An explanation to all those who think this site should be free

Depending on whether we are actively advertising or not, three to ten new people register with this site every day. Of course, people delete their accounts here as well.

Every week, one person tells us our site should be free. This is despite the fact – at the time of writing – we are twelve times cheaper than mainstream dating sites.

Perhaps we should explain…

One of the main reasons our site was set up was to be a cheaper alternative to mainstream dating sites. They can end up being very expensive, especially those which require payment for bundles of three or five messages or search result boosts.

From March 2023 to July 2024 our site was totally free to use. We then started to charge $10 USD to turn on the ability to message other members. At the time of writing our prices have increased to $20 USD a year. Replying to messages sent to you by other members is free. If you are in a country where there are very few members, please contact us and will we turn messaging on for free. However it is on the condition you only contact people in the same country as yourself, as we are paying for advertising for the other countries on this site.

You may use social media sites and smartphone apps which are free. If these sites and apps have hundreds of millions of users, then their bills just for Internet bandwidth alone can be estimated to be in the millions of dollars per year. Where does this money come from? Why are they giving this away for free? What exactly is their agenda? These people have lots of money and can wait a long time. Many social media sites are funded by government (directly or indirectly), the stock market (this means your pension funds), billionaires and university grants. We have none of these sources of funding. Some apps start off being independent, accept funding from external sources and (coincidentally?) their security changes shortly afterwards. Many sites are accused of shadow-banning i.e. you can post what you want, but your message will never be seen by large numbers of people. The messaging app Session is soon going to close down due to lack of money. It was based on Signal source code.

Our site is not a news site, nor an essay site. The meeting parts of our site are dynamically generated from input from our members. We have search functionality. This means we need a more powerful webserver and have to pay annually for basic pieces of utility software and firewalls (to protect from Internet attacks) we did not write ourselves. We have been careful not to take shortcuts and have not incorporated free spyware from technology companies to save a little time. Technology companies give away free functionality to website owners to make their life a little easier, but the real cost is a loss of privacy.

The reality is for our kind of site, people will only stay if they see lots of other people from their country and age range. Otherwise they will delete their account within days or weeks. For some countries such as Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands we paid news websites for advertisements. This increased our membership from very low numbers to something around one thousand. However advertisements are expensive. We are currently advertising on X.com (formerly Twitter) for several countries in Western Europe, Australia, Canada and Scandinavia. We sometimes advertise for the UK and the USA. Our site sends out emails notifying members if they have unread messages. So if a person has not been active on our site for a few months, it matters less. Of course some major technology providers may filter some of our emails as junk. Really it is better if people use a mailfence.com or mailbox.org address. Check to make sure our emails aren’t landing in your junk/bulk folder. All our notification emails have an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

The cost of paying for a web-server, utility software and advertising is several thousand dollars a year. This is why we require a small payment from members. We have never stored financial details on our site. We never automatically bill people again. If people want to pay for a second year, they have to do so manually. Our low cost is for a whole year.

If we moved back to being a free site we would be overwhelmed by annoying people, scammers and spammers taking advantage of the ability to message large numbers of people. Having to make a payment first makes people think if this site is right for them. It will stop some men not filling in their profile and messaging women half way across the world, who will be too far away to realistically have a relationship with. The women will then complain to us and possibly delete or hide their profiles.

For the best represented countries on this site, the income from memberships is approximately the same as the money spent on advertising. The money and time spent running our webserver is entirely at our expense.

We do – at our discretion – give away free memberships, especially for people in countries not well represented on our site. But this is not really helping. It just means we have no funds to advertise in their country, if we manage to find an independent news site willing to tell their readers about us. We are not in the early days of the Internet when people freely exchanged links. Virtually all the news sites we contact want at least 400 Euros to mention us to their readers. Content takes time and money for them to produce.