CasualDates Review

When I came to CasualDates as the next dating site to review, I was pretty keen to dive straight in and give it a go. The last few online dating sites I’ve reviewed have been total busts, and I really wanted a quality experience meeting local women that were interested in going out with new men for possible relationships. Not to give away the ending of the review, but unfortunately, CasualDates was not the experience I was hoping for. Unfortunately, it is another in a long series of fairly young online dating sites that talks a big game, but ends up over priced, under populated, and filled with problems too big to overlook.

ABOUT

The homepage on this site makes you think you’re in for a really slick website experience. The flashy pics and cool design is really nice, which is expected since as  you’ll find out, this site is one of the more expensive dating sites out there. Good to see they’re plugging at least some of their overpriced membership money back into the web design. But we’ll get to their prices a little later. So, I went into their initial free profile creation feature and filled in my information. It took about five minutes to finish, meaning it wasn’t as comprehensive as some of the better dating sites out there. In fact, as I was filling it out, it seemed like the site was hurrying me along, trying to get me going as soon as possible, instead of trying to get a sense of who I am, and who good matches for me would be. Which is not good for a dating site.

After finishing up my initial free profile, I was brought to the search page where there were seemingly hundreds of local women online looking for dates in my area. Looking through their profiles, and my suspicions about the poor quality of the site’s match making abilities was obvious. Although the women were attractive, looking at their profiles told me most of them were not my cup of tea. However, there were some scattered in and amongst the throngs that were interesting, so I decided to start sending out my “hello” emails to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately this was when the other shoe dropped, and I was informed that to contact other members, I had to upgrade to one of the site’s paid membership options. Here’s the pricing breakdown:

PRICES

3 Day Membership: $2.97

1 Month Membership: $29.95

3 Month Membership: $24.95/Month ($74.85)

6 Month Membership: $19.95/Month ($119.70)

SITE FEATURES

Once I had purchased my monthly membership (which cost way more than most comparable sites that have way more features), I began looking around the site to see what I had bought for myself. In addition to now being able to use the email and search features without limits, there were a few other nice things the site had to offer. You can see new members that join each day, see who is online at any time, and who has viewed your profile. You can “buddy request” women, put certain women into a “favorites” section, and block people that ou don’t want anything to do with. Lastly you can use the site’s XXX theatre to watch pornos and their list of webcam girls. Now, everything except the last part was fine, but suddenly in the middle of trying to meet women to date in search of a possible relationship, they’re giving me all sorts of sex videos and web cam girlies to watch?  I’d expect that sort of thing from a sex dating site, and not a dating site! Not that I didn’t spend a few moments taking a look, mind you….

DRAWBACKS

I suppose you’ve got a sense of the drawbacks to the site already, in my opinion. the biggest problem is the matchmaking system they’ve got going there. Looking through profile after profile and only finding one out of twenty that are actually suitable to date is way too low a ratio. Their compatibility system is terrible, and I think it’s a result of their too brief information process during your profile creation. Secondly, there are too many fake profiles that are really just their site’s “bots” that are programmed to send you flirty emails but that never end up anywhere. These are on there to make it look like their membership is higher than it is, and keep you using the site when you would otherwise just leave. It doesn’t have a web chatting feature (probably so you can’t see the bots), and it doesn’t have a mobile app. But the most annoying problem was that after the month had expired, and I wanted to leave the site, they charged me for another month. I had only purchased the one month membership, but I guess unless you contact them and specifically say take me off, they’ll keep charging. Getting in touch with their customer service people was just as frustrating.  Eventually we did work it out, but the time and effort I had to go through to do it was very annoying.

REVIEW CONCLUSION

Overall, this site had a few positive features, but is not worth the time, money or your effort if you’re trying to meet new people to date. Over the month I sent out about 173 emails to different women, using the site an average of about half an hour each day. I got replies from 65 of those women, but I’d say more than 30 of those were the site’s automatic bots just stringing me along, because none of them ever sent a picture or wanted to commit to getting together for a first date. I did manage to meet 14 real women that were interested in going out on a first date, and all but two of them showed up. Unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, the compatibility just wasn’t there, so I wasn’t super keen to see any of them again. Luckily I did have those adult movies to get me through those lonelier nights, but in all, I would avoid this site altogether!