About x3guide | x3guide

x3guide is the buyer's guide for porn sites. Our goal is to help surfers get informed as much as possible before buying a membership to a porn paysite.

With over 10 years of experience and having seen the members's area of over 1000 paysites, we know all the tricks in the book and what to pay attention to. Our reviews are independent and honest. They can't be totally unbiased though, as porn surfers ourselves, we have our preferences too. :) But we try to be as objective as possible—even if a genre is not the most interesting to us, sites in it won't get less points.

We hope you find our site to be a useful resource. If not, please tell us. Negative opinions help us improve the site, and we're open to all ideas.

Disclosure: we get a commission if you visit a porn site using our link and subscribe. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own. You can support us by using our links. We offer special prices for many sites, so you will often pay less. Find our full discounts list here.

Tips for online porn customers

Experienced porn site customers know that buying access to porn sites is generally without any problems, if you pay attention to a few things.

Little or low quality content: It's usually impossible to know what's inside the member's area before paying. This is easy—before paying, just take a look at our reviews. ;)
Pre-checked cross-sales: Pay attention on the join page or payment page of paysites. Some will have a pre-checked checkbox or a pre-selected dropdown menu option for purchasing extra memberships to other sites. If you don't pay attention, and leave this box checked or the dropdown unchanged, you might get surprised at the charge you're billed. Our reviews warn you of pre-checked cross-sales with a box like this:
Cross sales: Pre-checked Checkbox or Pre-selected Dropdown offers in the join form. If you don't unselect them, you'll pay extra for membership(s) to additional site(s).
Reccuring vs. Non-Recurring: Recurring memberships stay active until you cancel, usually charging your credit card a monthly membership fee.
Non-recurring memberships have a one-time payment, there is no need to cancel, they won't rebill—they are typically more expensive though.
Cancellation: Most sites are easy to cancel—they can only stay in business if they're honest with their customers. The majority of the sites use big, reliable, third-party processors such as CCBILL or Epoch. You should cancel a few days before the expiration date, as some sites require you to cancel 24-48 hours before the rebill (the membership won't be disabled instantly, naturally it will stay active for the period you already paid for).
To cancel, look for Support, Customer Support, or Cancel Membership links at the bottom of the paysites. Alternatively, check the email(s) you received when you signed up, most will have instructions for cancellation. If you run into any problems, contact us, and we'll do our best to help you! If we find that any of the websites listed on x3guide intentionally cheat customers, we'll put a big fat warning on their review page!
Trial memberships: Trial memberships are great to to get a feel of a paysite for little money. There are two things to pay attention to. One is cancellation—as some sites require you to cancel 24-28 hours before the rebill, on trial memberships it can be best practice to quickly decide if you want to stay longer, and if not, cancel right away.
The other thing you should be familiar with are limited trials. Some trials are limited in the sense that you will only be able to download a few scenes. If this is the case, we'll warn you with a LTD sign in the the review's Prices & Billing section.
DRM: DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Some sites protect their videos with DRM, meaning that even if you download them, you won't be able to play them after your membership expires. Some people don't mind this, as they only watch streaming videos. If you're a downloader like some of us, the DRM-free sight in the reviews' Videos section will be a relief. Fortunately DRM protection is not too common anymore.
Exclusive vs. Leased content: Exclusive content means that the scene is only available on one website / network. Leased content refers to scenes which are sold to many companies, and will appear on many websites. Some pro porn surfers frown upon leased content, as they seek new porn, and leased scenes they've often already seen. On the other hand, having additional, bonus leased content next to the exclusive core content can add value to a membership. We'll give a lower Originality score to sites which use leased scenes as their core content instead of marking it as bonus content.

Our review process & types

Site listing: Not a review yet, just a site that's listed with only basic information.
Quick review: These reviews have all stats & information about sites, but the review article is short. This enables us to quickly review new sites. A quick review is often followed by a full review later on.
Full review: All stats & information, plus an in-depth article about the reviewed site.

Our rating criteria

There are 10 factors we take into account when we rate a website. A website will get a 1-10 rating in each of these aspects. The final score will be calculated from all these using a special formula. For instance Quality scores will have a bigger impact on the final score than the Value score. Here are the criteria.

Quality: How good the content looks compared to today's standards. We look at the quality of different types of content separately, hence Quality is made up of 4 factors.
- Streaming Videos: The quality of videos that you play directly on the websites (like a YouTube video).
- Downloadable Videos: The quality of downloaded videos.
- Photos: Quality of pictures.
- Webcams: Quality of live cam shows.

In the final score's calculation, we'll only take the highest score of the 4 above. The reason is that we want to judge all sites based on their main content. For instance, we don't want to punish a primarily video site or webcam site for adding a medium quality pictures section.

Size: How much photo, video, webcam content the site has.
Updates: How often the site is updated.
Originality: How exclusive, original, and unique the primary content of the site is.
Value: At the current price, how good a deal it is.
Usability: How easy it is to browse the site, the number of errors we encounter, page speed, download speed, navigation, search & navigation functions.
Reviewer's Opinion: The reviewer's personal opinion! Any extra factors can be taken into account here. Reading the related textual review will reveal these factors.

We do consider the site's genre when giving scores. For instance in a rare fetish genre the same video quality & quantity may score more than in a popular genre such as hardcore, which has a lot bigger selection & competition.
When reviewing networks, in the individual sites' reviews we only rate their own content and updates. In the network review, we'll rate the whole network's number of updates and content. We use this system so that you can see how good the sites are in a network individually.

Our rating formula for the final score:

  2.0 * (Highest Quality + Size) 
+ 1.5 * (Updates + Originality) 
+ 1.0 * (Usability + Value + Reviewer's Opinion)

Outside reviews

Sometimes you may want to get a second opinion. There are a few other trustable porn review sites out there.
We link to such reviews in the Review History & Outside Reviews box on our review pages.
Here are a few of the sites that we think are worthy: