Tingler Reviews 9

Reply from Tingler

Sep 10, 2025

Hi Paul Saunders,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We completely understand your frustration — we started Tingler as a free-to-chat community because we wanted to make it as easy as possible for people with herpes to connect without barriers.

The reality is that running and maintaining a safe, supportive space has real costs. On top of that, new online safety laws — which we welcome as they help keep dating safe — also bring significant compliance expenses. Advertising is also essential to bring in new members and keep the community growing, which adds further costs.

We’ve always strived to be transparent. In the past, we were able to offer free chat thanks to our Premium Subscribers. Unfortunately, not enough users were subscribing to cover our increasing costs, and without introducing Pay to Chat, Tingler would simply become unviable.

Adding a paid element allows us to keep Tingler sustainable, improve the platform, and remain ad-free from intrusive banners or data selling. That said, we believe Tingler still offers great value — our subscription is less than a third of what many competitor sites charge.

Tingler will always remain about more than just being “another dating app.” Our mission is to provide a respectful, stigma-free environment where people can build real connections — something that many larger platforms don’t prioritise.

We truly value your feedback and are always looking for ways to balance accessibility with sustainability. We hope you’ll stick with us and see the improvements we’re working hard to deliver.

– The Tingler Team

Reply from Tingler

Updated Sep 10, 2025

Thanks for your review Trevor. We do from time to time run ads in New Zealand to try and bring in new local NZ'ers. Hopefully we can get a few more members more local to you. In the meantime please feel free to spread the word on any forums you are on :)

Reply from Tingler

Dec 16, 2021

Sorry to read that you have not had much success finding a match. We have had many successful matches over the years and when we hear about these it always warms our hearts and makes us realise that the hard work we put into building a site that is accessible and allows users to connect with others without paying extortionate dating site fees is worth the effort. Therefore it does sadden us to hear when people have not had the success that they had hoped for.

From our experience we've found that profiles with good quality photos and a detailed description of the type of partner they are seeking are often the ones that are most likely to find a successful match.

Reply from Tingler

Dec 16, 2021

Thanks for taking the time to review Tingler, and sorry to read that you've had a bad experience on the site. We really do appreciate all feedback good or bad as it helps us focus on which features we need to introduce next. When we first launched the site we found that our reporting functionality found on each profile together with an analysis of certain registration metrics was sufficient for keeping fake profiles off of our site. Our goal has always been to keep the sign up process as frictionless as possible, however with the growing success of the site and increasing number of users as we branch out to new countries it has now become time for us to introduce a verification process which we have now rolled out a few weeks ago. This mean that for users to earn a verified status they have to upload a gesture based selfie that matches their profile pics. This helps us ensure that the picture in the profile matches the person using the account.

Reply from Tingler

Sep 25, 2021

Hi Tess,

Sorry to read you had issues browsing profiles.

From your description of your experience it sounds like when you registered you must have inadvertently registered your profile as a male profile which would explain why you could only view female profile.

Like many other dating sites, the gender criteria for browsing features is defaulted based on a users Gender and Sexual Orientation. For example, a heterosexual male user will have search results filtered to female profiles.

Tingler

Reply from Tingler

Feb 24, 2021

Hi Coral.

Sorry you've been having issues signing in to the site. We completely understand how frustrating it must be when you register for a new site and cannot then sign in. Based on what you have described it sounds as if for some reason the username you are signing it with does not exist. It's happened once or twice in the past that an error has occurred when creating a new account, and this only becomes apparent with trying to subsequently sign in. The resolution to this is to create a new account. For times when this does occur, we updated our sign in page to inform users that their account creation has failed and that they need to create a new account.

We try to answer all customer contact us queries, but sometimes this is not possible as some users inadvertently forget to provide us with a reply email address.

Please contact us at contact@tingler.co if you need further help signing up to Tingler. We like to apologise for the inconvenience on getting you into our site but hope to see you there soon.

Tingler

Reply from Tingler

Jul 3, 2020

We carefully monitor profiles for any that are suspected of being fake, you'd be suprised how easy they are to spot, and we also have a report button for users to report any questionable profiles. We are pretty lucky in that we have a great community of users who will quickly point out any profiles that need dealing with, and luckily we've not had many fake profiles that needed attention.

Reply from Tingler

Jul 3, 2020

Hi, Dating can sometimes be a fickle game. We find that the most successful profiles are those that have more than one profile photo and also those that have longer About Me details in their profile blurb.

Tingler is a free to chat site as we wanted to make it as accessible as possible to those seeking support or looking to meet new people. Our profile listing page for free users is listed in random order. It may be that some of the users that you have messaged have not been on the site for a few weeks. If you want to make sure you are messaging active users, the default listing order for our Premium members is in order of those logged on. These profiles usually respond within a few hours.