Ashley Madison Review: Does It Work Like a Sugar Dating Website?

People still talk a lot about Ashley Madison. Even though it has significantly upgraded its security system, a lot of interesting questions about it remain open. We’ve decided to find out if it works for sugar babies and sugar daddies as well as niche sugar sites. Is it a good value for money? So, we joined the community as a sugar daddy, tested the site, and described the results of our experiment in this Ashley Madison review!

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Ashley Madison Free Trial

Free trials are popular among various dating platforms, as they offer the opportunity to explore the site to understand if it’s worth any payment. Based on recent information from customer support, Ashley Madison doesn’t currently offer any free trials. Instead, it offers to double your amount of credits after the purchase. 

It means if you buy 500 credits for $159, you’ll get +500 credits for free. Moreover, there is an introductory package of 100 credits for $59.00 to explore the functionality of the dating platform. Finally, the choice of free features is convenient enough to find suitable matches without spending any funds, so you don’t need any free trial period at all.

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Who Is Ashley Madison Good for?

• Married sugar daddies and sugar babies
• People who aren’t looking for exclusive sugar relationships

Website for Sugar DaddiesWebsite for Sugar Babies

Around 75% of all Ashley Madison members are male users, so yes, the competition will be high for men—but that is pretty common. Male members can create accounts and use nearly all features except for messaging for free. Unlocking a conversation costs 10 credits, and all further messages sent to this user get free. Extra credits may also be spent on unlocking private photos.

Sugar babies are encouraged to join the community—that is why it’s entirely free for them. Messaging is free, so sugar babies can chat with as many sugar daddies as they want to. Women won’t be able to boost their profiles for free, though, but considering the gender imbalance, that will hardly be a problem.

Ashley Madison Overview

Creating an Account on Ashley Madison

So, Ashley Madison is a site for extramarital affairs. A lot of people heard of it not only because of its concept (which seemed pretty controversial in 2002 when it was launched) but also because of the news about data leaks in 2015. Oddly enough, this didn't make the site less popular. The Ashley Madison chief strategy officer notes that even during the worst times, over 100,000 people joined the site every single day. Moreover, after the company improved its security system, that number has only grown.

Joining Ashley Madison has never been difficult and was always free. So, there was no reason to delay registration. Here are the steps we needed to take:

• Follow the See Your Matches link
• Provide some basic details like location, relationship status, ethnicity (can't be skipped)
• Add some more information by choosing hashtags that indicate our preferences and interests
• Add a profile picture (we could blur it or add a mask — a nice feature for those who're looking for an extramarital affair)

So, creating a profile didn't take much time or effort, but we still decided to make our profile more detailed to attract more women looking for an affair and ideally, a sugar affair. So, we created a catchy headline and added more information in self-description to let others know that we're looking for a sugar partner.

Tips to Make a Good Profile on Ashley Madison

• Create a catchy headline that will be actually useful for others
• Clarify that you're looking for a sugar relationship with someone. This way, you can narrow the search to Ashley Madison members who have the same relationship goals
• Add photos! You can blur them and make some of them private. Still, the very fact that you have a profile picture will make attractive young women respond to your messages much more often

Popular Ashley Madison Profiles

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Ashley Madison Cost: Is This Dating Site Cheap or Expensive?

Ashley Madison is free for women, and that's understandable. Its business model leads to searching for solutions that would allow attracting more female members. But still, we registered as a male user and bought credits to find out if this dating platform really makes a good value for money. We tested all the free and premium services, and here's what we think of this experience.

Free Features

Here's what we could do before purchasing credits:

• Create and edit our account, add profile photos and blur them/add masks
• View other members' profiles
• Like other members' profiles
• Send winks
• Use the Discover feature (it's not one of the best matchmaking sites as you won't find like-minded people with similar sugar relationship goals using it, but the search still works well enough)
• See who favorited us

As you can see, there are pretty many free features to use. Basically, as a free member, we could do almost anything except for sending messages. The only important thing to consider is that we could view not only the public but also the private photos without paying for one reason: we had a profile pic. If you don't want to upload a photo, you'll need to become a full member and purchase credits to be able to request access to one's private photos.

Paid Services & Their Costs

There are not so many features to spend credits on. Ashley Madison, unlike many other dating platforms, doesn't aim at providing as many services as possible. It offers only a few communication tools instead:

• Chat — 8 credits for a standard message
• Priority messages (highlighted message in one’s inbox) — 13 credits per message
• Open collect messages — 5 credits

The best thing about Ashley Madison is that you don’t have to pay for each message sent after you initiate a contact with one member. In other words, if you pay for the first message you send to a girl and keep talking, all the next messages to her will be completely free. 

On top of that, everyone who buys a credit package gets a month of free Message Plus. We got it, and we could read all the collected messages and reply to them for free. All our credits stayed with us! We bought the classic package, costing 500 credits, and we didn’t even run out of them in 3 weeks. 

How to Look for Matches on Ashley Madison?

After we joined the Ashley Madison community and bought some credits, we started looking for matches. That was fairly simple, but we definitely have some things to say about Ashley Madison's search and communication tools.

The Search Feature

Basically, what Ashley Madison offers is a regular search with the following filters:

To be honest, we expected to see more filters. For example, hair color, eye color, tattoos, and others that you can find on sugar dating sites. But generally speaking, they were enough to find a few very attractive matches.

Profiles

When we signed up for the site, we were redirected to the Discover page immediately. There, you can see random matches. But again, we could click Filters to search for potential sugar babies by certain criteria. All profiles can be accessed for free, but the first thing we noticed was that around 50% of them were detailed or even had profile photos. 

Well, it's an affair website, so no complaints. Still, the members could at least write more detailed self-descriptions. Around half of the female users just added vitals (age, weight, zodiac sign, gender) and chose the Interest & Desires hashtags. Another half, however, also wrote self-descriptions that were way more useful than just some basic information.

Interaction

There's the Messages button on the Main Menu, and the Message Me link in every profile. In chat, we could choose between a regular message and a Priority message. There are no other messaging tools like calls or video chat. We mostly reached ladies who were online on Ashley Madison and most replied almost immediately. No wonder! We did get a lot of attention as a male benefactor with a detailed profile.

Ashley Madison Special Features: What Makes It Stand Out?

Basically, we have already mentioned all the special features on Ashley Madison. They are Message Plus, Priority Man and Priority Mails. But to be honest, we didn’t see much sense in sending those priority messages just as we got a lot of attention from ladies as a sugar daddy. Maybe men who are just looking for affairs and don’t offer financial compensation for dating find it way more useful. 

User Experience

Stew

Ashley Madison rate

Ashley Madison is a good place for some discreet fun, as long as you don’t expect to hook up with the first girl you find. It takes some getting used to, but once you make sense of search filters and navigation, it’s all a breeze. Besides, the mobile app is a nice touch many SD apps are missing.

Jerry

Ashley Madison rate

If you want to keep the cost down, make sure you’re sending regular messages instead of priority, or they’ll charge you five credits for each message when it would be free otherwise. I get it’s a business, but I don’t want to pay more when I don’t have to.

Chris

Ashley Madison rate

I got a bunch of messages right after registration on Ashley Madison, but those were mostly canned, so I ignored them, and when looking for a sugar baby who would be just right. The good news is the filters are so detailed that I found a couple of likely candidates, and I’m taking one of them on a date in a week.

Dennis

Ashley Madison rate

I heard about Ashley Madison from guys at work and decided to try it a few months ago. I appreciate the discretion of anonymous profiles, though it also offers scammers and bots free reign if you’re not careful. I went on a couple of dates already, and both babies were sweet and accommodating, but I had to screen a few dozen girls who were clearly after my money and had no desire to give anything back. It’s a good reminder that sugar dating takes plenty of time and effort to find the right person, even if it’s just for an affair or a fling.

Our User Experience

Littlelola3434 was the first lady we talked to. She could draw attention due to numerous photos of her and a catchy headline that stated she was interested in finding a benefactor. We were a benefactor on Ashley Madison, so we spent some credits on unlocking a conversation with her. Long story short, she was totally into a sugar relationship, but asked not for a monthly allowance but for PPM: $500 per meeting, to be exact.

Catherine45 reached us first and was one of the married individuals you can meet on the site. Despite her marital status, she clarified that she was open to any relationships, and the only term was to keep them discreet. Though she was a bit older than the girls we initially were looking for, we had a few great conversations about life, interests, and plenty of other things that definitely brought enjoyment in our communication with this lady.

Babiigal was a girl we thought we could really make our sugar baby. She wasn't looking for "married dating," actually. She was single but noted she didn't mind dating married people (she considered finding sugar momma or a sugar daddy), lived in LA, and was a freshman in one of the local colleges. We had a conversation about financial compensation, of course, and she was one of the rare girls who wanted to receive a monthly allowance to pay for college and an apartment.

Expert Take on Ashley Madison

Marty Cooper

Researcher

Ashley Madison rate

Yes, it was designed as a site for people seeking affairs, and it definitely has a long, and well, interesting history. I’m not going to talk about hackers, customer records, and things like that. I’d rather focus on the current version of Ashley Madison. Male users need to pay for communication there, but it’s not a drawback considering that the prices are pretty low compared to many other regular dating and sugar dating platforms. There are not so many features to use, that’s true, but again, it’s not such a big drawback. Ashley Madison is a dating website where people (often married people) meet and then set up a date in real life. Profiles, however, are not detailed, and that’s a problem. Still, members usually don’t hesitate to share their photos so you can Google them. Generally speaking, it’s a good website overall, but every user should understand that they’ll hardly find a match completely effortlessly.

How to Get the Most Out of Ashley Madison

So, we hope that our experience on the site allowed us to develop a pretty effective strategy of dating on Ashley Madison. And now, we can share the most important rules with you:

• If you are using Ashley Madison as a male member, let other members know what you are looking for in your profile and the first message you send to every new potential user.
• If you don't care much about privacy, upload your real photo. Men rarely do that, and you'll definitely stand out.
• Even blurred photos work better than their absence. You can add pictures to private albums and grant access only to users you already trust.
• If you have any doubts, ask another member to send you a photo and use Google search by image to make sure a potential sugar partner is not catfishing you.
• Send winks! That's how you get a potential sugar baby's attention without paying.

Ashley Madison vs Victoria Milan

Victoria Milan and Ashley Madison are two platforms that were created for non-traditional dating, finding hookups, and NSA relationships.

Both Asley Madison and Victoria Milan are reliable sugar dating sites. What is better? Depends on your preferences in design and details of features. These websites are quite similar.

Conclusion: Is It Worth It for Sugar Daddies?

Life is short, have an affair, Ashley Madison's slogan says. Can you find someone for discreet relationships on this platform, and most importantly, can you become a successful Ashley Madison sugar daddy? Yes, that's possible! On this online dating platform, lots of women are looking for mutually beneficial arrangements, and every sugar daddy becomes a rock star. You'll get tons of messages, especially if you have a profile photo on Monday morning, on Wednesday night, and on seeking. The thing is, you should be careful as there's no ID verification or anything like that. Still, Ashley Madison definitely works as an affair dating site and as a sugar dating site.

FAQ

Marty Cooper

Researcher

Marty Cooper is a professional writer and researcher. He is responsible for fact-checking, finding useful links and statistics, checking the details, and of course, writing posts for our website. Marty is our main sugar dating website tester—he analyzes all the factors and provides the distillation of the most useful and interesting data.

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