Personally can’t relate to all the bad reviews. I’ve been using Raya for over a year, and was accepted a few hours after applying (with one recommendation). Currently average around 3-5 matches a week, which isn’t bad for a minority male in a smaller UK city (Newcastle). Since joining I’ve had a few visitors/dates from the app, and visited others as well. The inability to limit match range is frustrating, and means the quantity of dates isn’t as good as other apps, but the quality of matches is brilliant, and far better than any other.

I design and build apps so I tested this one.It seems the ‘like’ component doesn’t work ethically. It states you’re given a limit on ‘likes’ per day when the reality is you have a limit on people served to you. You could reject every person but only like one and still hit your limit of ‘likes’ so the naming and explanation on why there is a limit (to encourage you to talk with your connections) is incredibly misleading.The unlimited feature isn’t actually unlimited either. It merely doubles the amount of “likes” you would typically get in a day before the blocker hits you again.This prompted me to also test what happens if you use the rewind button on the same person and whether your like limit could be reached simply repeating that with one person. It did. Which shows that Raya does not discern between who and how you have engaged with others historically. All it accounts for is the engagement of the app, not the individual.Without that, you lose the expected range of potential people to match with and will ultimately be served the same people - which you’ve already probably noticed, right?It’s also suspicious that you cannot set and then be served anyone who matches your desired criteria. You are simply given random people from a pool of age groups, gender, and location. How is that not a fundamental feature in 2024?These aren’t bugs. This is intentional design to minimise your chances of finding a meaningful connection. This app is gamified and costs you your time and money.

Like all dating sites, the first 24 hours seem great and then it goes downhill from there. As a woman (especially one of colour) don’t hold your breath. Very small pool of swipeable men. You also have to wait up to 12 hours before you’re shown a new set of members. Honestly seems they let anyone on there, absolutely not the premium experience you’d think. You’re so much better off on Hinge or any other site. The subscription fee is SO ridiculously high at £17 per month. Maybe the experience is better if you’re paying the premium fee of £45, but judging from the cheaper version definitely not worth it. Maybe it was good in 2020 or so but it’s definitely had a downfall and I wish I’d been warned of this before WASTING my money. 0/10. Absolutely not worth the hype.

I wanted to give Raya a go, i usually use hinge which might not be the best cuz people end in rose jail, but nevertheless it still delivers and i dont have to pay. With Raya you have to pay just to have an account with them. And they only give you about 20 ish accounts to like/not like twice a day. Then you just have to wait until Raya shows you more profiles. And honestly what is the point of paying? You would think that because you are putting money into it you would have better benefits, but no. In order to “skip the wait” you have to pay even more money. So basically you are just paying for like the status or exclusivity of raya, which is quite frankly dog poo.