Sunday, July 18, 2010

Chatline Dating

Chatline dating has been around for quite some time apparently. Here is a list of the chatlines that I know of, ranked in order of best to worst.

Quest - 60 min free trial, 7 days
Vibeline - 30 min free trial, 3 days
Lavalife - 30 min
Livelinks

Having used the chatlines for a little bit now, a few of my annoyances are the women who leave you messages just to waste your time, or the women who complain about guys who don't want to waste their minutes while they enjoy the service for free. To avoid this, here is a little trick that I found out :

The trick itself is simple. You get a free trial whenever you call from a new number. So I thought, what if I always called from a new number. So I researched around and found the best means of specifying your phone number whenever dialing. The cheapest method is through a service called zenofon. It has a free trial, so you can use it for 30 minutes without having to pay for anything.

Zenofon is extremely cheap. It's a penny per minute (0.01 cents). So that means 60 minutes = 60 cents. There is also no upfront cost involved, it's completely pay as you go. The idea here is to use a new number each time you call up the chatline. You can simply use this random number generator to get a new number quickly (strip the area code).

To give you an idea of the savings, here is a chart comparing the standard quest rates versus the zenofon rates:

Minutes Quest Zenofon
90 $29 $1
160 $49 $1.60
420 $99 $4.20
740 $149 $7.40
1045 $199 $10.45

The only caveat of using this trick, is that you have 60 minutes (if using quest) to try and meet your special somebody. If you run out of time, you will be forced to sign back in and create a temporary profile under a new number, which takes about 2 minutes once you got the pattern down.