Free Dating Sites

As everyone knows, dating can be expensive, taking dates to those lovely restaurants, out for drinks or doing something else special. It can also be hard to come across free dating sites as they seem to be few and far between, despite many claiming to be free. Most dating sites will let you join for free but then as soon as you try to actually do anything on the site it will start asking you to pay.

There are several different ways these sites try to extract money from you. Some ask for a monthly subscription fee, whilst others ask you to purchase tokens or coins to send messages, view matches, etc…

Free dating sites on the other hand let you use their services without asking you for money. The majority of these sites offer their services for free by selling advertising space on their site, so whilst you are using it, you will see ads on the site for other products and services. Some, however, will collect data about you and sell this in return for allowing you to use their service. These can be difficult to spot and you will only know that is what they are doing by digging through their, normally lengthy, terms of service and/or privacy policy.

So, to help you out, we’ve put together a list of the best free dating sites that you can use to find love without having to put your hand in your pocket.

Completely Free Dating

We’ll start with ourselves. Our own free dating site is exactly what the name suggests, completely free. We don’t sell your data to any 3rd parties, but we do, however, have ads on the site, which provides us with the funds to run the site. We initially launched the site in 2007 and have been providing our service, completely free to our end users ever since. You can register, search and message fellow users without ever having to pay us a penny and we never ask for your credit card details either. The site is also 100% mobile-friendly, so you can use it on the go as well, directly on your mobiles web browser, so no matter what smartphone you have, the site will work without you having to download a separate app.

FreeDating.co.uk

Freedating.co.uk is the biggest UK specific free dating site. Like our site, you can create a profile for free, search for other members and message them, without having to pay. They also promise to keep the site free forever.

OkCupid

OkCupid is a US-based site that offers it service to people all over the world and has the motto “dating deserves better”. They claim to have some unique matching algorithms that will find you better matches than other sites. Whilst you can use OkCupid for free via their “basic” account option, this does come with some restrictions on the number of “likes” you can send each day. You will need to upgrade to their paid tier to remove these restrictions and the ads as well as being able to see who has liked you before you have matched.

Plenty of Fish

Plenty of Fish (POF) is the original free dating site, dating back to 2003. It lays claim to around 150 million registered users around the world with 4 million active daily users. Originally the site was completely free and ads supported but now offers paid “upgrade” options, however, it is still possible to use the site without having to pay. The pay for features on POF are more “nice to have” features, like being able to view extended profiles, upload more photos and get “read receipts” for messages you have sent. It also has a companion app on both the Apple and Google Play stores so you can use it on your mobile as well.

Conclusion

These four free dating sites are really the best there is for people in the UK to use. Whilst Completely Free Dating and FreeDating.co.uk offer their services for free with no options to pay for “upgrades” to get access to additional features, both OkCupid and Plenty of Fish do but are both perfectly usable without paying for the upgrades if you decide you want truly free dating. All the other dating sites we looked at whilst writing this article that claimed to be free, actually turned out to have a significant downside. They either didn’t live up to their claims and it was actually only free to create a profile or they were like the “Wild West” with no control or monitoring and just completely full of fake and scam profiles.

So, there are truly free dating sites out there if you go looking for them, just keep your wits about you whilst you do.