Costs:

• This site is a 100% FREE site with full features and no Premium membership offered.
• Premium memberships were discontinued at the time of writing.  Please check site to confirm.

Features:

• Save Your Favorites
• Easily mark off your favorite members, or those you are not interested in.
• Send flirts (like winks) to other members so they know you are interested.
• Voice and Video Profiles available to post.
• See or listen to other members' video and / or voice profiles.
• Instant Messaging
• Correspond while still maintaining your privacy.
• Interest Groups (forums)
• Participate in online message boards and join local interest groups.
• Chat Rooms
• Get involved in live chat rooms or have a private chat.
• Local restaurant discounts (of up to 60%) offered through the site.
• Singles Events posted for your location.
• Singles Travel is offered as a nice way to meet other members.
• Dating Advice is supplied if you're so inclined .
• Read dating tips and articles from the site's experts.
• Multilingual Content. The main menu and portions of the website are available in 35 different languages.

Performing a Search:

• A full search facility is available, allowing members to search by:
  • gender
  • sexual orientation
  • age range
  • relationship desired
  • race
  • religion
  • relationship status
  • location to within 10 miles of where you live
  • whether the member has pictures posted
  • ethnicity
  • smoking
  • drinking
  • height
  • education
  • children
  • body type

Editor's Verdict:

MetroDate is a free dating site with a bright idea: it focuses on offering its service in medium to large metropolitan cities located in the U.S.  Our searches are based in Orlando, which will provide a good test in a smallish city by national standards.  It will be interesting and instructive to see how well MetroDate.com meets the needs of its members, as it will help to establish a benchmark for cities which have populations under a million.
 
The site itself  has a modern layout with the tabs for categories and drop-down menus.  It's easy to work and facilitates quick navigation around the site. MetroDate is absolutely loaded with little extras.  There's a lot here to build a membership around, including discussion groups (forums) that feature about 30 categories. (There is a useful information box telling you how many members have posted to the forum and how many of these bloggers/posters are local to you). The website design is very well thought out and executed.  The chat rooms are well-done: there's an optional Spanish speaking room for those who need it and an adult chat room if that's more appealing. This has resulted in a bunch of 'regulars' using the chat rooms.

Our benchmark search resulted in 21 members' listings.  The listings contained a good range of information: age, sexual orientation, ethnic group, religion,  height, children status, smoker, location, and the number of photos posted.  The photos were of good size and quality.  We were a little surprised we couldn't enlarge the photos, but they were of a good size to start with so it's not a deal-breaker.  One thing that deserves to be pointed out is that of the 21 listings we got, just 10 had accompanying photos. That's not an encouraging number and may indicate a dating membership that's less engaged. (We'll comment further on this later in the review).  Disappointingly, there is no last log-in feature here for indicating when a member was last on site.  Last log-in gives us a definitive way to judge a site's activity levels.  Without that, we are left to make deductive judgments and pick up clues in other ways.

MetroDate has its own version of personality analysis that is the current hot thing for a site to offer. No computer-generated matching results from it, however. The answers are made available on a members profiles.  Even though we'd prefer a computerized matching option, which isn't available here, having the results posted in members' profiles is a nice way to get to know a member better.

One of the ways MetroDate generates revenue for its free dating site is by carrying ads for Mate1.com, eHarmony, Dating for Seniors and other dating sites that rotate in with ads.  You might view this as a reasonable way to offer a quality, free service and maintain a profitable business.

Another of the niceties is MetroDate.com's connection with the Singles Events and Social Planner that is common in most cities, but is not heavily promoted on the net. Let's face it, you are going to eventually meet  the person if you care enough to get to know them, and that  usually means a public meeting, in a restaurant  perhaps, or a coffeehouse. So these singles events offer an opportunity to meet up with others or just find a mutually appealing location and meet there.  The singles events can help with ideas and locations even if you'd rather not join that group.  They do promote businesses, but some are very suitable for dating.

To put this site in perspective, what we have here is a fine social site that is a dating site.  We see signs of activity which is great.  The site is 100% free, so there are no restrictions on communicating through e-mail and full access to photos, profiles and chat rooms for all members.  The playing field is as level as it can be. You could simply join and see what happens. There are no guarantees that you'll find a great mate but you'll know in a reasonable time-frame if it's working for you or not.  We would give it a thumbs up for dating if we could confirm the members log-in activity, but without that handy tool you must learn by doing.  We would guess the results would be mixed.  Some good some not so good.

MetroDate has a warm friendly feel to its site and membership.  That's a good thing that can't be manufactured in a day.  Even if it produces very little for your love life, we speculate  it will likely be a positive experience for you socially.  We think it deserves a good trial run to see if it suits you as a dater.  

Click on the button below to check out MetroDate.com for yourself...