Dating site scripts?
 

Anyone know of/have experience with buying a professional script?

I haven't bought one, but have been looking. Aint too much good out there off the shelf. Probably be best to go with a custom script.

Yeah, I'm just at the point though where before I commit a coder to 3 months of fucking around (x2 no doubt) to create a kickass custom script..that im checking out all the options.. If there is a great script out there, we may just use it.. I guess at this point it's about allocation of resources vs returns on investments. Dating for us isn't a proven part of our business like the rest of it our inhouse guys can be working on instead.

but if theres nothing out there then we've got no choice.

Don't know if you came across these yet. I used to own a site with webscribble's script on it. It was okay. Might be able to tweek it and make it better. The second one I came across later and liked but have not tried it out. Relationship will build a site for you and all you have to do is promote it but they want like 5K up front. If you want a co-brand I use iwantu.
http://dotnetdating.com/default.aspx?group_id=2
http://webscribble.com/products/webdate/index.shtml
http://www.relationshipexchange.com/index.cfm

there are no ready made scripts, trust me I looked for quite some time. Webscribble sucks, zend encoded, checks his server for license among a bunch of other nonsense, you need custom, no way around it. Why use a cobrand also? That defeats the purpose, you want to see the "real" numbers and have full control. Custom, no other way

Guys

My personal experience is you are better off building your own than depending on scripts.
it took me almost a year to get mine completed. ( may be I tossed with ideas and programmers too much)

Once you build you are also going to spend quite big bucks trying to get the sign ups :)).

If you want quick dollars, get hold of an already established dating service, private lable and promote.

If you want bigger ROI , do it your self. But be prepared to invest some serious cash.

Yeah i don't want to cobrand.. may as well just send sign ups directly.. but you're telling me that the pages and pages of dating scripts are all shite?
www.aewebworks.com and all those guys in google?

I'm not too worried about signups and traffic.. We wouldn't be looking into it if we didn't have our own traffic. But at the same time I don't want to spend a year going back and forth over the script.. even though i know it will be better in the end.. there comes a point where we may as well just add another paysite to the program for a fraction of the time and hassle.
Not against putting in the hard custom coding hardyards.. we've spent a grip on custom coding.. just i thought we might get away with it this time :)

aedating has serious support issues from what I have heard, also was zend encoded at one time, may be not now. AEwebworks is the absolute best off the shelf script online, I have looked at atleast 3 dozen scripts. 99% all crap. You dont even know if the code is good, you gonna go spend a ton of time rewriting it? I think you know the answer, your an intelligent guy :winkwink:

The problem is even if you do a custom script you have no members. Why would someone sign up? You could target major cities then work out from there but even if you have 20,000 US members after spending a fortune to get them you'll be lucky if each member has 30-50 choices to pick from within 20 miles of them. They join your site for free and say wow I can pay for Match.com and there are 1000s of mebers within 20 miles of me. Why should I give these guys my money? If you can answer that question then you will make it but only if you can.

Hi..

Bluewire Studio is actually looking for a webmaster to help us out in development of our next script. A lot of times we will develop our commercial scripts alongside a webmaster who is looking for the purpose of that script...We do it customly how he/she wants it and then we use a 'version' of it for our commercial release. In exchange, we give the webmaster 50% off the cost of development. So basically just split development costs. If you're looking for a custom dating site script...This is one heck of an opportunity to get it done at a decent price

We have a 6 man programming team. Either 2 or 3 of which would be devoted to this project over a 6-8 week span. We are looking to implement a flashcom based chat, instant messaging, cam2cam, and mic2mic system...Much like the one we just did in our CamGirl Pay2Play script that many of you have seen. And for those of you who have seen the beta...you know bluewire means business :thumbsup


If this interests you, hit me up

Because we're not trying to be everything to everyone. We have one of the best gay fisting sites on the net. How many people out of those 20k are going to be into that? scatter gunning is not what we're about.
We've already got a bunch of fisting afficiandos that love it enough to pay to see it all in the one spot. All our niched dating service would be doing at first is letting them tap into other members. Sure the next step is to promote the niched site outside your own traffic and eventually you tie all the niches up into one main site from the niched satellites.. but thats how we're approaching it, from niched communities where we already own the seed traffic upwards.

doing niche dating will be a plus. I wish you all the luck in the world. I'm not trying to be negative just trying to point out how expensive it can be.

Negativity is good :) trust me I know how expensive doing this shit can be, I wouldn't even be looking into it if we didn't already own a backbone of traffic and the ability to integrate dating however we want into our sites. And i do realise that even that isn't enough to make it succeed.. it just reduces the chance of failure a somewhat... and greases up the annoying starting friction.
I thank you for your valid points though, I really do, someone with experience can even pick apart what im currently describing and it won't bother me, it will help me find the exact right way to move ahead.. unlike some, I like constructive criticism.. I haven't done everything in the biz and im more than willing to learn from the mistakes/successes of others, it beats learning from mistakes of your own. :)

:) ae isn't zend encoded - just talking to a rep now.