| Platform | Region Focus | Characteristics | Price Example |
| SofiaDate | Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus) | Connects men with Eastern European women known for beauty, intellect, traditional values. | Subscription: $30/month, Credits: $0.50/credit |
| SakuraDate | Asia (Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, China) | Dedicated to introducing men to Asian women renowned for grace, compassion, family values. | Subscription: $25/month, Credits: $0.60/credit |
| LaDate | Latin America (Colombia, Brazil, Mexico) | Focuses on Latin women known for being passionate, energetic, family-centric. | Subscription: $35/month, Credits: $0.40/credit |
| TheLuckyDate | Global | Offers a global platform for men to meet foreign women from any region, promoting connections without geographical limitations. | Flexible payment: $20-$50/month, Credits: Varies |
Mail order bride marriages have been popular in the U.S. for centuries, even since the settling of the American frontier. Nowadays, people from other countries are also on the lookout for a serious relationship with foreign mail order brides, however, the price of the whole endeavor can be a deal-breaker for many.
So, here we’ll go over a break down of mail order bride pricing as well as some tips for how to find cheap mail order brides without compromising
What does “mail order brides cost” even mean?
People often get a tad confused when discussing mail order brides pricing and the very nature of what a mail order bride even is.
That’s understandable, given the term’s phrasing, but let’s make this clear – no, you don’t actually “buy” a mail order bride as that would be quite illegal and grossly immoral.
Instead, a mail order wife is simply any woman who is looking for foreign husband, typically either through a marriage agency or on international dating sites. Such ladies can come from all over the world – there are Slavic brides, Asian brides, ladies from Latin American countries, African brides, and so on.
So, if we’re talking about simple international courtship through online dating sites, what do we mean by “cost?”
Quite simply, the mail order bride prices we’ll be discussing are merely the expenses of dating, gifts, traveling, meeting in person, immigrating, and getting married – i.e., the normal expenses you can expect to accumulate while meeting, courting, and marrying your mail order bride.
Which are the most affordable mail order brides sites?
The best international dating sites are typically the ones with great profile verification and anti-scam features, with large databases of foreign women profiles, and with great communication services.
There are thousands of such dating site examples out there, most of which are focused on particular regions – some are for brides from Latin America, others are for Asian ladies, and yet other – for Slavic/European brides.
Here are the ones we usually recommend:
SofiaDate has a great matchmaking system, lots of free features, excellent UI, and a great database of awesome ladies from Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus) countries.
SakuraDate is a very famous dating site for mail order ladies from Asia (Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, China). Has tempting discounts for new users and top-notch profile verification.
One of the best dating services for those looking for a Latin America (Colombia, Brazil, Mexico). LaDate has a huge database and can help you find a foreign wife from all over Eastern Europe.
TheLuckyDate is the most famous dating site for those looking for a mail order bride from Global. Also includes mail order brides from Australia and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
Are international marriage agencies as expensive as they sound?
Yes, they are. Marriage agencies and brokers ask for a lot of money to “help” you find your future wife. They tend to claim that a lot of these costs are for services you’d have to pay for on your own anyway, however, such brokers are known for keeping a huge price tag of their rates for themselves.
Add the often very poor service they provide, and marriage agencies aren’t really an affordable or even good way to find your ideal foreign bride. Instead, what we’d be talking about here is the costs of finding a foreign woman through dating sites.
What factors go into the “price” of a mail order bride?
The mail order wife price you can be expected to pay over time is based on numerous factors. Many people often think that the price of the online dating platform is the first major monetary obstacle, but that’s actually a very minute portion of the average mail order wife cost.
Here are the main factors you’d want to consider ahead of time:
Her country of origin
The first and most obvious component of the mail order bride price is which country she is from. This is crucial as you’d probably want to arrange at least a few in-person meetings with your foreign girlfriend to get to know her better.
Depending on where she lives, this may mean a quick and affordable flight across one or two borders, or it can mean a long and expensive flight across the entire planet every time you want to meet her.
The hotel, food, and other standard traveling expenses also vary from country to country too – a one-week stay in Bangladesh can cost much less than a one-week stay in Japan, for example.
Your country of origin
The price of a mail order bride depends on your own country too. In most cases, we are talking about the U.S. as that’s where mail order brides are the most popular, but men from more and more other countries are joining in on the practice, too.
Your own country matters because how expensive/affordable it would be for your future wife to immigrate there, how significant the traveling costs are going to be, how pricey your wedding would be, and so on.
How much time do you want to spend chatting with her?
Many people think that getting a mail order bride is a quick affair. And it can indeed be that way, especially if you use a marriage agencies as they just match you up with someone and try to rush you to the wedding isle with as little fuss as possible.
This has an obvious drawback, however – you can’t be certain your mail order foreign wife is really the right fit for you.
So, many people prefer to spend at least several months chatting with and dating their girlfriends before they move on to the next phase of the relationship. This can result in more potential expenses, of course, as every day spend chatting, traveling means more money spent.
Another way to look at it, however, is that those additional expenses are a sort of investment in the future stability of the relationship – they help you figure out if you share the same life values as your girlfriend, have the same goals and life plans, and so on. After all, an untimely divorce is much more expensive than a few extra months chatting with your girlfriend.
What’s your budget for gifts?
Sending pricey gifts to different countries halfway across the globe to impress girls you haven’t met yet can seem silly at first. And, it can indeed end up costing you quite a bit.
Many males end up sending thousand dollars or more worth of gifts to multiple girls at the same time – often as soon as they start communicating with them.
It is obviously ill-advised to overspend just on gifts, especially with girls you aren’t sure are serious and genuine about being with you.
Yet, at the same time, gifts are a good way to gain some extra favor from the girl you are courting. The key to balancing this is to first start with fewer and smaller gifts at the early stages of courtship and to only spend extra once you are as close to certain she is The One as possible.
How many times would you want to meet her in person?
The travel arrangements to visiting your girlfriend in a different country are one of the most significant expenses you’d be looking at. At the same time, however, meeting your bride-to-be at least a few times in person is absolutely crucial if you want to ensure the future success of your relationship.
So, it’s definitely worth it to think carefully about how you’re going to approach your traveling expenses. We’ll go over some traveling tips below, but the first simple step is to plan for fewer but longer visits to your girlfriend’s country, as staying somewhere is usually cheaper than traveling back and forth.
What are the immigration and visa costs you can expect?
The visa expenses and immigration costs you’d have to deal with can vary greatly depending on the visa processing and laws in your country. In some cases we can be talking about just a few hundred dollars or euro and just several short weeks of wait time. In other cases, the price can be much steeper.
U.S. visas, for example, can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, when you sum up all the extra fees and expenses over time.
The visa costs are just part of the immigration equation too, as moving abroad can be much more expensive than just traveling for a few days.
What is your budget for the wedding?
Saving money while planning for a wedding can often feel like a lost cause. A wedding ceremony in the West is usually a very expensive affair nowadays. It depends on how you go about them, however, as you can also get by cheaper with a smaller wedding ceremony.
Of course, this is true whether you’re marrying a mail order bride or your next door neighbor, so, many don’t count the wedding in the mail order brides pricing.
That’s folly, however, as it is a major expense you need to consider. Additionally keep in mind that many mail order brides would also want a second wedding ceremony back in their own country. The bride’s family often pays for that, however, but it still means extra traveling expenses.
Average price for mail order bride by region
Calculating the exact mail order brides cost you’re going to have to pay is impossible as you can’t really foresee all the expenses waiting for you around the corner. However, there are some rough averages you can expect, based on where your mail order bride is from:
- Around $8,000 for a U.S. or a Western European bride
- Around $7,200 for Latin American mail order brides
- About $5,700 for Eastern European or Slavic brides
- Around $4,000 for African brides
- About $3,000 for Asian mail order brides
All of these are approximations, and the expected averages for Asian mail order brides exhibit the most fluctuations because there are stark economic differences between the many different Asian countries.
Free dating websites vs Paid dating sites
One thing we haven’t mentioned so far is the existence of free dating sites. Indeed, there are thousands of such free online dating platforms where you can meet mail order brides and engage in as much online communication with them as you want.
Such sites are rarely recommended, however, because of how full of scammers they are. Especially free sites about Russian mail order brides are notorious for all their send-me-money scams, blackmail, catfishing scams, and more.
So, while there are people who maintain they have had great experiences with free sites and have saved on mail order bride pricing that why while also meeting the woman of their dream, it’s usually recommended to focus on the sites with the best verification features, even if they have a sizable monthly subscription or have a credit system that charges you for extra services.
After all, considering all the other 4-digit expenses we mentioned above, paying a few dozen or a few hundred bucks for a safe website with good communication features is typically worth it in the long run.
Tips for lowering mail order brides prices
All of these can make it seem like the mail order bride cost is a bit too much to bear. However, as with most other things in life, there are many great ways to lower the average mail order bride price without missing out on a great mail order wife.
Be smart with the features of the dating services you use
Most international dating platforms either offer full access for a monthly subscription or a credit system which charges for additional services such as video calls.
Some people dislike the idea of having to pay extra for more loading features, however, credit system sites tend to be the most common and best places to find verified and scam-free profiles of foreign beauties.
So, the best solution is to use such sites, but to be smart about how many of their features you use and how often.
Be smart with the presents you send your potential bride too
Same as above, sending gifts online is a great way to earn a gal’s attention, but those can bump up the mail order wife cost you’re looking at quite a lot. So, some special gifts here and there are great, but you should be smart about when and what you send.
Book flights and hotels ahead of time
Booking flights is both an art and a science nowadays. There are many neat tricks for booking affordable flights online and you’d want to employ all of them to keep your mail order wife budget in line.
Pick your country of interest carefully
As we outlined above, a huge component of mail order brides pricing is in which part of the world you’re looking for charming ladies. If you’re in Europe, for example, Slavic countries are right across the border from you which can lower you average expense for traveling by a lot.
On the other hand, if you’re an American, traveling to Bulgaria and traveling to the Philippines can cost more or less the same, however, the latter may be better cause it’s more affordable to stay there for a bit.
Avoid scammers
There is no going around it – scammers are an ever-present danger for anyone looking for a potential wife online. Even on platforms with good profile verification there is still a little risk of potential mail order brides pretending to be genuinely interested in native grooms.
That’s why it’s always advisable to spend a little extra time talking with your bride-to-be even though such platforms keep advertising that you can find a wife “with just a few clicks” – you can, but you can also find a scammer, so it’s best to spend a little extra time and money first to save yourself a lot of time and stress down the line.
Be ready for the total mail order bride cost (and extra) ahead of time
As with any other monetary endeavor in life, the more money you have before you start, the easier it is to manage your budget well. If, at one point in the process, you end up with insufficient funds, not only do you risk falling short, but you may end up having to make some sub-optimal financial choices that can bump up your total mail order wife cost.
So, one of the best things you can do is to make sure you have enough money saved up before you even start the whole process.
Good communication is key
Proper communication can open up a lot of doors in life, and the same goes for online communication with potential mail order brides.
Want to woo her without having to overspend on gifts? Want to win her over without having to fly around the globe a dozen times? Want to make sure you’re not chatting with a scammer? Good communication skills can help you out with all of these.
Remember not to be too cheap either
As you’ve figured out by now, Mail order bride pricing isn’t cheap and you can be expected to have to pay thousands of dollars from the moment you start chatting to the moment you’re married and your bride is a legal permanent resident in your country.
However, what’s even more expensive is having to spend months and years chatting with hundreds of girls and falling for dozens of scams on free sites, only to finally marry the wrong girl and have to spend even more on the divorce.
So, even though it’s good to minimize your expenses whenever possible, it’s important not to be so cheap that you mess up the whole process and all your chances of a happy marriage.
Is the mail order brides cost worth it?
If you search around online, you’ll find a lot of “mail order bride horror stories” of both husbands who have gotten scammed and wives who are unhappy with who they’ve ended up with.
In almost all such cases, however, the key issue was that they had used a marriage agency. Plus, what’s also being lost in such discussions is that traditional dating also ends up in unhappy marriages and divorce about 50% of the time. Furthermore, most people love talking about the failed marriages but few discuss the hundreds of thousands of successful ones.
So, if you approach the mail order marriage adventure intelligently, make sure that you find the right person and get to know her properly, and if you can avoid needless overspending along the way – yes, a mail order marriage can be one of the absolute best decisions you’ve ever made.