ROAST Dating is a photo-analyzing, profile-feedback dating coaching platform that caters to singles needing a dating app profile refresh. Visit their site, take a quiz, give them your email and a link to your current Tinder profile, and wait for a profile review.
Seems easy enough, right?
Follow us as we sign up, get feedback, and understand if ROAST Dating is all it’s cracked up to be or just another platform where the blind leads the blind.
Our Immediate First Impression
Upon first glance at ROAST Dating, we were excited to see how it works. ROAST doubles down on its high value by promising “more, better matches,” having the authority and expertise to back up its claims by spending over 8+ years researching “what works on dating apps.”
They claim to have a user base of over 200,000+ “happy customers,” but at this point, we’re not sure if ROAST is only for men or if women can sign up and take value from the information as well.
Step 1: The Quiz
The free quiz is required before you can make an account. It has 12 questions, starting with the basic, “Do you want to get more matches?” and ending with the always-asked question, “What are you looking for?”
The intro questions are pretty vague but enough to pinpoint basic intentions so that the ROAST dating coach can better understand what you’re after in the long run.
One of the final questions prompts this graphic:
And we totally agree. Quality over quantity every day!
Step 2: The Followup
After the short quiz, you must attach a link to an existing Tinder account or manually upload 5-7 images for review. Within a minute, you’ll have access to your personal report results.
Or so we thought… besides the first image (1/9), the rest of the report is hidden behind this paywall:
So, if you want to access your “full review report,” you must pay at least $6.99. The full report is the AI-generated split-second analysis of your uploaded pics or attached Tinder profile and an expert review within 24-48 hours.
Sidenote: Pay no attention to the 10-minute countdown timer pressuring buyers into the discounted price. The $6.99 price is always the price– the discount is just a way to incentivize people to buy a report.
Step 3: The “Expert” Report
Around 24-ish hours later, we received our personalized report from one of ROAST’s dating experts. The report includes the following scores and explanations:
This summarizes all the photos; they later break it down photo-by-photo. The suggestions on how to improve feel a bit vague but are okay to keep in mind when taking future photos.
Moving onto the “actionable” next steps, ROAST offers the following suggestions to fine-tune our profile:
Don’t worry about reading it— it’s all AI that’s been passed off as written by a ROAST dating coach. No human says, “They add a sprinkle of dynamism!” This whole cliche ChatGPT tone carries through to the photo-by-photo suggestions too, which was pretty disappointing as we were eagerly awaiting higher-level expert-guided feedback:
Doesn’t it feel very AI? “Remember, your background is already rocking; just ensure your face tells the same story!” Um sir, we are running here.
Sidenote: Throughout the report, there are 3-4 different additional product offers that don’t seem to make sense. For example, they plug AI Headshots, which doesn’t correlate to all the prior messages they’ve preached about professional, personality-filled profile pictures. How would an AI headshot be the correct solution?
Step 4: Access Platform Lessons
Okay, so we’ve done the profile review, read the ebooks, and read the expert personalized report; what’s next?
The only actionable next steps provided are to either:
- Try AI headshots
- Join the Telegram channel
- View the ROAST community’s inspirational photos
- Retake photos and reupload (need to pay again)
- Take the lessons on the platform
We opted for the learning platform since we didn’t want to join anything or pay more money. And we have to give it to ROAST; their lesson topics are extensive, offering over 50 different video recordings on photos, bios, intro messages, mindset shifts, algorithms (which nobody, not even Tinder developers themselves, fully understand), Instagram, and sex.
Yeah, they also cover sex… for some reason.
We sat and watched some of the first few video lessons, and they were okay. The audio is hard to understand, and the information is very basic, outdated, and honestly, a bit odd.
Step 5: Follow Emailed Instructions
For the first week of the program, you’ll receive a daily email with a short (generally useless) blurb and a lesson recommendation that links to the general learning area and isn’t topic-specific.
ROAST Dating Pros and Cons
Con: Random charges and lack of price transparency
The first (and frankly, most concerning) red flag is their lack of payment transparency.
ROAST offers several different service tiers, from basic reports to full-spectrum expert analyses. We decided to splurge on the medium-tier “HACKER” package to read the ebooks and have a dating expert examine our profile instead of AI.
However, if you decide to go with the STARTER package, you’ll see this pop-up:
The keyword above is “7 days for FREE,” but then the very next page is…
…Which prompts us to pay, so that’s super confusing.
First, it’s free, and then it’s not, and then it’s this price, but then we got charged twice in one week for a STARTER and HACKER package when the HACKER includes the STARTER offerings.
Watch out for this!
Pro: Some decent information
We downloaded the ebooks to see if we could find any valuable information that would propel us forward in our quest for a better dating profile, but the Tinder ebook is just full of fluffy lines like “No more lonely Friday nights” and “Get an expert to write your dating app bio.”
The paradox here is that we need to pay for the Tinder ebook to “sharpen our dating profiles,” but then the whole ebook is just ROAST trying to plug their other services like bio writing and AI headshots. Why are they marketing to have ROAST write our bio when they pitched this ebook as a step-by-step guide for doing so?
Anyways, from start to finish, we’d say the ratio of valuable information to basic, run-of-the-mill details is about 1 in 30. You can find most of what ROAST teaches on ChatGPT or by doing a quick Google search. Still, for every piece of hay in the haystack, there is an occasional needle of valuable info.
For example, we liked this checklist in the Tinder ebook:
Con: The whole interaction feels very chaotic and lacks credibility
Although we were excited to sign up and possibly learn new information, we left empty-handed, feeling like we wasted our time, money, trust, and energy.
For a service boasting over 200,000+ sign-ups, we expected better material quality, cohesiveness, professionalism, and tact.
The process doesn’t feel smooth, supportive, or invested in. The emails aren’t formatted, the site rarely loads correctly, we found random charges on our card that we didn’t authorize (mentioned above), and we never felt like we had any real interaction with a human being, like promised.
When you do want to just explore their platform, it’s physically impossible to enjoy it because you’re constantly inundated with additional services/products/things.
Conclusion: Try as a last resort?
The information we paid to read did not feel worth the price tag. Although we were provided with a full profile report, it didn’t seem very actionable or written by a human being. We could see how this service would be useful with its lengthy content library, but we would need to see quite a few improvements to consider paying for it as a routine customer, like:
- A more trustworthy payment subscription or service– No double charges
- Better user experience process: design, email flow, interface, etc
- Higher-level information from photos to openers
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