Finding your soulmate is priceless. Sure. But do you have to use a paid site to find a real relationship? Does a monthly fee really weed out people who aren’t taking the process seriously?
This wasn’t really an issue before 2012, but the Tinder-led surge of 30-second profiles and instant access to all single folks within 10 miles gave sites with tedious personality analyses and upscale subscriptions a run for their money — literally.
Is it worth paying for a dating site?
According to
There’s no one dating site that everyone is particularly psyched about. Swiping exhaustion and creepily persistent users are an omnipresent part of all online dating. Sorry, but a paid subscription isn’t a metal detector that pulls all of the upstanding, faithful singles up out of the crowd. When there are sites that can offer millions of users for free and success stories to prove they work, why not try them before spending $40 per month elsewhere?
A hefty price point doesn’t guarantee the absence of fakes or catfishes, either. (In 2019,
The aesthetic experience certainly isn’t what your money is going toward, either. Many of the older, subscription-based sites have been slow to modernize their UX designs, still relying on the very 2000s style of bombarding you with notifications for every wink, message, and whatever else.
Can you actually fall in love with someone online?
We’ve all accepted that online dating is great for finding a
There’s an unspoken assumption that people on free dating sites are young, horny people with no disposable income and that people on paid dating site are mature, employed individuals who are ready to settle down. But
Which dating sites are actually free?
Waters get muddied when basically every damn dating site has some sort of paid and free version. True free apps let users do all of this as a baseline, and then offer paid perks such as the ability to see everyone who has swiped right on you or boosting your profile for a certain amount of time. Free-but-not-really apps are the ones that are technically free to use, but you have to pay to do just about anything including
Premium memberships of freemium apps are an affordable way to give more control over your pool of potential boos, but they probably don’t do much to expedite the grueling swiping process.
At any rate, there’s a certain serendipitous feeling that comes with the possibility that, out of the millions of users Hinge could have shown you that day, your soulmate popped up in the crowd of 10 likes you can give out per day (compared to the unlimited likes that come with
These are the best free dating sites for finding a serious relationship: