Pricing
Chemistry.com offers a fully guided online dating experience, which you can check out first by signing up for free. A free account will let you take the site’s personality assessment test and receive a number of matches per day. However, if you want the full experience — including the ability to send messages or contact your matches through other channels — then you’ll have to sign up for a paid subscription.
Chemistry.com gives you a number of subscription lengths to choose from, which you can see from within your free account dashboard. Like its sister site Match.com, Chemistry.com requires you to pay the full amount of your subscription when you sign up for one. Expect a sizable payment if you register for a lengthy billing cycle, even if you do save a lot on your per-month fees.
Unlike many of its competitors, Chemistry.com has very limited payment options: You can only pay via major credit or debit cards. What’s more, your subscription automatically renews and deducts from your credit or debit card shortly before your current one expires. Unfortunately, it you can’t opt out of this option.
12th Place4 out of 10Features
Chemistry.com’s biggest selling point is the extensive guidance it offers you at every stage of the dating process. This begins with a thorough personality assessment, which the site does through a personality test that you’ll have to take during registration. It’s a pretty lengthy test, covering everything from your background and lifestyle to your traits and habits, and Chemistry.com advises setting aside around 30 to 45 minutes for completing the questionnaire. You can save your answers and continue at a different time, or you can power through the whole thing in one go; either way, though, that’s a sizable chunk of your time to sink into a registration process.
Chemistry.com promises a good payoff for all that work, though, as the site uses the information you provide to send you links to a number of compatible users every day. Each link comes with an automatic introduction if you express interest in the user.
Guided Matchmaking
Once you find someone you’re interested in, Chemistry.com steps in and helps you build a rapport with that user by suggesting ways to break the ice and sustain engaging conversations. Chemistry.com will prompt you with actions called “Chemistry Starters,” which are little activities or online minigames that help you get to know the other person.
Aside from all that, Chemistry.com also offers personalized feedback and dating assistance. It tries to take the guesswork out of dating by giving you recommendations based on your match’s personality type, as well as analyzing your dating behavior and suggesting actions you can take to ensure successful communication. These suggestions are driven not just by knowledge of your dating behavior on the site, but also by observations of traits and behaviors that are common to all of Chemistry.com’s members.
On paper, this makes Chemistry.com a great way to dip your toes into the online dating world if you’re completely new to it. However, there are lots of trade-offs, not least of which is your lack of control over the whole process. Chemistry.com does most of the work, and unfortunately, that means you won’t have any tools to engage in some match-searching of your own. You can’t sift through members’ profiles using custom criteria, for example.
Communication Options
Chemistry Starters aside, Chemistry.com has a limited number of communication options. You can send Winks to express your interest in another user, and you can remind them to reply to your messages by sending Nudges. As for freeform communication, you can do that through Chemistry.com’s email messaging system. However, you don’t have any options for real-time communication.
Privacy and Security
Chemistry.com gives you the option to hide your profile for a while if you want to take a short break from the site. This keeps your profile from appearing in other users’ match results, and it archives all your matches. There’s no way to block users from contacting you, though.
Important Safety Information: A lot of users, both old and recent, have reported unpleasant experiences with profiles run by scammers, “catfishers” who try to lure you in using bogus profiles, or just bots that waste your time with nonsensical messages. These incidents happen despite Chemistry.com’s claims of vetting all registrants’ profiles, so it’s best to be alert and cautious if you do choose to try out this service. The prevalence of these issues don’t bode well for the overall quality of Chemistry.com’s profile pool and community, though, so you’re probably better off trying a different online dating service entirely.
Customer Support
Chemistry.com has a Help Center that collects answers to common questions and issues, though the lack of a search function makes navigation a hassle. If you need direct assistance, you can also email Chemistry.com’s support staff through their online contact form. You can also start a live chat with a customer support representative, though this option is only available from 8 AM – 5 PM CST every day.
What's the Verdict on Chemistry.com?
Chemistry.com 2019 Review – Conclusion
Chemistry.com’s customized feedback and coaching system looks attractive on paper, especially if you’re a beginner who doesn’t know how to start getting into the online dating field. However, that guided experience also entails a lack of control over the whole matchmaking process: You don’t have any options for manual match searches, nor are there many communication options beyond the “Chemistry Starters” with which the site tries to spark contact between you and your matches. Worst of all, though, many users have reported encounters with unsavory members of the Chemistry.com community, ranging from annoying bots to potentially dangerous scammers. Beginner or not, you’re bound to find much better dating experiences elsewhere. Despite its apparent perks, it’s best to steer clear of Chemistry.com.
No Comments... Yet!