’re reasonable for the cost of a single coffee or dinner, but treat the ongoing costs like any other subscription: cancel anything you’re not actually using inside a month, and don’t let a low per-use price talk you into paying for five different apps at once when one recurring commitment would do more.

The Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory named social infrastructure — the physical and institutional stuff that makes gathering easy and cheap — as one of the six pillars of a national response to loneliness, precisely because individual effort runs into a wall when the free places to go have thinned out. That’s a policy problem, not a personal one. In the meantime, the cheapest fix available to any one person is still the boring one: find the free recurring thing, and go back.