How we compare

What makes a criterion a criterion

A criterion is only meaningful when you can check it yourself and get the same answer regardless of the mood of whoever is checking.

On that test, almost everything written in ranking lists falls away immediately. “Convenient interface”, “quality user base”, “high success rate” are claims that can neither be confirmed nor refuted.

We kept five criteria, each checkable without special knowledge, and noted beside each one how long the check takes.

The five criteria and how to check them

Total price for the whole subscription period. Check: on the price page, look for the total rather than “€/month”. If there is no total, multiply the monthly price by the number of months in the plan. Two minutes. Why it matters: this is the only price figure that actually leaves your card.

Ending the subscription. Check: look in the interface before paying for both the withdrawal function and the route to terminate, and check the notice period in the terms. Three minutes. Why it matters: since 19 June 2026 an online order must carry a withdrawal function for the fourteen-day right, termination must work at least in the same channels used to subscribe, and a notice period longer than one month is unlawful in Finland.

Profile verification. Check: look at what exactly is verified — email, phone, or a selfie check. One minute. Why it matters: only selfie verification genuinely prevents the use of someone else’s photographs; the rest can be worked around in five minutes.

Visibility in search engines. Check: open the service’s address with /robots.txt on the end. Thirty seconds. Why it matters: the differences between sites are large, and this settles the privacy question.

How the charge appears on a statement. Check: look at the payment method — app store, payment intermediary, or a direct card charge. One minute. Why it matters: it determines what is seen by anyone with access to the statement.

• Total price for the period — 2 minutes
• Cancellation button and notice period — 3 minutes
• How profiles are verified — 1 minute
• Profile visibility in search engines — 30 seconds
• How the charge appears on a bank statement — 1 minute

What we do not measure, and why

User numbers. No service publishes how many active users it has, and the counting method is not disclosed anywhere. Figures such as “over 40 000 active users” appear on front pages, but they cannot be verified: there is no external audit in this industry.

The share of successful matches. It cannot be checked even in principle, and nobody has tried.

The quality of the user base. It is not measurable and means something different to everyone.

How convenient the interface is. Subjective, changes with every app update, and depends on habits.

We name these things not because they do not matter, but because ranking lists are usually built on exactly them — and that is what makes those lists impossible to check.

Why there is no overall rating

Giving a service a single score would mean weighing the criteria against each other: how much more important price is than privacy, or verification than the size of the user base.

But the weights depend on the person, not on the service. For someone searching in Helsinki, the number of users decides almost everything. For someone in a small town who is afraid of being seen by people they know, profile visibility in search engines matters more. A single score is someone else’s priorities presented as objectivity.

Separately: such a score goes out of date entirely and all at once. One service changes its price and the whole page is already wrong, while looking just as convincing as before.

So we give the criteria and the way to check them, and the reader does the weighing. And that is why the outcome may be “none of these will suit you” — our pages have “who this is not for” sections, which no ranking list has.

Does the commission affect the order

It does not, and you can check that against the published criteria — they are above on this page in full, not in the form of a promise.

We do not compile “best of” lists precisely because in those the order is usually decided by the size of the commission. You can see this on other people’s lists yourself: hover over a link and see whether it goes to the service’s own site or to a short unfamiliar domain, which is an affiliate network’s tracking link.

If you find a claim here that the cited source does not support, write to us and we will correct it.

Frequently asked