100% Free Mail Order Bride Sites – What’s the Catch?

Many services are free on the internet, so it’s not surprising that so many men like the idea of free mail order bride websites. But do they exist, and are they any good?

Most internet dating services started off as paid services. The clever thing about online dating sites is that you can give away memberships for free. And once you have a certain number of members to obtain some sort of critical mass then you can charge the members who want to get the contact details of other members.

Plenty of Fish changed the playing field as far as dating sites were concerned. This was about the first really monsterously successful free dating site. Plenty of Fish is 100% free.

However, go on the site and you’ll soon notice that a free dating site isn’t necessarily a good thing. Problems with the Fish dating site are:

• People who don’t pay anything will sign up even if they’re not serious about using the service. So you’ll find that although Plenty of Fish and other free dating sites claim to have millions of members, not many of them will be actively seeking a partner.
• People already married or in a relationship love free dating sites! There’s safety in the fact that they know their partners won’t ever see an incriminating credit card statement with “DATING SITE MEMBERSHIP” on it!
• Free dating sites are also exceedingly popular with people who just want to chat, flirt, or have an affair. So they’re the last places you should be looking if you’re marriage minded.

So we’ve looked at Plenty of Fish. But how does this relate to mail order bride themed dating sites?

You’ll find that free mail order bride sites suffer from exactly the same problems as Plenty of Fish. There are quite a few 100% free mail order brides sites. Most of them are in the Asian dating niche. Mostly the sites derive their revenue from advertising.

Of all the free Asian dating sites, Date In Asia is about the best known. The site claims to have over one million members. As stated previously, how many are active members isn’t known.

Here’s what a couple of members of DragonLadies.org have to say about DateInAsia:

A scammers paradise.

…it is full of scammers , hookers , and fake chinese profiles

I personally haven’t spent as much time on Date In Asia as I have on sites like Chinese Love Links or Cherry Blossoms dating. I was rather pleased when I was asked to provide a mobile phone number to be verified when I registered with Date In Asia. This shows that at least the site’s owners are making a bit of an effort in trying to prevent people registering multiple profiles to be used in scams. But then when I visited China and found out how little a mobile phone SIM card costs I realised that this wasn’t going to do much to deter a determined scammer.

Worse was to come when I actually started using the site. I got a few contacts from ladies. I specified I was looking for a Chinese lady aged 30 or over. I got the usual 19 year old Filipinas. Very lovely they were too, but they were wasting my time. But of the few Chinese ladies who did contact me, two were hookers! At least they were honest in their intentions though. One was even in the Chinese city I was due to visit, so at least she’d taken the time to read my profile.

I have heard that many men like Date In Asia for finding Filipinas to visit when they make the trip to the Philippines. To be honest there are so many Filipinas looking for husbands online that you’d be crazy to spend loads of money on a Filipino dating site membership. But having said that I could only recommend Date In Asia to men with plenty of experience of Filipina dating. If you don’t know how to recognise the romance scammers then signing up to Date In Asia is like putting your head in a bucket of eels.

Finally I tried to re-register for Date In Asia. I say re-register because free sites always seem to delete your profile after a while, or after a few days in the case of Plenty of Fish. I couldn’t actually register again for Date In Asia as I couldn’t get the phone registration part of the sign-up process to work. Oh well, I don’t think I was missing much.

Beyond the scammers and timewasters though, I’m not a big fan of free dating sites. Date In Asia has a very basic search engine, and it’s nothing like as sophisticated or as useful as the Cupid Media sites. There are also only basic facilities for recording your favorite ladies. Given how many interests you’ll get on a Thai, Chinese or Filipino dating site then you’ll be overwhelmed unless you have some good facilities for keeping track of all the beautiful ladies on them.

So all in all free dating sites are really of limited use if you’re interested in finding a mail order bride. Usually you’re better off signing up to a site that offers free membership, then paying once you know you’re ready to contact some of the beautiful ladies on the site.

Freemium Dating Sites

Finally a word or two about so-called freemium dating sites. These are sites that are actually free to use, but you have to pay to gain extra features.

One well known example is Thai Friendly. Since I originally wrote this article Thai Friendly has come out of nowhere to be one of the top 3 Thai dating sites online.

Thai Friendly is free, but you have to pay extra to make the site actually useful. Sure, with a free membership plan you can contact other members. But you can only send a certain number of messages with a free membership plan. And you’ll find that this limit is just not really enough. Especially if you’re only in Thailand for a week or two and need to get the dates set up quickly.

Once you’ve thought about upgrading your membership then you’ll find that in actual fact Thai Friendly isn’t that cheap. In fact it costs much the same as Thai Cupid, which in my opinion is a much better site.

So if you’re interested in a dating site that’s free, then make sure the free usage parts of it are worthwhile. Otherwise you might as well just use a paid site.

Have you had any luck with free dating sites? If so post your success stories in the comments section below. Or moan about these sites if like me you think they’re complete rubbish!