When choosing a dating site or application, users usually ask an important question: “To pay or not to pay?” The available choice of dating sites today is simply huge, and money-wise, they can be divided into three main categories:
Completely Free
You pay absolutely nothing for registration and use.
Completely Paid
You pay to install, register and use. And sometimes also for bonus features on the site.
Freemium
The platform provides basic services and tools for free or offers a trial period. But in order to enjoy the full potential of the site, you have to pay for premium access.
At first glance, the most logical thing to do is to use free dating services and avoid unnecessary expenses. But in reality, everything isn’t so simple.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Free Sites
First, let’s take a look at the pros:
- Real money saving. You don’t pay for anything at all.
- There are many active users, as there are lots of people who want to use free services.
- Ease of use. You don’t need to figure out how to link a card to a service, how to make a payment (especially from another country), and so on.
It seems like this is the ideal option. But all this looks good only in theory. In practice, using free dating services you’ll encounter problems:
- Bad moderation due to the fact that the developers do not have the funds to maintain a large staff of moderators.
- A lot of scammers, Internet trolls, and problem users.
- Omnipresent advertising constantly interferes with the use of the platform. After all, the site must earn money from something.
- Low levels of security and confidentiality due to the same lack of funding.
- Limited functionality, which often seems outdated and clunky. Plus the lack of really important and useful features that have been available on paid sites and applications for a long time.
Doubts may start to creep in whether any savings made on free sites are actually worth the hassle. After all, paid services are usually not that expensive, and there are many more useful features available. Plus the security is much better.
Interesting Features Dating Sites and Apps Offer for Money
Let’s start with Tinder. The app offers three different subscriptions: Tinder +, Tinder Gold, and Tinder Platinum. Subscription to “Plus” gives you unlimited likes, “Cancel” and “International Passport” functions, and removes all ads.
Gold, in addition to all of the above, allows you to find out who liked you, see new top profiles, use five super likes per week, and a free Boost. The Platinum version prioritizes your likes, saves your likes history, and most importantly, allows you to immediately send messages to potential partners.
Similar paid functionality is offered by another popular online dating service — Badoo. But here, among other useful things, you can literally track your progress on the site. For example, see who liked you and who added you to their Favorites list. And your messages in others’ inboxes will always be at the top.
The dating service Bumble offers many useful paid features. For example, Bumble Boost allows you to see who has matched with you, extend the match by 24 hours, use an unlimited number of regular swipes and five super swipes.
Even more, functionality is available for Bumble Premium owners: unlimited use of search filters, fan list, match renewals, super swipes, incognito mode, and much more. Separately, you can also use the Spotlight function to raise your profile to the top of search results and get more chances for a successful match.
Happn offers many different paid services — from a monthly subscription for access to premium features to buying Coins and Credits — the local currency. With a Premium account, you can see a list of people you like, use more search criteria, enjoy unlimited likes, hide some information from your profile, and turn off ads.
Random Video Chat for Dating: How Not to Pay For “Airtime”
It’s not entirely fair to compare random chat services with classic dating sites and apps. But still, among them, there are interesting sites that offer very useful functions for your money.
You can of course save some money and use the free Omegle or Chatroulette. But you won’t get any really interesting features, or good moderation, or real pleasure from communication due to the abundance of fakes, bots, and advertising broadcasts.
So who can really offer us something interesting for our cash?
Chatrandom
A free video chat, but with in-app purchases. By connecting to Chatrandom PLUS, you’ll get more useful features. The most interesting of them are chatting with girls. And for an extra cost, you can also return to the previous chat partner if the connection for some reason is cut off.
Shagle
A freemium video chat with strangers you can use without any investment. But full functionality is revealed only when paying for a premium account from $6.99 per week. With it, you’ll not see annoying ads, and you’ll be able to use gender and geographic filters, as well as return to the previous chat in one click.
Videochat.chat
Unlike many rivals, this is a paid random chat. Here you get the opportunity to chat only with girls, and each of them must verify their identity.
No fakes or bots — that’s completely out of the question on chat random. And most importantly, at https://videochat.chat/random/ you can take advantage of a free trial period and personally evaluate all the advantages of the site.
Chatous
Positioned as a free video chat with strangers, but it also has some nuances. It has its own currency — tokens, for which you can access useful features, perform certain actions, and so on. These tokens can be purchased directly from the app. The minimum purchase is 50 tokens for $0.99.
Emerald chat
Another freemium random video chat that nevertheless offers many useful features for owners of paid Emerald Gold accounts users to filter by karma level, gender filter, stranger filter, account verification icon next to the name, etc. You can also transfer your account to Emerald Famous for money — it will be displayed at the top of the pages of other users.
Tinychat
a video chat service offering three paid plans to choose from: Pro, Extreme, and Gold. They remove video limits in your “rooms”, allow you to stream high-quality videos, disable ads, prioritize your stream, and more.
Many of these features are really useful, and the free alternatives simply do not have them. But it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth using them, or you prefer to save money.
Conclusion
Looking at all of the above, we can draw the following conclusion. Paid features are convenient and useful. But you need to select them responsibly and with understanding so you don’t waste your money. This is the only way to get the most out of your favorite platform, find interesting chat partners, new friends, and perhaps even your future soulmate.
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