Is MeetMe Free?

Partly. According to MeetMe's own site you can chat for free, and the app also offers Premium features meant to help you find matches faster. Those paid features come as subscriptions, and there is a separate currency called Credits that is used for virtual gifts. Knowing which is which keeps you from paying for something that was never going to help you meet a woman.

MeetMe's site says chat is free. That is the core of what a man wants from the app, which is the ability to write to someone, and it does not need a card.

So you can sign up, look around and see whether the people near you are the kind you want to talk to before you spend anything. That order is the right one. A man who pays on day one has bought a tool for a result he has not yet tested.

Premium is the paid layer. MeetMe describes its features as a way of finding matches faster, which is a modest promise. It speeds up the search. It does not make a woman who is not interested become interested.

Subscriptions are sold in several lengths. A long one is tempting after one good evening on the app. Do not commit for months on that. Treat the first purchase as a short test, because you do not yet know whether the women near you answer.

Subscriptions renew automatically. You stop that by switching auto-renew off in your Apple or Google account. So the switch lives with the store you paid through.

The practical habit is to look at that setting the same day you subscribe. Then a decision to keep going becomes something you do on purpose, not something that happens because you forgot.

Credits are bought or earned separately, and they are used for virtual gifts in the Live Network. The Live Network is the video side of MeetMe, where people watch streamers and send gifts.

Three points about Credits are worth knowing in advance:

• They are non-refundable once purchased.
• MeetMe can change what they cost or how they can be used.
• They have no cash value, and cannot be redeemed for money or real-world goods.

For a man who is there to date, the point is simple. Gifts in the Live Network go to people on a stream. They are not a way to start a date with a woman near you, so spending Credits there will not get you a first drink.

Free chat removes the cost of writing to a woman. It does not remove the work. A message still has to give her a reason to answer, and a stack of free chats that all open with "hi" gets the same silence as a paid one.

a dating coach says almost every man makes several basic errors online, and that photos come first among them. Your first photo and your first line decide whether anyone replies, and MeetMe charges nothing for either. Get those right before you think about a subscription.

Subscription refunds on iOS are handled by Apple. If you paid some other way, you contact MeetMe support.

Credits are the harder case, because they cannot be refunded after purchase. That is one more reason to buy few of them, or none, until you are sure you want what they pay for.

a dating coach's advice on online dating is to treat every app as a test and to count results, not activity. Run MeetMe free for two weeks. Count how many conversations you start, how many get an answer and how many turn into a plan.

If women near you are replying and you want to reach more of them faster, a short Premium subscription is a fair experiment. If nobody is replying, a subscription will not change that. The weak point is almost always the photo she sees first and the first message you send, and neither one is for sale.

Skip Credits unless you actually want to send gifts on the live video side. That is a hobby, not a dating plan.

Decide what result you are paying for, write it down, and set a date to check it. Look at the auto-renew setting at once. If you cannot name the thing the money is supposed to change, wait.