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

Curious about eharmony but not yet ready to dish out your credit card details? You're not alone, and the good news is that the dating site is reasonably generous in the scope it gives to non-paying members. 

In fact, there's almost no aspect of the user interface that is totally restricted to paid accounts, so if you want to get a sense of how the site operates and the emphasis it places on matchmaking assessments, testing the waters with a free account is a great idea. 

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

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Credit: eharmony

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What you can do with a free account

Create and fill out a profile

With a free account, you can create a profile, upload photos, fill out 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 proprietary personality quiz, which the site uses to compare you with other members and assign your potential match a "compatibility score."

Apply (some) search criteria

In the Discover section of the site, eharmony will present you with the profiles of various singles that fit your match criteria, helping you narrow down your search for a significant other. For free members, however, there are only a limited number of filters that you can apply. 

These include height range, age range, and whether or not someone is a smoker or has/wants children. If you upgrade to a premium account, however, you'll unlock many more filter options, including ethnicity, religion, income range, and education level.

And most frustratingly of all, while free account members can select which regions of their country they want to view profiles from, they cannot filter these profiles by distance, whereas paying members can elect to be shown only people within a certain distance of their location. 

Read profile bios

With a free account, you don't get full access to people's profiles, but you can generally get a very thorough understanding of who they are as a person, since key details like their hobbies, marital status, gender, location, height and body type, and even dating preferences are all visible. 

Verify your account

To get your eharmony account verified, follow these steps:

• Click on the SMS Verification button on your profile

• Enter your mobile phone number and click "Start the SMS verification"

• You will receive a verification code via text

• Enter the verification code in your eharmony prompt screen

If you follow the above steps, you'll earn a verification symbol on your profile, which is like a little vote of confidence to help potential matches trust in the authenticity of your account. 

Get matches

Free accounts are every bit as visible in the Discovery section as paid accounts, and they're allowed to like and dislike others, so don't be surprised when you start getting notifications that other people you've liked have returned your interest. 

There is a catch, though … there's still a lot you can't do with a free account.

What you can't do with a free account

View profile photos

If you're into blind dating, this might not be an issue, but the average online dater still wants to see what their match or potential match looks like, and eharmony blurs the profile photos for non-paying accounts, not enough to totally hide the photo — you can usually make out face shape and even hair color, for example — but enough to heighten the mystery. 

Initiate chats

As a non-paying member, you can send a message whenever you like an account, which is a great way to improve your odds of a match, and you can send matches an Icebreaker, eharmony's interactive photo-pairing 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 details.  

Worse, still, if you are sent a message by someone who happened to like your profile, you won't be able to read it without upgrading your account, which can be quite tortuous when the person you've been eyeing finally shows up in your inbox.

This is why eharmony's free accounts are really a "trap," because even though there's a fair amount of stuff you can do on the site for free, benefitting from your efforts really requires an upgrade.