Does Match.com Offer a Free Trial?

Sometimes, and the offer usually comes to you rather than the other way round. Match often emails free trial offers to free members, so the one thing to do is keep Match Offers turned on in the Email Preferences section of your Account Settings. To redeem a trial, you choose a package and enter your payment details. That means you will be charged when it ends unless you cancel first, and cancelling during a trial ends your access on the spot.

Match sends trial offers by email, and it sends them to free members. There is no trial button to hunt for inside the app.

That makes one setting matter more than it looks. Open Account Settings, go to Email Preferences, and check that Match Offers is switched on. Plenty of men turn off every email from a dating site in the first week, because the notifications pile up fast. If you did, you turned off the trial offers along with them.

So switch that one back on, even if you leave the rest off. Then carry on as a free member and keep an eye on your inbox.

A trial is not a free pass with no strings attached. Redeeming it means picking a package and handing over your payment details. The package you pick is what you have signed up for once the free days run out.

So read it before you confirm. Know which package you chose, how long it runs, and the day the trial ends. Then set an alarm for the day before, labelled with one question: keep it or cancel it?

This is the detail that catches men out. Cancelling a trial does not let you finish out the free days. Your access ends the moment you cancel.

So do not cancel on day one to be safe, planning to enjoy the rest of the trial anyway. That throws away every free day you had left. Use the trial, make the call near the end, and cancel then if the answer is no.

The worst way to spend a trial is setting up. Every evening you spend choosing photos and rewriting your profile is an evening of free access gone.

a dating coach makes this point about paid dating features in general. They multiply what you already get. If your page gets some attention on the free version, paying gets you more of it. If it gets you nothing, paying multiplies nothing, and zero times anything is still zero.

So get the basics right while you are still a free member:

• A lead photo that shows your face clearly, taken in daylight, that looks like you do now.
• A few more photos that show what your weeks actually look like.
• A few lines about yourself that give her something specific to reply to, instead of the lines every other man writes.

When that is done, redeem the offer.

Treat the trial as a test with one clear goal: a date booked before it ends.

• Write to a few women every day, and make each first message about something on her page, not "hey."
• Reply to anyone who writes to you on the same day.
• Once a conversation is going well, suggest a plan within a handful of messages: a day, a place, one drink.

That last point is where most trials go to waste. coach describes the usual failure in two versions. Either a man sends one message and the conversation dies, or he becomes her pen pal and never makes a plan. A trial is far too short for pen pals.

My advice on any paid dating feature is to test it rather than argue about it. Try it, set the results beside what the free account was getting you, and only keep paying if the gap is plain to see.

A trial lets you run that test without paying for the first stretch. So when the alarm goes off, count what happened. How many women replied? How many conversations reached a plan? Did a date actually happen?

If the trial produced replies and at least one date, keeping the package means buying more of something that works. If it produced nothing, the subscription was not what was missing. Your photos and your first messages were, and those are worth fixing before you pay for anything.