So you want to get a Sugar Baby...
Finding your primo gold digger
Over the past year I’ve had a couple fellers message me asking about my experiences with sugar dating and requesting tips for navigating that world.
In this guide I’ll walk you through the standard nomenclature, clear up some common misconceptions about the subculture, discuss different types of arrangements and Types of Girl you’ll encounter therein, explain how to negotiate and not get hustled, go over what a reasonable allowance might be circa 2025, and so on.
But before we begin I’ll throw in a quick disclaimer noting that I myself haven’t been actively engaged in the subculture for about a year now, and some of my sensibilities may be a bit outmoded. But frankly I doubt much has changed.
Anyway, on with the show.
Basics
First off—what exactly IS a sugar baby?
One answer might be she’s something in between a girlfriend and a hooker… which obviously can mean a lot of different things, and in the sugaring world it’s quite common for your dynamic even with one individual girl to slide around on that continuum rather nimbly as befits the vibe and your current situation.
A lot of the time she’ll just become your girlfriend, in which case some people use the term “Sugar Girlfriend” to refer to it, but in my opinion that’s kind of gay and I just say girlfriend. That said, if you get into a more conventional relationship as an extension of a sugaring dynamic it will usually retain certain transactional or fetishistic elements—e.g. since you’re taking care of her rent she’ll be more flamboyantly submissive, or you’ll retain an asymmetric non-monogamous structure (as in she’s loyal but you can get side hoes). This was basically the dynamic I had with Alyssa, Rose, and Rebecca.
Then you have what’s often called a “Traditional Arrangement,” which is almost certainly what you think of when you hear the phrase “sugar baby,” and in practice is situated roughly halfway between girlfriend and hooker—think a FWB you’re paying, sometimes with a moderate romantic valence a la French mistress-keeping and sometimes with more of a light and playful vibe. This dynamic is what most girls go into sugaring wanting, but at least in my experience it’s kind of weird and unstable, as in practice if you want to see a girl more than two or three times she’ll usually just become your girlfriend. Though I’m also kind of a sentimental faggot, so maybe don’t overindex on that. Anyway I’ve only had one dynamic like this last for any significant amount of time, and that was just kind of a uniquely strong friendship bond.
Then the final category is basically just soft escorting—think one level above an upscale hooker (except usually much cheaper, funnily enough, which is why most prostitutes tend to kind of despise or at least sort of look down on sugar babies).
Anyway this last segment is often conflated with the term “Pay Per Meet” (or PPM), but technically PPM is just a specific type of payment structure wherein you pay the girl a specified amount every time you see her instead of giving her a monthly or weekly allowance. But I myself would prefer to do PPM even with girls I was entirely in love with because it just objectively makes a lot more sense. That said some girls feel less like a hooker if it’s a single Zelle payment once a month as opposed to four separate Cashapp payments and idk women are just kind of gay sometimes but you roll with it.
Platforms
SeekingArrangement (or just Seeking these days i guess) is the big one.
There’s another one called What’s Your Price or something gay like that but it struck me as a lot more shabby and groace and had that cringe game show name so I never even bothered looking at it, and you probably oughtn’t either.
That said: Most of the absolute tippity top girls in the lifestyle don’t really use Seeking; they’re scouted on Instagram by procurers (a lot of influencers—particularly Brazilians for some reason—are basically soft escorts) and invited to Eyes Wide Shut parties, OR they’ll just go to a random marina and hop in some rich guy’s boat. They’ll always prefer for there to be some plausible deniability, and Seeking is typically seen as kind of gauche and chintzy by sugar babies who come from a more cultivated background.
So long story short: if you’re an actual millionaire or some shit I’d honestly just buy a boat and sit around waiting for broads to show up. But if you’re more of a beer track suburban dad, cheugy yuppie, etc. you’ll want to go with Seeking for sure.
Locations
NY, CA, FL are the hotspots where you’ll find tons of high quality girls. TX also seems pretty big into it. Really any college town should have some decent options, though... just less so in the Midwest—Nebraska in particular had absolutely atrocious options on SA, basically all hookery methheads and shit—but as I pointed out in my article celebrating midwesterners that actually speaks to something cozy about their culture.
Now obviously the going allowance will scale a lot with cost of living—i.e. when I was travelling to NYC for consulting work the higher tier art hoes there seemed to expect roughly twice what I’d pony up in Orlando to date Disney World princesses from good families. But if I were in Miami for instance I’d probably be paying close to the same.
Why get a sugar baby?
You don’t have the time for a conventional relationship but still desire feminine companionship more substantial than what you’d get from an escort
You have autism or something and find it more emotionally soothing to keep transactional subtext legible instead of unspoken and opaque (also lots of spergy girls become sugar babies for this exact reason—see Rose above)
You have some unusual sexual preference it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect women to accommodate in a normie relationship (was kind of the case for me… read my novel The Con if you want the tea)
You want to date multiple women in concert without having to keep secrets or persuade them to accept polyamory
You aren’t quite hot enough to dominate the Tinder / Hinge algo, but significantly better looking than the modal 45yo man, which will make you Chad of Seeking.
Sugaring as a vector for hookups
One important thing you need to know is that SeekingArrangement will ban you if you just message girls asking for PPM, because that’s seen as a euphemism for trying to turn random coeds into hookers.
But the thing is you actually can 100% use Seeking like that if you have decent text game and aren’t completely disgusting looking.
See, the classier girls will basically never accept a paid one night stand offer overtly… but you can pretty consistently achieve it by way of plausible deniability if you just say for instance that you want to “test the waters” or “see how we vibe” or something gay like that. Then you make her a PPM offer during the date itself once she’s for sure into you (or better yet, proceed like it’s a normal date and let her bring up the money).
Note that to make this work you actually DO need to have decent game and be somewhat good looking, but you can still score chicks you’d NEVER have a chance with on Tinder or Hinge for significantly less than a comparably attractive escort. Back when I was legit hot in 2020 and to a lesser extent 2021 I even got away with a few freebies (and of course they complained about it later…).
Oh—another Protip? Girls on Seeking will be significantly more adventurous if you fly them out from another city—registers as a sort of erotic adventure to them. Obviously it’s also far more expensive, but you’ll get a significantly higher tier of girl this way.
Anyway the less classy girls will basically act exactly like hookers, except they’ll be at least somewhat more selective and typically a lot more casual about it.
They’ll kind of want you to treat them like a girlfriend, but more like how a poor guy treats his girlfriend, not any of the shit women of your own social class would expect of you. So if you meet their standards you can kind of just say “can I fuck you for $300” and they’ll be like “okay.”
But as I said—you need to do this in text messages and not on SeekingArrangement itself, or you’ll get banned.
Sugaring as vector for relationships
Anyway, my basic approach using the site (everyone calls it “the site” for some reason) back in 2020-2024 was generally just to do a ton of hookups until I found a chick I actually wanted to be my girlfriend and would love bomb me back. Pretty much all of these relationships ended thanks to me fucking up in some operatically embarrassing way—at least four of the girls were entirely splendid Wife Material (and if you don’t believe me listen to the podcast episodes linked above).
Were these girls any crazier or less morally upright than you’d find on, say, Hinge?
Maybe? They were for sure higher in trait openness and perhaps a bit more mercurial by disposition, but obviously so am I—Clearly I’d never click with a normie bih.
You’ll find that basically all normgroid womyn will treat girls you meet on Seeking as completely indistinguishable from streetwalkers, but you also have to recognize that this is kind of just faggoty intrasexual competition behavior.
At the end of the day I’m quite inclined to recommend Seeking even as a vector for conventional dating provided you’re someone who enjoys spending money on women (or just want to get someone younger and better looking than you can pull on Hinge).
It would unironically be a great option for a lot of Trads.
Types of women on the site:
Girls on there “ironically” — an absolutely colossal proportion of normie college girls will make a Seeking account “as a joke” to get attention or simply see what kind of offers they get. They’d never admit it to men outside the lifestyle, but there’s honestly a very decent chance that women in your life you’d NEVER expect to be involved in something like this have at least made an account “and then deleted it after a week.” Basically these girls will lead some weepy Boomers on and maybe sell some nudes or a few feet pics, but in the vast majority of cases aren’t gonna meet up with anyone… UNLESS the right guy slides into their DMs.
Long story short this is where you can lifehack your way into pulling normal girls you’d NEVER pull on Tinder or Hinge. If the age gap is small they usually won’t expect much in the way of an allowance, and if you’re somewhat good looking you might not even have to pay at all. The really fantastic thing about this group is they don’t have any expectations and are typically content to play things by ear and let the dynamic evolve organically. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of…Professional Sugar Babies — Avoid this group at all costs. They have a bad attitude and are basically just prosties tbh. You’ll end up paying four times as much and there will very rarely be a meaningful connection. Thankfully you can clock them right away because they’ll be talking like an HR lady in the messages.
Girls who want a “platonic” sugar daddy — Platonic sugaring is incredibly rare and typically only happens in the context of e.g. octogenarians or guys with a broken benis or something. That said lots of girls will obviously fuck their SD and then lie to all of their friends saying it’s platonic and their friends will pretend to believe them, but those girls are more in the Ironic category. This category exists more to slot all the clueless broads who think they’re gonna get paid to get dinner with someone who doesn’t specifically look like Mason Verger. Anyway they’ll just say they want platonic in their profile, so just ignore them.
Girls treating it like normal dating — a lot of nurses / realtors / single mothers / upper class Black (and to a lesser extent Latina and Jewish) women will get on Seeking specifically because they want a boyfriend who makes more money than them and they keep matching with scrubs on Hinge or whatever. This cohort isn’t looking to be super hookery with it, but come from an ecology where acting more overtly transactional in your relationships is a lot more normal. Still, a lot of them will still fade in and out of the soft escorty stuff depending on the particular situation… it’s incredibly vibes-based in practice. Anyway this is how I ended up hooking up with such a crazy number of Jewesses.
Scammers — a fuckton of them. By far the most common one is they find a guy who is horny late at night and lead him on in a plausible fish-reely way and then ask him to Venmo her $50 for “gas” or something like that. Somehow I fell for this like eight times, but it’s okay because I was able to scam a lot of those girls back for feet pics. Anyway it’s not too hard to filter out scammers; exceedingly few of them will have an extended phone call with you so just go for that as a sorting mechanism. Any girl you’d actually want to meet up with will be down.
The Money and the Sex
So this part’s going behind the paywall, obviously. ..