OkCupid Premium vs Premium Plus: What Each Plan Includes

Premium gives you unlimited Likes, Dealbreakers, no ads and all your Intros at once. It also shows you everyone who Likes you, lets you see public question answers you haven't answered yourself, and adds a small weekly allowance of SuperLikes. Premium Plus includes all of that and adds Priority Likes, unlimited read receipts, a bigger weekly allowance of SuperLikes and Rush Hour Boosts.

Premium is the plan most men should look at first. It covers:

• Unlimited Likes
• Dealbreakers
• No ads
• All your Intros at once
• Seeing everyone who Likes you
• Seeing public question answers that you haven't answered yourself
• A few SuperLikes each week

Unlimited Likes and seeing everyone who Likes you do most of the work. The rest make the app nicer to use.

Premium Plus keeps everything in Premium and adds four things:

• Priority Likes
• Unlimited read receipts
• A larger weekly allowance of SuperLikes
• Rush Hour Boosts

These are extras built on top of a working setup. None of them replaces the basics Premium already covers.

You may also see an older plan called Basic mentioned. OkCupid no longer sells it to members who are just joining, so for a man signing up, the real choice is between Premium and Premium Plus.

If you pay for anything on OkCupid, pay for control over who you reach and who you answer. Two Premium features give you exactly that.

Unlimited Likes means you are no longer rationing your interest. a dating coach rates this kind of feature above almost anything else a dating app sells. His reasoning is that the ability to choose who you contact, instead of waiting for the app to decide for you, is worth paying for in almost every case.

Seeing everyone who Likes you is the other half. Instead of Liking women and hoping, you start with the women who have already shown interest and decide who to answer. That is the warmest possible start to a conversation.

One smaller Premium feature is worth using on purpose. Seeing public answers to questions you haven't answered yourself lets you read more of what a woman has said. That gives you more to work with in a first message, and a better sense of whether you would get along before you spend a Like.

Unlimited doesn't mean indiscriminate, though. coach has coached plenty of men who showed interest in nearly everyone. When they got selective, they sent far fewer Likes and got far better results.

SuperLikes bring your interest to her attention more than an ordinary Like does, which raises the odds she actually sees you. My caution is that they also give away a little power. You have shown your hand before a word was exchanged, so your messages afterwards have to be sharper to make up for it. Use them on women you are genuinely keen on, not as a scattergun.

Read receipts tell you when she has read your message. That can be useful, but coach has written about the anxiety a read-but-unanswered message causes. If seeing "read" with no reply will tempt you to send a second and third message, you are better off without it. Neediness in messaging is one of the fastest ways to lose a woman's interest.

coach is positive about boosts on the apps. He has said they are worth it, and his advice is still to test them: try a stretch with them and a stretch without, then compare what comes in.

My rule for any paid feature is that it multiplies the results you already have. It makes a working setup better. It can't rescue a setup that gets nothing.

So start with the free version and make sure you are getting some mutual Likes and some conversations. Then try Premium for a month. Unlimited Likes and seeing who Likes you are the features most likely to make a clear difference, and a month is enough to see whether they do.

Judge that month by what matters: more good conversations and more dates, not a busier inbox. If the numbers look the same at the end of it, go back to free and put the effort into your photos and messages instead.

Move to Premium Plus only if Premium is already working and you want more of the same. If your conversations are going well, the extras have something to multiply, and a month of Premium Plus is a fair test. If Premium isn't making a clear difference, Premium Plus won't either.

Whatever you pay for, the things that decide whether a woman agrees to a drink are the same. Your photos decide whether she notices you. What you wrote about yourself decides whether she's curious. Your first few messages decide whether it goes anywhere.

My approach is to get from first message to her number in four to seven messages, bringing up a drink early as a light suggestion. That works on the free version, on Premium and on Premium Plus. The plan only changes how many chances you get to use it.