When men marry foreign brides, it’s never cheap. The wedding party, the K-1 visa, the trip(s) to the bride’s country—every item on this shopping list is pretty expensive.
But don’t worry about it. Here, we’ll explain how to save money on each of those steps—if you do everything right, you’ll be able to reduce the total cost up to 50%.
And we’re going to start with online dating. It’s not the most expensive part of the mail bride budget, of course, but it’s also very important because it may influence the whole journey and because, well, big success starts with small steps.
Here are the top 10 affordable mail bride websites for you.
SofiaDate
SofiaDate is a 100% real and legit dating platform focused on European women. There are thousands of ladies from Slavic countries, Balkans, Scandinavia, and Western Europe here. To contact them, you’ll need to buy credits first, and the cost of the credit packages begins at only $2.99 for 35 credits. You’ll also get 20 credits for free after the registration which, let’s be honest, is a good deal because it allows you to chat with any lady on the site for 10 minutes. You can also add the ladies to your favorite lists and watch their photos for free here.
SakuraDate
SakuraDate is a trusted dating platform from the same owner as SofiaDate (but focused on Asian women). The pricing policy here is similar, with 20 free credits for new members and a special discount for new users. That’s not all—they also have seasonal discounts, so there are lots of opportunities to save money here (you just need to confirm your email address in order to not miss those discounts). Of course, it’s also free to browse profiles, use all the search tools, and even watch the photos of the ladies.
LatiDate
Thousands of Latin women, convenient messaging tools, gift delivery, and a very high response rate—these are the main advantages of this platform. But it’s not just these advantages, of course. LatiDate also has special discounts for new users and it also provides a pack of free credits to any new member: these credits will allow you to chat with literally any Latina lady on the site for up to 10 minutes for free. And you don’t need to enter your credit card number or even confirm your email to get this bonus!
TheLuckyDate
TheLuckyDate is a “traditional” international dating website with all the attributes of a good mail brides platform: detailed profiles, a high response rate, convenient messaging tools, and a good welcome bonus. New users get 2,000 credits here which is equivalent to 10 minutes of live chat, and they can also purchase their first credit pack with a huge discount. But if you don’t want to pay right away, you can use this website for free: profile browsing is 100% free, as well as sending likes to the ladies.
La-Date
With more than 1,300,000 monthly visits, La Date is one of the most popular Latina mail bride websites available right now. And it’s also one of the most affordable platforms in the industry: new members get free credits and can start chatting or send 2 emails without any purchases, there’s a lot of free features here, and you can even add the profiles to your favorite list if you’re a standard member.
GoldenBride
GoldenBride, a popular Asian bride platform, has a wide assortment of premium features: virtual and real gifts, a perfect instant messaging tool, emails, etc. But it’s also not that bad when it comes to free services: here, you can watch the photos of the ladies for free, as well as send likes and contact customer support without any credits. And of course, there’s a huge welcome bonus for new users.
Ukrainian Charm
Free search filters, free profile browsing, free Newsfeed (you can watch other people’s Feeds and photos), free People game—Ukrainian Charm is definitely one of the best dating apps for those who want to save money but don’t want to compromise on the quality. When it comes to quality, this site is almost perfect, too: the profiles are very detailed, the website looks great, and the customer support team is professional.
UkraineBride4You
UkraineBride4You is one of those dating apps that stand out from the crowd in almost every possible way. The number of messaging tools here is just amazing (there’s even a video chat tool) and the quality of profiles is extremely high (they are verified by ID).
But it’s not the #1 dating app regarding the welcome bonus, unfortunately. UkraineBride4You doesn’t offer free credits to new users so you can’t chat with the ladies for free here. The good news is that you’ll get free chat vouchers and 5 free first emails after the first purchase, so it’s definitely worth it.
BravoDate
BravoDate has basically everything you need—and what’s more important, it doesn’t charge you right away. On this website, free users are allowed to watch photos, send likes, view the posts of other members in their Newsfeeds, and even play that “People” game, so credits are only required for communication. In fact, you don’t even need to purchase them to start chatting: new members can use the live chat tool for 10 minutes if they get 20 free credits!
NaomiDate
NaomiDate is a dating platform where you can find thousands of Asian women. On this website, you can watch the ladies’ albums for free, add them to your Favorites list, and send them likes—all these features are 100% free to use. Of course, the welcome bonus is also available, and you do not need to verify your identity or even your email to enjoy those 20 free credits!
Prices
As you see, all those dating websites have one similar thing in common: they all are credit-based. The websites with a monthly premium subscription are extremely rare today and it’s safe to say that credit-based dating apps are the future of the industry.
Which is good. It’s safe, it’s convenient, it’s transparent, and it allows the user to be in charge.
But is it possible to calculate the monthly pricing of a dating site with such a system?
The answer is yes. According to our data, in the majority of cases, men spend around 20 minutes per day chatting with the girls on such websites. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that 20 minutes per day translate into 600 minutes per month, but at least that’s something to base our calculations on.
Another popular option is 15 minutes of live chat per day and approximately 1 email every 2 days. So the patterns are clear now: it’s either 600 minutes per month or 450 minutes and 15 emails per month.
How much does it cost?
Let’s take the 4 biggest dating apps on our list: SofiaDate, TheLuckyDate, La Date, and UkraineBride4You. Here, you’ll find a table that shows 2 options: the “600 minutes” one and the “450+15” one.
By the way, SofiaDate is basically the same as SakuraDate and LatinaDate but with different nations covered, and La Date has the same pricing policy as UkrainianCharm, so this table actually covers not 4 but 7 top dating platforms.
Anyway, here are the calculations:
| SofiaDate | TheLuckyDate | La-Date | UkraineBride4You | |
| 600 minutes cost | $240 | $264 | $240 | $240 |
| 450 minutes and 15 emails cost | $220 | $231 | $200 | $220 |
Here’s another important fact for you: a cheaper dating website is not necessarily a good dating website. In fact, the cheapest ones are actually not worth your attention at all.
Why?
Are cheap mail bride websites any good?
Cheap websites are bad, they are not worth it, and (this can be surprising) you can actually lose much, much more money on them than on trusted and more expensive dating platforms. Here are the top 4 reasons why you shouldn’t waste your time on these sites:
- No anti-scam system/ID verification. If a site doesn’t have it, it’s most likely full of bots and fake accounts (and fake accounts are mostly used by scammers).
- Low quality of profiles, abandoned profiles. We are not talking about scam here, just about the overall quality of the accounts—cheap and free dating apps are always full of dead accounts that haven’t posted anything in years, and empty profiles with 1 photo.
- Fewer features. We can’t say that features like video chat or gift delivery are a must, but in 2024, a good dating app must offer something more than just instant messaging. Neither free nor cheap dating apps offer extra features, only texting.
- Low-quality protection system. If a dating site can’t protect your credit card information, you’ll lose money. If a dating site can’t protect your personal information, you’ll probably have problems (and lose money, too). Dating websites must be secure and protected, and free/cheap platforms are never secure and protected enough just because they don’t have money for that.
So, cheap sites are not that good, yet they can come in handy if you’re on a budget. But, if you want to try premium sites with better security measures and more features, we can help reduce expenses with some tips.
How to save money when getting a mail order bride?
To get a mail order bride, you’ll need to pay. Online dating sites, a visit to her country, the K-1 visa, the wedding—every step is quite expensive.
But you can save money on each of them.
- Online dating: focus on live chat instead of video chat and voice calls. 1 minute of voice call service on UkraineBride4You costs $4 while 1 minute of live chat costs $0.4. Using text messages instead of extra premium features will save you $100-$300 per month!
- A trip: use hotel/flight aggregators, use AirBNB instead of hotels, choose low season (off-season) if your bride is from a tourist destination country. Buying your plane ticket early (6-8 weeks) will save you up to 30% ($150-$300 depending on the destination). The hotels during a low season cost 20-25% cheaper than during a high season which means you’ll save around $300-$500 on a 2-week trip.
- The K-1 visa: File Form I-129F online—that’s how you get a $50 discount from USCIS.
- The wedding: plan the wedding in your bride’s country. The average wedding cost in Mexico is $8,600, while in the US, it’s almost $30,000—so you can save a huge amount of money by marrying your bride in another country. Or, if you don’t want to spend money on the wedding at all (and your partner agrees), think of legal marriage registration without the wedding itself—it’ll cost you around $50-$100 depending on the country.
Another thing you can do to save money is minimize the risks of getting scammed. The median loss per victim of online romance scam is reported to be around $2,000, so this is not something you should ignore.
How not to get scammed: Basic, yet main rules
There are basically 3 main rules. Of course, we could activate Expert Mode and go into details, but the fact is that you only need to follow these main rules in order to reduce the risks. The rules are very simple.
- Never send money to other people, no matter how sad their stories are.
- Never use bad dating websites—always read the reviews and make sure the site has a strong anti scam protection.
- Never share the information that can be used for blackmail—you can send those photos later when you are 100% sure she’s a real person.
But remember that the range of methods used by scammers is constantly expanding. For example, 2 years ago you just needed to google the photo of a woman to see if it was used on other dating sites—and if it was, it certainly was a red flag. Today, they use AI tools like Midjourney to create ultra-realistic pictures that won’t show up in Google search results. The same is true with communication—it was easy to spot scammers in those days, and today, they can even use ChatGPT to chat like real people.
So instead of trying to spot them right away, you can do it in the terminal phase when they reveal their true intentions and finally ask you for money or credit card number/code. You see the request, you block the profile and report it, simple as that.
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