Is Pure’s subscription worth it compared to AdultFriendFinder’s Gold membership?

In the world of online hookup services, two names are earning a reputation for punching well above their weight: AdultFriendFinder and Pure. The first is a web-based hookup site — the world’s oldest dedicated hookup site, in fact — while the second is an app that has been around since 2013 but has largely flown under the radar until recently. 

Both services are kink- and LGBTQ-friendly with large, built-in communities eager to explore sexuality, whether that’s over a text conversation or an in-person meetup. And more to the point: both services lock a great deal of their functionality behind a paid membership, so if you want to get the most out of your experience, you’re going to need to make a financial commitment. 

Here’s how the paid membership tiers compare between AdultFriendFinder and Pure, and whether or not we think upgrading is worth your investment.

AFF vs. Pure Membership comparison

Free membership offerings

Before you can appreciate each service’s paid offerings, you need to understand what they offer non-paying members, since the value proposition depends on whether or not the free service meets your needs. 

In the case of AFF, an unpaid membership comes with some severe limitations: you can’t view other members’ full profiles, and you can’t message anyone one-on-one, so your time on the site will largely be restricted to the community areas (message boards, live webcam feeds, and erotic stories), which still offer plenty of fun activities and ways to interact with other users, but ultimately make building connection much more difficult.

Pure takes a similar approach, granting limited app functionality to free users, including posting ads and sending likes, but not chatting one-on-one with matches or sending them photos and videos. There’s also a limit on the number of ads you can view or post on a free membership, similar to how Tinder caps the number of right-swipes you can use in a 24-hour time period. 

From a value perspective, the free AFF membership offers much more functionality, though both have the same restrictions on one-on-one interactions. There is an exception worth mentioning, though: women on Pure start at a higher membership tier, allowing them to match and message other users without a paid subscription.

Winner: AdultFriendFinder

Paid membership perks

If you’re resigned to paying for the pleasure of your online hookup service, it’s worth seeing which one offers greater value. 

In the case of an AdultFriendFinder Gold membership, you can expect some serious perks beyond just unlocking one-on-one chatting. For one thing, you’ll get a special badge marking you off as a Gold member, helping you to stand out in the search. Additionally, you’ll unlock the ability to view photos and videos in HD, a great quality-of-life improvement over the grainy baseline offerings, as well as a more comprehensive search function that lets you filter profiles by more criteria, including kinks. 

A Gold membership even unlocks new areas of the site to explore, such as the Sex Academy, which is like an online library designed to help you level up your bedroom skills.

Pure’s paid membership functions in much the same way, unlocking one-on-one conversations with other users (by far the most useful feature), while also removing the caps on how many ads you can post or how many people you can talk to in a 24-hour window. There are also some cool additional features, like the ability to enter incognito mode, where other users can’t see that you’re online until you’ve replied to a message, which helps add even more anonymity to an already stealthy app. 

One feature now conspicuously missing from Pure’s paid membership is “Devil’s Bones,” which used to connect you with an anonymous chat partner via voice chat. It was extremely popular and a truly novel invention on Pure’s part, but later versions of the Apple App Store terms of service made it necessary to deactivate it. 

Winner: Tie

Success rate

Nobody downloads a hookup app to endlessly chat, right? If you actually want to convert your paid membership into IRL hookups, both AFF and Pure offer you different odds, but much of that depends on where you live. 

In terms of total membership, for example, Pure can boast just over 15 million users worldwide, which is certainly nothing to sneer at, but AdultFriendFinder has a whopping 80 million users worldwide, so from a numbers perspective, AFF clearly has an edge. But there’s a strong geographic concentration among Pure’s members that isn’t as visible among AFF members.

Because AdultFriendFinder is a self-contained online community, it attracts many more people from rural areas and small towns, where there isn’t a hookup or kink scene to speak of. On the other hand, Pure users concentrate in cities, and especially large metropolitan cities like New York, London, and Berlin, where there are pre-existing kink scenes. This problem compounds with Pure because it uses geolocation to populate your ad feed, so if you live far from major population centers, the app will be inherently less effective for you. 

That having been said, if you’re judging these services based on their ability to match you up with another person for an IRL hookup, Pure’s culture of kink and seizing the moment are both powerful catalysts.

Winner: Pure

If you’re curious about Pure but don’t want to make a major financial commitment, we strongly recommend testing the waters with one of their weekly membership plans (prices vary by location, but expect to pay around $15 for a single week). Not only will that experience teach you how to use the app, but it will also give you a sense of how popular Pure is in your vicinity.