Firstly, we need to look at what might motivate a web developer to put up a dating site for free. Can they make money out of it? Certainly they can. It has never been easier to make money on the web. People selling products and services on the web want traffic, and they are prepared to pay for it! There are various ways that any website can make money by referring some of its traffic to advertisers, or in some cases, simply displaying advertising. A site that has a free product generates plenty of free traffic, and if they have a lot of traffic then they can make a lot of money by advertising other people's products.

Secondly, we have to answer the question of why a web developer wouldn't automatically choose to design a payment-based dating site, as opposed to one that is totally free. The competition for payment-based dating services is so great that you would need a huge advertising budget to compete with a payment-based dating service. Also, you need a very large subscriber-base before you can say that you have a dating service that's likely to be useful to anybody! What's the good of finding that you have ten matches out of a possible 5,000 if they all live in the USA and you live in the UK?

Thirdly, why are there so many articles that tell you to avoid totally-free dating services? That's a fairly easy question to answer. These articles could simply be written by subscription-based dating services themselves. They are after your money, so to tell you that free dating services are worth as much as you pay for them is in their interest. However, that's not the only source of these articles! Websites can make money by referring people to dating websites through specially-encoded tracking links. If this is done and someone posts a free profile or subscribes to the service, the dating service will pay a fee for the lead or sale to the owner of the website.

It seems that on the face of it, dating services that are completely free may actually be worth using. However, you still have to have enough people using the service to make it likely that there will be potential datees of interest to you in your area. Companies with large advertising budgets are very likely to have more profiles for you to look at! That's quite straightforward to see. You'll probably learn about paid dating services more quickly than totally-free ones.

How many people who write profiles on payment-required online dating services are likely to be paid subscribers? In many cases, the number of paying subscribers could be quite low, so if you choose to register with a paid dating agency, it's best to make sure that it offers the ability to reply for free to any person who posts a profile. Otherwise you could be wasting your time sending messages to people who won't subscribe, and therefore will not be able to reply to you.

What's likely to be different about a totally-free dating service? Well, it won't have a huge staff to approve profiles. You may have to put up with some slightly worse language seen in some profiles as a result. Of course, such services will also attract people who aren't prepared to pay for the service. With so many internet communication services available for free or very low cost these days, can you blame them? After all, no human does the matching on paid or free dating sites; it's all done by computer. Once the website has been developed, it can be left to chug away at the search results, and the only costs borne by the dating sites are the costs of the computer hardware, the electricity, and the internet bandwidth.

On the plus side, anyone you send a message to will be able to reply to you! There's no wasting time with people that haven't subscribed to the service. You don't have to worry that 80% of the time, you could be sending a message to someone who won't subscribe to the service. It will also take you the same amount of time to develop an attractive dating profile, whether you use a free online dating site or a paid one.

In my opinion, it's definitely worth considering posting a profile to at least one totally-free dating service. See how you get on! After all, you are not wasting any money, are you?