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What to use now that Facebook Events is dead

Meta never shut Events down. The help page for creating a personal Facebook event still loaded on 6 September 2026, and Pew's 2025 survey of American adults put 71 percent of them on Facebook, with the 30-to-49 band heaviest at 80 percent. Teenagers are the ones who walked. Roughly three in ten US teens use Facebook now, against 71 percent in 2014-15. The invitation still sends, and whether anyone sees it depends on which of those two age bands your guests sit in.

For a birthday or a housewarming in 2026 the two names that come up are Partiful and Apple Invites. Both come with a catch, and the catch on one of them is a subscription you have to be paying for already.

"Facebook Events are ended (no one checks them). Group Chats are messy (the invite gets buried under 50 memes). Calendar Invites feel too corporate/serious for a party. Does anyone else feel like we lost the 'middle ground'?" That is a poster on r/CasualConversation on 30 December 2025, in a thread titled "Is the 'Facebook Event' era officially ended? What are we supposed to use now?" Twenty-three comments, no replacement agreed on. Partiful took six upvotes. Apple Invites, WhatsApp and "just keep using Facebook" split the rest.

Who still opens Facebook

I went looking for a usage number for Facebook Events specifically and came back with nothing. Meta does not publish one. So every claim about decline on this page is a claim about who opens Facebook at all: 71 percent of US adults (fielded 5 February to 18 June 2025) and about three in ten teens, against 71 percent of teens a decade earlier.

If your guests are 35, with a school-run group chat and a Marketplace habit, a Facebook event still gets seen. At 24 they open the app twice a year to look at a cousin's wedding photos, and your notification sits there unread until the party is over.

What "the middle ground" actually is

Across the two threads the same four requirements keep coming up:

• The invitation opens from a link, without the guest signing up for anything.
• The address is a real address, tappable, that opens in whichever maps app is already on the guest's phone.
• Going and Maybe, visible to the host, with names attached.
• A reminder on the day, on the guest's phone, not in their email archive.

Another commenter in the same thread wrote it as a spec: "I just want a simple way to send a link that says 'Here is the plan, here is the time'."

Back in April 2018, on r/androidapps, a poster whose friends were drifting off Facebook asked for a fifth thing: "It'd be nice if they can mark themselves yes or no and if I can see they didn't see the invitation yet." Fifty-two upvotes, eight years ago, and almost nobody has shipped it since. Evite is the exception, with read receipts on the free tier, and it pays for that by printing ads inside your invitation.

The options, side by side

Every price in that table was checked on 6 September 2026. None of the ten asks for your guests' live location, which is why that column reads No the whole way down.

Partiful and Apple Invites, the two default answers

Wikipedia, as a secondary source, puts Partiful's founding in 2019, a $20M Series A from a16z in 2022, "the majority of users are under the age of 30", and a Google Best App of 2024 award. Its own site says "100% free, no paywalls". The App Store listing for v3.8.28, dated around 1 September 2026, carries four in-app purchases: a $4.95 Premium Add-On, a $4.99 app icon, a $9.90 two-pack and a $1.99 Peek.

Partiful asks your guest for a phone number, and that is what decides whether it works for your group. To answer an invitation a guest has to "enter your name and your phone number in order to verify your RSVP", and then, in Partiful's own words, "you'll get a code texted to your number" (help centre, page dated 16 June 2026). For most people that is nothing. The friend who has spent two years keeping their number out of apps just stops there. On r/partyplanning in August 2025, a thread asking for "an alternative to Partiful considering some of the potential security and ethics stuff" pulled 18 upvotes and 52 comments.

About six weeks later, on 4 October 2025, TechCrunch reported that Partiful was not stripping EXIF metadata from uploaded photos: "If the user's photo contained the precise real-world location of where it was taken, anyone else could have also viewed the precise coordinates of where that photo was taken." They shipped the fix that Saturday and stripped GPS data from photos already uploaded. It matters now mainly to people who were already uneasy, and that unease is what the r/partyplanning thread was about in the first place. If the phone-number step is the part that puts you off, the alternatives are in free Partiful alternatives.

Apple Invites was announced on 4 February 2025. Guests get the most generous deal of anything here: "Guests can view and respond to an invitation using the new iPhone app or on the web without needing an iCloud+ subscription or an Apple Account." The App Store listing was at v1.11.0 on 18 August 2026, iPhone only, iOS 18 or later, and it says plainly that "Creation of invitations requires an iCloud+ subscription". iCloud+ starts at $0.99 a month in the US for 50 GB, so the running cost of hosting is about a dollar a month and an iPhone. Your Android friends still answer in a browser, which is more than most iPhone-first apps manage.

The bigger-room options: Luma, Evite and Paperless Post

Luma's free tier runs unlimited events with unlimited guests, reminders, check-in and 500 invites a week, and it takes a 5 percent cut only if you sell tickets. Luma Plus is $59 a month, billed annually. The iOS app was at v2.16.6 on 21 August 2026 with a 4.9 average from about 17,000 ratings, and there is an Android app at luma.com/android. It also reads like a conference. On r/apps in June 2025 someone put it this way: "I've tried apps like Luma, Eventbrite... but I often find that the listings are too focused on larger, organized events." A Luma page for eight people and a lasagne looks like a product launch.

Evite still has the free tier that made it, with designs, shareable links and those read receipts. Premium's headline exclusive is "No ads", which tells you what the free tier does. Evite Pro is an annual subscription at $249.99. Paperless Post earns its keep when the card itself is the point. The first 50 invitations sent by email or phone number through the site cost nothing, after which you buy coins, and the per-guest rate on the paid tiers runs $0.50 on Basic, $1.05 on Premium and $1.44 on All Access. Paperless Pro starts at $250 a year for 250 annual guests. At a wedding that is a rounding error. Fourteen people on a Thursday never get past the free 50 sends anyway, which makes the coin pricing irrelevant to exactly the kind of party the December thread was asking about.

The two you already have

WhatsApp shipped Events into 1:1 conversations on 9 April 2025, in a feature roundup that also added a "maybe" RSVP, plus ones, an end date and time, and pinning the event to the top of the chat. A WhatsApp event reaches the members of the chat you made it in and nobody else, and it sits in the same scroll as the 50 memes.

Google Calendar is the thing the December thread was complaining about, and it is also what the 2018 Android thread kept recommending, with 13 upvotes for calendar invites and 14 for Doodle. Both threads are right. It handles RSVPs at no cost on every phone in the room, which is why the office runs on it, and why a calendar invite for a 30th birthday still reads like a meeting request.

If you want no accounts at all

gath.io calls itself "a simple, federated, privacy-first event hosting platform" and means it: "There are no accounts on Gathio." Events are never displayed publicly and are deleted seven days after they end. It is open source, so you can run it yourself, and it is what r/selfhosted answered with in July 2025 when someone there asked for a self-hosted Partiful. There is no reminder. Nothing sits on the guest's phone to nudge them on the morning of, so either they remember or you text them.

Where Will U Be There fits, and where it does not

I built the hosted-event side of Will U Be There against that four-point list. The address comes off a map with autocomplete, so it resolves in the guest's maps app when they tap it. Date and time go in next, and the event goes out to all your friends or to whichever groups you pick. People answer Going or Maybe, you see the names, everyone going gets a reminder on the day, and the address opens in their maps app. The event has a public link at willubethere.app/e/..., so someone who has not installed anything can still read it. Groups join by link too, up to 200 people, with no friend requests inside a group.

The app never receives your location. There is no GPS in it at all, which is also why it cannot show a friend where you are standing, only which city you told it you would be in. Friends who refuse to install another app open the event link in a browser instead. It runs on iPhone and Android, free, with no ads and no in-app purchases.

You add a city and two dates, your friends do the same, and when two trips land within 100 km of each other on overlapping dates, both of you get a notification. Hosted events sit on top of that. Friends only ever see the overlap, never your full trip list. Around your trip it shows concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, drawn from over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries and more than 360 hand-picked sources, which is the other half of finding what is on in a city you are visiting. Data sits in the EU, on Supabase in Ireland, with no ad SDK anywhere in the build and more detail in what we do and do not collect.

Partiful's invitations look better than mine and will keep looking better, so use Partiful when the card is the point of the party. Mine does the other job: fourteen people get the address in their own maps app, and you get the names of everyone who said yes. It is on the App Store and Google Play.

Picking one this week

Under-30 guests in the US who will type a phone number and wait for an SMS code: Partiful. If everyone is on iPhone and you already pay for iCloud+, Apple Invites adds nothing to the bill. Past a hundred guests, or a meetup that repeats every month, go to Luma. Watch the 500-invites-a-week ceiling. A wedding or a christening where the card is part of the gift: Paperless Post, and budget for the sends past the first 50. Run your own server and gath.io does the job, minus the reminder. A mixed Android and iPhone crowd who will not sign up for anything: a plain link with Going and Maybe, which is what I built.

Put the street address as plain text in the message next to the link, whichever of these you pick. Every one of them has a guest who will not tap through, and that guest will text you at 20:40 asking which building.