Known Donor Sites UK: Four Platforms Compared

2026-09-02 · J. Ewert

Four known donor sites are used regularly in the UK: Pride Angel, Co-ParentMatch, PollenTree and CoParents.co.uk. All four let you register, build a profile and search for free, and all four ask for money before you can hold a conversation. In September 2026 that charge ranged from £9.99 for one week to £190 for a year.

Almost nothing written about these sites compares them on the things that decide how the experience goes: what messaging actually costs, who reads reports, what the terms say about money changing hands, and what each one tells you about UK law. This article sets out what each site publishes about itself, checked in September 2026, and what is the same on all of them because UK law makes it so. Two disclosures belong at the top. sperm-donation.com is a matching platform too, so all four of these sites are competitors of ours, which is a reason to follow the links and check the pages yourself. And the platform’s role is the whole product: we do not handle, store, test or ship anything biological, we are not a clinic or a sperm bank, we do not verify identity or health, and we do not give legal or medical advice. The checks, and the decisions, stay with you.

Which known donor sites operate in the UK?

The four sites people in the UK land on most often are Pride Angel, Co-ParentMatch, PollenTree and CoParents.co.uk. Pride Angel and PollenTree are run from the UK and read that way. Co-ParentMatch is international with a strong UK membership. CoParents.co.uk is the British arm of an international network that also runs sites in the United States, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

None of them is a clinic, a sperm bank or a regulated service. Each one is a place where people write profiles and message each other, which puts all four in the category the regulator calls unregulated donation. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority uses that term for any donation arranged outside a licensed clinic, including a donation from a friend, and it applies whether you met the person on a website, in a Facebook group or at work. The comparison below is about the quality of the room the site puts you in, because everything after the introduction happens between you and another adult.

What does each known donor site cost in the UK?

Every one of the four is free to join, free to fill in a profile and free to search. Messaging is where each one charges, and the models are different enough that the cheapest site depends on how long you expect to be looking.

Pride Angel sells message credits rather than a plain subscription: its published prices are £30 for 20 credits, £38 for 30 and £48 for 50, with Premium membership at £190 a year or £25 a month by direct debit on a minimum three month term that renews automatically. Sperm and egg donors pay nothing and receive 10 free message credits a month, so on Pride Angel the recipient carries the cost of nearly every conversation.

Co-ParentMatch publishes a plain price table: £9.99 for one week, £14.99 for one month, £38.99 for three months and £59.99 for six months, billed through PayPal or an Apple in-app purchase, cancellable at any time with access running to the end of the paid period. On that site the payment wall sits in front of reading as well as sending, so a free member who is messaged first still has to subscribe to find out what the message said.

PollenTree and CoParents.co.uk both run subscriptions without publishing the price on their public pages, which means you see the figure at the checkout after you have built a profile. PollenTree does publish one useful detail: a free member can read the first two messages from a subscriber before the site asks them to pay. Our earlier review of CoParents.com, the group’s international site, recorded £42 for a single month in August 2026, and the UK site may price differently.

What do these sites actually check?

Moderation on all four is reactive and document-free. None of them verifies a medical test, checks an identity document against a person, or confirms how many children a donor already has. What they do is read reports, remove accounts and, on some sites, add a badge.

PollenTree publishes its ban policy in plain terms: direct evidence of a breach, such as a copy of an offending message, leads to an immediate ban, and three separate complaints without direct evidence also lead to a ban. It removes spam accounts and replaces the profile page with a notice explaining the removal, and it says openly that it cannot act on anything that happens off the site. CoParents.co.uk describes human moderation with email verification, photo review, a consistency check on the parenting project and a stated 24 hour response to reports, with a badge on verified profiles.

Pride Angel offers an optional health questionnaire that a member can fill in or leave blank, and can also mark private, so a completed questionnaire tells you the person was willing to answer questions rather than that anything was tested. PollenTree shows a donor’s health questionnaire once you have added them as a friend and tells recipients to insist on up to date evidence of screening anyway. Reading all four sets of rules together, the honest summary is that a badge on any of these sites means an account passed a light check, and the screening that matters is still the conversation you have and the paperwork you ask to see. Our guide to what people test for covers what that paperwork usually looks like.

What do the sites say about money?

All four operate on the same rule, because UK law leaves them no room: a private donor may be reimbursed for expenses and nothing else. PollenTree states in its recipient guidelines that charging anything more than reasonable travel expenses breaches its terms, and warns about donors who inflate expenses or add new ones at the last minute. Co-ParentMatch states on its own how-it-works page that it does not permit the buying or selling of sperm.

For a UK reader that rule is worth understanding rather than just obeying. Payment beyond expenses moves a private arrangement towards activity the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act reserves for licensed clinics, and the sites have no interest in hosting it. A donor who opens with a price, or who treats expenses as a negotiation, is telling you something about how the rest of the arrangement will go. This is also the point where the American vocabulary that dominates search results stops applying, since paying a donor is lawful and normal in the United States and is a different legal world.

How do the sites differ on natural insemination?

They differ sharply, and this is the single most useful thing to check before signing up anywhere. PollenTree names seeking natural insemination as disrespectful conduct in its recipient guidelines and states that artificial insemination is the only acceptable method on the site. Pride Angel and Co-ParentMatch both carry information pages about it in their libraries alongside their other conception articles.

The regulator’s position is direct. The HFEA notes that some unregulated donors claim natural insemination is the more successful route, states plainly that this is not true, and says no one should feel pressured into having sex with a stranger. A donor who raises it on any of these sites has told you enough, and the reasonable response is to stop replying and report the account. The ordinary sensible things apply as they would anywhere: meet in public first, tell someone where you are, and take the time described in our guide to a first meeting with a known donor.

Which site suits which situation?

Fit depends on what you are looking for rather than on which site is best, and the four split reasonably cleanly. Pride Angel suits people who want a UK-flavoured library and a directory of clinics and family law firms alongside the profiles, and it suits donors, who use it free. Co-ParentMatch suits people who want to test a site cheaply, because £9.99 buys a week of messaging and a clear view of who is actually active.

PollenTree suits people who care most about conduct rules, since it is the only one of the four that bans natural insemination outright and publishes what gets an account removed. CoParents.co.uk suits people looking for a co-parenting arrangement rather than a donation, which is the part of its offer it leads with, and where the British meaning of co-parenting as an elective arrangement between two adults is well established. If your question is really about donation through a clinic instead, our comparison of a sperm bank and a known donor is the better starting point.

What none of these sites can change

UK law sits on top of every one of them, identically, and no membership tier alters any of it. Where conception happens outside a licensed clinic, the donor is normally the child’s legal father if the birth mother is single or in a relationship that is neither a marriage nor a civil partnership. That status carries child maintenance liability through the Child Maintenance Service and the standing to apply to a court about the child’s arrangements.

The written agreement that circulates on all four sites is not a contract in this country. It records what everyone intended, courts may take it into account, and it cannot decide legal parenthood or stop a maintenance claim. The full position, including what UK courts have done with these documents, is set out in our articles on who counts as the legal parent and why a donor agreement is not binding.

Two further limits are worth naming. There is no register of private donations anywhere in the UK, so nobody is counting how many families a private donor has helped create, and the HFEA notes that some serial unregulated donors have led to more than 200 children in this country, against the 10-family limit that applies inside licensed clinics. And the offences in the Act fall on the donation itself rather than on the recipient: the HFEA’s own FAQs state that using an unregulated donor is not a criminal offence for the person receiving it, while storing sperm by freezing it, or arranging for sperm to be delivered to someone, are crimes when done without a licence, whether an individual or a business does it. Two men were convicted under those provisions in 2010 and received a fine and a suspended sentence.

Why do the sites all stop at the introduction?

Because the law stops them there. Procuring, testing, processing, storing and distributing sperm are licensable activities under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, so a UK site that arranged a courier, held samples or ran tests would be operating a service that requires a licence from the HFEA. That is the reason every one of these platforms, ours included, ends at the point where two people have each other’s details.

It also explains a gap that surprises new users. The site cannot tell you whether a donor’s test results are real, cannot count his previous families, and cannot follow anything that happens once a conversation moves to WhatsApp. PollenTree says this outright in its guidelines and advises keeping communication on the platform for as long as possible, which is sound advice on any of the four. Where a site does sell something, it is products rather than donations: Pride Angel runs a shop with insemination kits, ovulation tests and postal infection tests, and Co-ParentMatch sells home insemination kits.

How do you compare them without paying four times?

Register free on all four, complete one good profile, and search before you spend anything. Every one of these sites lets you see who is there without a subscription, and that free view answers the only question that matters at this stage: are there enough active, plausible people within reach of you.

A practical order of work looks like this. Write the profile once in a document and paste it into each site, since the same text will do. Search your region on each and count the profiles that were updated recently rather than the total membership figure on the homepage, because a large historic membership tells you very little. Note which sites the same faces appear on, because heavy overlap means one subscription may be enough. Then buy the shortest paid period on the site with the most recent activity, and use it. Co-ParentMatch’s £9.99 week exists for exactly this, and Pride Angel’s credits do the same job without a subscription. Keep in mind that free members on some sites cannot read what you send them, which is worth knowing before you conclude that nobody replies.

What about the numbers sites publish about themselves?

Treat homepage statistics as marketing unless the site says where they came from. CoParents.co.uk states more than 450,000 members over 18 years, more than 150,000 active members, that 85 per cent of members find compatible profiles and that one in two starts a serious conversation in the first week. None of those figures carries a definition or a method on the page, and no independent body audits membership claims in this sector.

Co-ParentMatch describes thousands of members worldwide without publishing a UK figure. Pride Angel and PollenTree publish no membership numbers at all. The check that costs you nothing is to search your own region on a free account and count how many profiles were updated recently. The comparison of Facebook groups and matching platforms covers the same test for groups, where the member count is visible and equally misleading.

Is a clinic still the better route?

For most people the HFEA’s answer applies: a licensed clinic removes the donor’s legal fatherhood through the consent forms, requires screening for infectious and genetic conditions, applies the 10-family limit and offers counselling. That combination is not available in any private arrangement, whichever site introduced the two of you.

The reason people use these sites anyway is usually cost and waiting, and in the UK that means the funding rules. Most single women and female couples pay for six to twelve inseminations themselves before an NHS body will consider funding anything, and where you live decides the rest, which our article on NHS funding for donor sperm sets out region by region. A middle route is often overlooked: you can find a donor privately and then attend a licensed clinic together, which keeps the clinic’s legal and screening protections while letting you choose the person. That option, and the four routes into private donation generally, are covered in private sperm donor UK.

Frequently asked questions

The short version

The four UK known donor sites differ mainly in how they charge and how strictly they police conduct. Co-ParentMatch is the cheapest way to test a market at £9.99 a week, Pride Angel is the only one where donors are free and recipients buy credits, PollenTree has the clearest published rules on bans and on natural insemination, and CoParents.co.uk leads with co-parenting and publishes the largest membership claims with the least detail behind them.

What none of them changes is the part that lasts. Outside a licensed clinic the donor is usually the legal father, the agreement everyone signs is a record rather than a contract, nobody counts a private donor’s families, and no platform can verify a test result. Those four facts are the same on every site in this country, and they are worth more attention than the subscription price.

The sensible order is to search free everywhere first, pay for the shortest period on the site where your region is actually active, and spend the saved effort on the conversation and the clinic question instead. Anyone who needs to know where they personally stand needs a family solicitor rather than a template, and anyone weighing the routes can start with private sperm donor UK and the guide to donor siblings and numbers. Profiles on sperm-donation.com are free to browse, and every decision after that stays with you.