LetsMeet has just turned six years old! We'd like to thank all our users for their ongoing support over the years. I'd like to say that I hope you'll be with us for many more, but the purpose of this site is to help you meet the one you want to be with, so I'd rather say I hope you meet your soul mate, and tell your friends about us!

From the outset, we always wanted to be a completely free dating site. Most websites lure the user into registering for free, but then charge you to be able to send messages. In fact, most won't even let you respond to a paying subscriber without you paying yourself. In my opinion they're dinosaurs waiting to go extinct. Charging for web use is an ancient business model, one I'd personally like to see disappear over the next few years.

It's already begun happening, a few years ago there was a site called SA Reunited. Basically it allowed you to put your profile online and link it to your school or university. This was great, finally a way to keep in touch with all your old friends. They made one mistake again though. Like all the dating sites of the time there was a charge to send messages.

Apparently they had over 800 000 members listed, a database of significant value, and now they're gone. The reason? Facebook. Facebook offered essentially the same service, but for free, making their money (and we're talking billions...) out of advertising. In the end, SA Reunited was forced to change their business model to be a free site, but it was too little too late, while they were sleeping facebook took all their profits.

It never had to be that way, if they'd started with an advertising model rather than a pay model they might have made less money initially, far less probably, but they could have been the facebook of South Africa, and who knows, might have been able to branch out to other countries too. It's a real lesson for local pay sites.

That example basically leads us back here. The dinosaurs of South African online dating have been taking money from gullible South Africans for too long with their "register for free" and then pay to send messages con. To do this we need your help. Please tell your friends about us, click on the facebook like button above or just let them know when you chat to the. We're nearing the 13000 active user point, which I think is quite exciting, and hopefully soon we'll overtake the bigger pay sites!

All the best for 2012, may it be a year of love, laughter and happiness!