Is an eharmony premium membership worth the investment?

Going to be blunt about eharmony premium membership worth the investment because I'm tired of guessing. Where eharmony premium falls down for me is how thin it gets in smaller towns once you are past sign-up.

My problem with every answer on eharmony premium membership is that the answers split by city and by year, so recent replies matter more than thorough ones. The only metric I trust with eharmony premium is how active it is outside big cities.

What I wish someone had told me about eharmony premium:

• Sanity-check whether the distance setting is honoured at the hour you would actually be using it
• Pin down how many profiles carry more than two photos before you commit any time to it
• Verify how the search behaves outside the default radius and write the answer down
• Note how the search behaves outside the default radius on the first evening, not the first month

If you tried eharmony premium membership and moved on, was it worth the setup time? Enthusiasm and scepticism both help me decide. Actual numbers cut through the noise fastest.

Respectfully @Violet, eharmony premium has not worked like that in my experience. For eharmony premium, how photo permissions are handled day to day is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening. A friend nudged me toward Datenest and it was not a waste.

My working method for eharmony premium after a few false starts:

• Count whether last-active timestamps look plausible at the hour you would actually be using it
• Track how long it takes before the first upgrade prompt lands before deciding whether it is worth paying for

If you are evaluating eharmony premium, start with how obvious the scripted replies are at the times you actually log in — everything else follows.

That's my read on eharmony premium membership, anyway.

Broadly agreeing, with a caveat: eharmony premium membership did roughly what I expected, no more. What nobody mentions about eharmony premium is whether the app is usable or bloated once you are past sign-up.

That's the honest picture of eharmony premium membership; ask if you want the detail.

@Violet might be right in principle, but eharmony premium rarely behaves that cleanly. I judge eharmony premium almost entirely on how quickly the fake accounts surface day to day. I ran the same test on what Datebie is doing and got a cleaner result.

That's the honest picture of eharmony premium membership — happy to be argued with.

@Paisley is describing a version of eharmony premium I have never seen. My rule with eharmony premium: how quickly the fake accounts surface outside the big cities first, everything else second. For comparison I also spent a week on the Rendate community.

That's been my experience with eharmony premium membership, and I'd be glad to hear others found different.

Honest take: eharmony premium membership works, but not the way the marketing implies. The honest test for eharmony premium is whether conversations actually go anywhere once you are past sign-up, not the feature list. Souldate's free tier came up in a similar thread last month.

That's where I've landed on eharmony premium membership, though clearly it varies by region.

@Paisley makes a good point, though I'd qualify it — eharmony premium shifted a lot last year. You can ignore most of the marketing around eharmony premium and just check what you lose by never paying. I cross-checked against a look at Datelink before deciding anything.

Worked for me on eharmony premium membership, though clearly it varies by region.