CougarLife.com Dating Site Review—Is Cougar Life Worth It?
There are not so many cougar dating sites, and Cougar Life seemed one of the most promising one. We decided to join it to find out whether it works for guys who love cougars and male sugar babies looking for hot female benefactors. The first thing we noticed was that it looks like Ashley Madison and works pretty much like Ashley. Did that turn out to be good or bad news? Is CougarLife worth it? We tested the platform and are now ready to share our thoughts with you!
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Cougar Life Overview
| 📈Visits per month: | 323K |
| ✅ Profile verification: | Yes |
| ❤️ Reply rate: | 87% |
| 🌍 Most used in: | US, UK, and Canada |
Who Is Cougar Life for?
- Younger men who want to meet older women and start a casual relationship
- Older women who’d like to start non-exclusive relationships with younger men
Who Shouldn’t Use This Online Dating Site
- People looking for serious relationships, love, and marriage
- Men looking for a completely online dating site to meet cougars
Like on most similar websites, the number of women on Cougar Life is lower, and the administration encourages cougars to join the community by making messaging free. So, an upgrade is optional, and there are hundreds of thousands of profiles of younger cubs to chat with.
All adult men can create Cougar Life accounts for free. After they sign up, they can use search, view profiles, and see public photos without paying. If they want to contact a cougar, they’ll need to buy credits and spend 10 of them on unlocking a conversation. The same goes for unlocking a private album.
THINGS WE LIKED
- Polished design, user-friendly interface
- Reasonable prices, no need to pay for each message you send to others
- Active communities, one of the online dating sites where most members reply to your messages
- Cougar Life is free for women, which attracts more cougars
- Great online messenger and Priority messages to stand out
THINGS WE DIDN'T LIKE
- Not-so-detailed profiles (most members are protecting their privacy, but it still worsens the experience)
- No free messaging
- Not all older women a man can meet their want to become sugar mommas
Popular Sugar Momma Profiles
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Cougar Life Prices & Free Options
Just like most other online dating services, Cougar Life has both premium and standard features that all members can use. We were testing this website both as a Standard user and a Premium user, and we're going to share our impressions and findings below.
| Basic package | $29.99 for 100 credits | $0.30/credit |
| Classic package | $99.99 for 500 credits | $0.19/credit |
| Elite package | $149.99 for 1K credits | $0.15/credit |
Free Version of Cougar Life and Standard Features
The truth is on Cougar Life, nearly all features, except for a few the most useful and important ones, are free. As a non-paying member, we could:
- Create an account, add public photos and create Secret Albums
- Use advanced search filters
- View all the profiles
- Contact support
- Send winks and likes, add members' profiles to Favorite
- Use support service (which turned out to be a high-quality one)
How does Cougar Life work? When a member joins the community, they can learn about the site and its members and pretty much everything, and we weren't an exception to this rule. It's a benefit just because it gives a user enough time to realize whether they'd like to spend their money here or not. We were satisfied with what and how we saw on this cougar dating site—all the features worked properly, and there were pretty many attractive users, so we moved on to the account upgrade.
Premium Version of Cougar Life and Paid Features
There are three credit packages, and almost the only way to spend your credits is to send Cougar Life messages (there is also a profile highlight feature, but it’s available only to those who buy the most expensive package).
Members can spend them on the following premium features:
- Sending a message and unlocking a conversation—5 credits
- Sending a Priority Email—10 credits
There is no such thing as Cougar Life subscription plans, but at least on this site, you can unlock conversations, which is cheaper than paying for each message sent. So, we decided to purchase the Classic package, and it was enough to start 50 conversations (we could even buy less, but if you are going to use this site for a long time, you should probably buy an Elite package, especially considering your profile will also be highlighted).
So, was it worth the money? We said it was enough to start 50 conversations, but of course, we didn't spend our credits only on initiating them. We also had a good profile and got pretty many messages on Cougar Life, but in fact, it doesn't make much difference as opening a collect message still costs 5 credits. We also sent around 10 Priority Mails to test the feature, and it worked. We sent the first 3 Mails and, in all cases, got replies, and all the next Priority Mails were sent to users who didn't respond after we sent them a regular message. In 4 cases, it worked. We initiated around 30 conversations over nearly 4 weeks and we still have over a hundred credits, so in terms of prices, Cougar Life is one of the best sites. After all, we spent $100, which is the cost of a 1-month premium plan on many other niche online dating sites.
Registration
How to sign up for Cougar Life? It was very fast for us. To see it yourself, you only need to follow our steps and do the following:
- Browse the site
- Fill in the form (you’ll need not only to create a username and choose the date of birth but also enter your zip code, and we recommend you to provide a valid one—you’ll see the matches near you)
- Provide some more information (relationship status, height, weight)
- Confirm your email address
That’s all—now you have your Cougar Life account and can view the profiles, just like we did. Fortunately, there was no mobile verification or anything like that when we joined the site—it’s not only about the time you spend providing all that data and clicking all those links but also about privacy and safety. You won’t sign up for this dating site without a valid email address, though, and in our opinion, it’s enough.
Search & Filters
Again, Cougar Life is similar to Ashley Madison, and it also has the Discover feature. There were enough filters to find a good match, but some other cougar dating sites offer even more. Nevertheless, on CougarLife.com, we could search for members by the following criteria:
- Age range
- Location
- Relationship goals
- Photos (ladies with public photos, private photos)
- Body type
- Ethnic background
- Perfect/suitable partner
Still, on this online dating site, we needed to look through profiles manually, choosing the best matches. Fortunately, most users have profile photos, and we could see if there was more than one picture on search results. We didn’t apply super-specific filters and also searched for members of any age. Well, we still met a lot of attractive women on the Cougar Life website.
Who are the Cougar Life Members?
Who can you meet on this cougar dating site? We signed up as a younger man looking for older women, and we’ve met a lot of them on the site. The average age of the sugar mamas we saw was about 50, but we met younger ladies in their 40s too, as well as older women in their 60s and 70s as well. According to SimilarWeb, the site has about 130k monthly visits. Yes, that’s less impressive than tens of millions of visits on popular dating sites, but we should also consider that’s a niche platform, and many sugar momma websites have about 30 thousand visits, so yes, the Cougar Life community is a pretty large one.
Profiles
The good news is that Cougar Life profiles are pretty detailed (more detailed than on Ashley Madison, despite the fact that many female members are married). We met a lot of attractive women, and that’s the good news, too, and the majority were honest about what they were looking for (spoiler alert—they were looking for younger guys and some fun).
So, here is what we saw in a regular Cougar Life member’s profile:
- Public photos
- Self-description (mostly short ones, describing some interests, views of life, or relationship goals)
- The headline (usually tells what a member is looking for)
- Vitals (age, height, weight, status on the platform)
The profiles of younger men are pretty like profiles of mature women—male members provide some basic details, add a few photos, and that’s enough to start looking for hot matches (at least it worked for us).
Popular Sugar Cub Profiles
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Communication Features
There is not much to say about how younger men and older women interact on this site. Members can do the following:
- Send regular messages
- Send priority messages
- Like profiles
We can’t say that we needed more than that, though. The thing is, Cougar Life dating platform is not one of the sites that make you stay at all costs—you meet a lady, and if you both like each other, you just keep talking on WhatsApp or Instagram or any other messenger/social networking site.
By the way, it’s a great way to get rid of any doubts. If you want to make sure that one of the younger men/mature women you’ve met on Cougar Life is real/looks like their photos, just have a conversation in Zoom.
Our Experience on Cougar Life
Cougar #1
C1 was the first woman we chatted with on this online dating website, and as far as we understood later, she wasn't the typical user of Cougar Life. We talked about regular things like hobbies, travels, interests—that took around 2 days, and she was often online, so we didn't leave the site to keep talking somewhere else. After we got to know each other a bit better, we asked that "What you are looking for" question. She was happily married, had 3 kids and 2 grandsons (that's totally okay on Cougar Life—this is a non-judgmental community, and pretty many cougars have husbands or boyfriends) but she was looking for an exclusive relationship with her new young boyfriend. She said she likes to be the only woman in the life of men and doesn't think that someone must be the only man for her. Of course, she wasn't looking for compensated dating and pay to a man. Well, it's common on the site, too, but we just chatted a few times more, and after she realized that's not what we were looking for, she just faded away.
Cougar #2
C2 was one of the women who clearly indicated she's into sugar dating in her profile. We sent her a regular message first, but she didn't reply, so we decided to spend some credits on a Priority Mail. That turned out to be the right thing to do—as we found out later, she receives around 50 messages a day, most from guys who think that she'll pay for dating online or those who just don't meet her criteria, which, by the way, are clearly described in her profile, too. Fortunately, we matched her basic expectations about a guy, so we kept talking. She was single, had grown-up kids, and was interested in long-term relationships. We briefly discussed the terms of possible arrangements, and she said she doesn't mind paying a guy $1,500 as a monthly allowance plus covering gym expenses, and she doesn't mind him having hookups but doesn't want him to have a girlfriend. Sounded like a great deal for a man we’ve “created”, and we suppose a lot of men would be interested in seeing this lady.
Experts' Opinion on Cougar Life
Editor
It may seem that Cougar Life is just another dating Internet site with some standard features, and it’s pretty much a regular dating platform. However, it has one obvious yet very important advantage—it’s created only for mature women and younger men who want to date cougars. It works like a dating platform for people seeking casual relationships, as well as a sugar dating website for those who are looking for mutually beneficial arrangements. There are fewer sugar mommas and sugar cubs than members who’re looking for regular dating, but for them, it still works better than regular sugar websites, where most members are female young sugar babies and older male benefactors. Also, it’s not the online dating website where people actually build a relationship—there’s no video chat, but you don’t have to use it. In most cases, men and women here just meet, chat for a few days, keep communicating using different free messages and/or meet in real life.
How to Use the Cougar Life Site? Tips From Our Experts
We spent pretty much time, and here are some things we wish we noticed at the very beginning:
- Be specific in your profile. If you are asked what you are looking for, don't choose options like 'Whatever excites me'. It turned out to reduce the number of replies you get from others.
- Privacy matters, but photos matter, too. Don't add one profile picture—others know that it's much easier to steal/generate/upload one photo of a person. Add at least three, and you'll get twice as many messages as before.
- Send likes. Not all girls will reach you after that, but considering that messaging isn't free for men, even if a person just likes you back, you'll know for sure you won't spend 10 credits on reaching someone who's not interested in a conversation.
Safety
How does Cougar Life work when it comes to safety? Well, the administration of this niche dating website cares about members' privacy and safety. Someone who hasn't created their Cougar life account can't view the profiles. There are private photos that members can share only with users they already know. In addition, there is a safe payment method (PCI DSS validated), and all the data that members provide are protected and can't be disclosed to third parties that don't offer any services to the users of Cougar Life.
Final Thoughts
What's the verdict of our Cougar Life review? It's one of the online dating services for a specific group of people, which is great as it allows narrowing the search and getting exactly what you were looking for without making hundreds of failed attempts to find the right person. There are some standard features and some special tools that help men stand out, and generally speaking, if you're a cougar or a man who likes cougars or if you're a male sugar baby, the site is worth using.
Our sources of information:
Is it possible to find a male SB if I’m over 55 or is Cougar Life just for young cougars and sugar mommas?
There are no upper limit restrictions for female users on the platform. From our experience on Cougar Life, we’ve seen many SM profiles of women between the age of 50-60.
Don’t worry about the age, dear, I’ve been sugar dating for over 10 years now and I know that male sugar babies don’t care about the numbers if they have a mutual attraction with sugar mommas. I’ve been using Cougar Life for almost a year now and I’ve had many fun dates. Just use the search filters to find your type and get the word out!
I started using Cougar Life a couple of months ago after my girlfriend and I broke up. She had been holding me back for some time and I was finally able to find the freedom that I needed. Now, six months later, I have a handful of amazing relationships with cougars and they completely changed my life. I’m now sure that having a better quality of life is possible when you’re using a cougar site. Some women didn’t reply to my messages and I still don’t know why, but with a bit of persistence I’ve got three quite hot sugar mommas.
I’ve been using Cougar Life for quite a while now and I’ve never had any issues with it. The design is literally polished and the prices are reasonable for me, and best of all, I don’t need to pay for each message you send to others. And most importantly Cougar Life has a really good choice of potential dates who are interested in real-life meetings and don’t care about the age gap.