Why become a paid member?
First and foremost, as a paid member you show your appreciation for the work that our volunteers put in month after month and you help us to build a bigger, better and more sustainable community.
Secondly, as a paid member you will also become an official member of the Python User Group Singapore Society with voting rights at our Annual General Meeting.
Thirdly, as a paid member you will get access to heavily discounted PyCon SG tickets, that alone should make sure that your membership would basically pay for itself. Our real goal is to make enough profit to be able to offer PyCon SG tickets to our members for free.
Finally, of course we know that not everyone wants to or will be able to attend PyCon SG. The more our member-base grows, the more motivated we will be to find more and more perks for our members. This could be discounts at other conferences and SaaS products, invitations to special Python workshops conducted by our community members and access to Python specific job offers via our mailing list. In fact, when you join as a paid member, we will reach out to you and ask you how we can make the community even more useful and fun for you.
What will the money be used for?
We will use the membership fees to pay for monthly cost like the food served at the monthly meetups and various subscriptions to SaaS platforms like our domain, our Google Workspace and this Ghost.org website. We also would like to bring a little bit of merchandise (like stickers and T-shirts) to our monthly meetups and offer little thank-you-tokens to the speakers that present at the meetups.
More importantly, though, we will save up most of the money in order to create bigger and better PyCon SG conferences each year. Running a conference even at the small size like in the past years can cost upwards of S$100,000 and a lot of that has to be paid upfront. This puts an enormous amount of stress on the shoulders of our volunteers, as the ticket sales often only ramp up shortly before the actual conference date. With the constant fear of making a loss, our volunteers are less likely to try out new things or take any risks. As a result, bigger and more exciting venues that could host 500-1000 pax would remain out of reach for us.
Finally, if all of the above has been accounted for and there are still some profits left, we would like to reimburse our committee members for the time and hard work they put in month after month in order to foster our community.
Engage with us!
As mentioned above, when you join as a paid member, we will reach out to you and ask you about your expectations. Additionally, we are planning to run a members-only meetup alongside our usual public meetups. These members-only meetups will not feature any talks. Instead we will come together solely for the purpose of networking and to brainstorm together how we can make the community more sustainable, fun and exciting.
In fact, we hope that through these events, we can kindle a flame in our most enthusiastic members and attract some of you to join our organizing committee, so that the future of the society will be in good hands.
When can I cancel?
You can cancel your subscription at any time. When you do so, you will no longer be a member of the Python User Group Society and you can chose to just subscribe to our newsletter for free.
Can I sign up for free?
Sure! In the end the work that the Python User Group Singapore Society does is meant to be a non-profit service to the general public.
You can also subscribe to our newsletter without becoming a member of the society. You will still get notified about our monthly meetups and learn about local job offers, but you would not be considered a voting member of the society and you would not be entitled for discounted tickets for the annual PyCon SG conference.
How much is does the membership cost?
Please click at the "Become a member" button at the bottom right of the screen to see the current membership fees.
