TSDates review

Signing Up Takes Two Minutes, Then Comes the Bill

Registration is honestly painless. You tell it whether you're a man, a woman or trans, and who you want to meet. Orientation, body type and a few other details are optional, so you can stay mysterious or overshare, your call. Pick a public username, write a couple of lines about yourself, click the link in the confirmation email that arrives almost instantly, and you're in.

Then the trap door opens. That email link didn't drop me on a homepage. It dumped me straight onto a payment screen with membership plans lined up like the finance menu at a used car lot. No tour, no peek at the site, just a price list. Welcome, pal.

Before signup, the front page does the usual hype job. Model looking trans babes slide across the top (almost certainly promo shots, not your neighbors), with a strip of real user photos underneath. It claimed around 90,000 people online when I checked and bragged about 1.5 million users in my state alone. I raised an eyebrow at that. The total it waves around, just shy of 100 million members, deserves a pinch of salt the size of a hockey puck.

What TSDates Premium Actually Costs You

Gold Membership is the main plan. A single month is $40, but the page preselects a full year, which works out to about half the monthly rate and hits your card as one $240 charge. Cheaper per month, sure. It's also a very memorable line on a shared credit card statement, so have your cover story ready.

Next comes the upsell nobody asked for: Standard Contacts. On its own it's $21 a month, and once again the default is a yearly deal at a little over a hundred bucks. Click through with whatever is prechecked and you're looking at roughly $350 before you've said hi to anybody. I actually said 'you have got to be kidding me' out loud to my laptop.

Here's what that add on does, as far as I could untangle it. Gold gets you unlimited access to members, but free users can't contact Gold members or open their full profiles unless that Gold member also bought the upgrade. So Standard Contacts is basically you paying extra so the broke crowd can reach you too. It takes a minute to wrap your head around, so read the plan details once before you click and you'll know exactly what you're buying.

The Free Side Door TSDates Would Rather Hide

You can use it for free, sort of, and they really don't want you to notice. The payment page looks like a wall, but there's a Continue button parked under all the plans, and the Home icon gets you out too. Click either and you land on the actual site with a free account. It's like finding the unlocked side door at a sold out concert.

The home screen looks like somebody crossbred Facebook with a cam site. A sidebar tracks Friends, Flirts and Messages, which for me was a proud column of zeros, and a Member Activity feed gets filled with suggested stuff until you have real connections. Across the top sits a row of members online right now. As a free user, those are the people who bought the enhancement, since they're the only ones you're allowed to reach.

The good news: those online folks were close. The site clearly sorts by location, and the first profile I hovered over was under 50 miles away. That's hook up tonight territory, not road trip territory. The mix felt honest too, with some women who'd pass anywhere and others who were earlier in their journey or just having fun with it, which is kind of the point of an amateur site.

Profiles: Weirdly Detailed, Deliberately Tiny

Hovering over a thumbnail pops up a little box with extra details, plus, naturally, an Upgrade button, because even the tooltips work on commission. Profiles get specific in a way mainstream apps never would. I saw bra size and cock size listed right beside religion and hair color, plus a field about drug habits, which is a combo I did not expect on one screen. People write their own blurbs as well, and some are gloriously explicit about what they want done to them.

Opening a full profile is where the freeloader shaming peaks. The main photo shrinks to postage stamp size, surrounded by prompts to pay. Tap the Photo Album tab and you're bounced straight to checkout. That album is where the amateur pics and homemade clips live, so if you hoped to stock your spank bank for free, no dice. One online thumbnail literally showed someone mid blowjob, and I'll admit that's an effective tease.

As a free member I could still send flirts and messages to the enhanced profiles, which is the thing that actually matters if you want a date. Add Friend kicked me to the payment page again. So you can technically meet someone without spending a cent, just from a smaller pool, and the site will remind you of that fact constantly.

Live Trans Cams for Lazy Nights

There's a live cam area bolted on, and it's bigger than I expected. When I looked, a few hundred members were broadcasting at once, which beats the trans category on plenty of dedicated cam sites. My home screen even featured a couple of shows: a blonde with bright red lipstick and a curvier performer with a very confident camera angle.

This makes sense for nights when you can't be bothered to chat, plan or put on pants. Just watch and jerk off. I do wonder how much of that giant member count is really cam lurkers who never finished a profile, but as bonus wank material it's solid.

Is It Safe, Is There an App, Why Won't It Load

It's a legit paid dating site that has been running for years, not some malware swamp, but bring normal hookup street smarts. Use a username that isn't your real name, don't hand personal info to a stranger after two messages, and meet somewhere public first. Watch the checkout like a hawk, because the preselected yearly plans are where people get burned. Ads are moderate, and the upgrade nagging comes on top.

I couldn't find a proper app, just the site in a mobile browser, which handles browsing and messaging fine. If something seems broken, clear your cookies, switch browsers, or check whether your payment went through, since half the 'broken' buttons are just paywalled ones. In my time there, nothing crashed except my patience.

My Honest Bottom Line on TSDates

TSDates delivers what it promises: an active crowd of real trans women and their admirers, sorted by how close they live, plus a cam corner for stay at home nights. The one thing to watch is checkout. With prechecked annual plans, a contact add on that needs a second read and upgrade buttons on most pages, it pays to slow down, uncheck the extras and pick only what you actually want.

My advice: sign up free, hit Continue, message the enhanced profiles near you and see who bites. If replies come in and you want the photo albums, buy one month of Gold at $40 and uncheck everything else. Not your vibe? My list of best hookup sites has plenty of options, Fling.com is a broader casual scene, kinky folks may prefer FetLife, and couples hunting for a third can try SwingersDateClub.