Is eharmony free? What you can do without a credit card.

Are you curious about eharmony but not ready to give out your credit card information? You’re not alone, and the good news is that the dating site is fairly generous with the range it offers free members.

In fact, almost no user interface feature is completely restricted to paid accounts, so if you want to get a sense of how the site works and the emphasis it places on match testing, testing the waters with a free account is a good idea.

Here’s everything you can and can’t do with a free eharmony account:

What you can do with a free account

Create and complete a profile

With a free account, you can create a profile, upload photos, fill in important facts about yourself, from whether or not you have children to what you like to do in your free time, and even take eharmony’s personality quiz, which is used to help compare you to other members and give your potential match a “compatibility score.”

Use (other) search methods

In the Discover section of the site, eharmony will present profiles of different songs that match your match criteria, helping you narrow down your search to what’s important. For free members, however, there is a limited number of filters you can use.

These include height range, age range, and whether or not the person smokes or has/want children. When you upgrade to a premium account, however, you’ll unlock more filtering options, including nationality, religion, income, and education level.

And most frustrating of all, while free account members can choose which one regions of the country who want to view profiles from it, they cannot filter these profiles remotely, and paying members can choose to be shown only people within a certain distance of their location.

Read profile history

With a free account, you don’t get full access to people’s profiles, but you it can be you often get a more complete understanding of who they are as a person, as key details such as their hobbies, marital status, gender, location, height and body type, and even dating preferences are visible.

Verify your account

To verify your eharmony account, follow these steps:

• Click the SMS verification button on your profile

• Enter your mobile number and click “Start SMS verification”

• You will receive a verification code by text

• Enter the verification code on your eharmony notification screen

If you follow the steps above, you will get a verification mark on your profile, which is like a small trust vote to help guys who are likely to trust the authenticity of your account.

Find the same

Free accounts are just as visible in the Find section as paid accounts, and are allowed to like and dislike others, so don’t be surprised if you start getting notifications that other people you like have reciprocated your interest.

There’s a catch, though… there’s still a lot of you I won’t do it with a free account.

What you can do with a free account

View profile pictures

If you like people who don’t see them, this may not be a problem, but someone who is used to online dating still wants to see what his likeness or similar may look like, and harmony blurs profile pictures in non-paying accounts, it is not enough to hide the picture completely – you can determine the shape of the face and even the color of the hair, for example – but it is enough to increase the mystery.

Start conversations

As a non-paying member, you can send a message whenever you like an account, which is a great way to improve your chances of a match, and you can send a match on Icebreaker, eharmony’s interactive photo matching game to help start a conversation, but you won’t actually be able to send back and forth messages without giving up your credit card information.

Even worse, if you get a message from someone who liked your profile, you won’t be able to read it without upgrading your account, which can be a hassle when the person you’ve been eyeing finally shows up in your inbox.

This is why free eharmony accounts are a “trap,” because while there are a fair number of things you can do on the site for free, getting the most out of your efforts really needs to be optimized.