Rent a Friend Reviews and Complaints in 2026: What Trustpilot, Reddit Summaries and Review Sites Repeat About RentAFriend, the Five Complaints That Come Up Every Time (Stale Profiles, the Membership, Support, Sign-Up, No Messages for Friends), How to Avoid Each One, the Praise That Also Repeats, and How Roavi Is Built Around Those Complaints

"Rent a friend reviews" comes with "complaints", "trustpilot", "reddit" and "complaints reddit". We read what we could reach (Reddit itself is not reachable from here; the summaries that quote it are) and the pattern is the same everywhere. Here are the five complaints, the praise, and what to do about each.

The five complaints that repeat#

1. Stale profiles behind the paywall. You pay the membership, message five people, and hear back from one or none, because many profiles have not been active in a year. The most repeated complaint by a distance.
2. The membership itself. About $24.95 a month for a single outing roughly doubles the evening; what RentAFriend really costs.
3. Support. Trustpilot reviews from 2025 describe inquiries that got no reply.
4. Sign-up. A clunky flow, and questions about gender and orientation that some users found odd for a platonic service; the sign-up, what to expect.
5. From the friends' side: no messages. Outside New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Miami, a new profile can sit for weeks; why, and what to do.

The praise that also repeats#

The meetups are real and usually good. Reviewers describe coffee, concerts, walks, a plus-one at an event, a city shown by someone who lives there, and most say the person was who the profile said. The site has operated since 2009 and is legitimate; is RentAFriend legit? goes through that. Read the reviews as two products: the people (good) and the website (not).

How to avoid each complaint#

• Browse before you pay: profiles are visible without a membership; check how many are in your city and when they were last active.
• Buy a month, not a year, until you know the reply rate.
• Message several people at once.
• Agree hours and rate in writing before you meet, so there is nothing to dispute.
• If you are listing: only expect volume in the biggest cities; use several photos and a specific bio; consider a platform where people can message you without paying.

How Roavi is built around these complaints#

On Roavi you browse and message Local Friends free; the only money that changes hands is the friend's own hourly rate (most list $15 to $50), paid to them directly, with no commission. Every profile is reviewed by a person before it goes live and carries three real photos, reviews from previous meetups and an optional identity-verified badge. Meetups are platonic and in public. The honest caveat: Roavi is strongest in Latin America and Asia, with a growing but still thin US list (New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Phoenix, Nashville and a few others). Free messaging answers complaints one, two and five; the human review and reviews on profiles answer the trust question; the thin US list is the honest trade.

Read next: RentAFriend review, both sides and alternatives to RentAFriend.

Every city where you can do this today, with the live number of Local Friends in each: rent a friend, by the hour. In the United States the list is also by state.