Inside the lives of university students seeking support from Sugar Daddies

It’s a well-known fact that university students are often found low on cash and struggling to make ends meet. With university costs rising each year and the lasting effects of the covid pandemic, the cost of living crisis, and the threats of war, Students are feeling the pinch on their purse strings now more than ever.

Many students will get part time jobs whilst they’re studying to help pay for things like food and rent, but as more businesses announce closures due to rising costs, how exactly are students going to earn a living?

The answer is one you might not be expecting. Over the last few years there has been a steady increase in the number of British university students signing up to online ‘sugar daddy’ websites. According to a 2019 report by Seeking, the world’s largest sugar daddy website, they had over 500,000 British university students signed up as ‘sugar babies’ on their site at the time. This number is expected to be a lot higher now.

A ‘sugar daddy’ is typically an older, wealthier male who enters into a relationship with a ‘sugar baby’, typically a younger, attractive female. Things like gifts and money are often exchanged for companionship and sex.

Seeking was founded in 2006 by Brandon Wade. It is free to join and anyone over the age of 18 can set up a profile. According to the national student money survey 2023 students spend on average £1078 per month and 82% of students worry about making ends meet. This could explain why so many university students are drawn to the world of sugar dating (also known as ‘sugaring’).

One woman who has experience with sugaring is Becky Hope. The 23 year old signed up to the site in 2019 after hearing about it form a friend who was also signed up at the time. She started off using the site about once a month, but as her confidence grew so did the number of times she’d visit the site. Eventually she was using the site two or three times a week.

Being a university student is one of the main reasons that made Becky sign up to the site, “I was partying a lot and blasting through more of my student finance than I’d like to admit. I also wanted to stay in my home city over the summer and knew I wouldn’t be able to afford to through more conventional means.”

Becky who was studying at Sheffield University at the time, says her relationships with the men would start through the site, before planning to meet up in person. The relationships would involve going for drinks or meals in fancy restaurants, messaging online and even go as far as sex. She estimates she met up with around five people in person ranging in age from 37 to 49.

During her time on the site Becky developed a more long term relationship with one of her sugar daddies, “On paper it looked like a normal relationship, we weren’t official or anything, but that relationship lasted for about seven or eight months.”

Looking back Becky thinks she should probably have been more scared than she was when she started sugaring, “I was new to the city, so in a weird way I was comforted by the fact that no one I knew would see me out with a random old man.”

She did take some precautions though when going out on meet ups, “I would share my location with the friend who introduced me to the site and she would check in to make sure I was where I was supposed to be.”

Becky received payment in different ways depending on the sugar daddy, “Some of them would just pay for the meal and drinks and some would also pay me an hourly rate on top of that. With the long term relationship I was given a weekly allowance.”

So how much money was she getting from these men? “I set a standard rate of £100 per hour but with the long term one, we would meet up once a week and he’d give me £600 per week.”

According to the national student money survey 2023, 3% of students get money from sex work and 6% of students would consider sex work to get money in a cash crisis.

Maddie Crichton-Fuller, 24, used seeking arrangements and an online texting site while she was in her second year at Birmingham University, after seeing people talk about it on social media. “I had just come out of a long term relationship and decided I needed to do something different. I was only on there for about three or four months before I joined a different site as a text operator,” Maddie says.

When first signing up Maddie thought she would earn loads of money just by posting pictures of herself, but quickly learned that wasn’t the case. She learned in order to make money she would have to meet up in person, something she says she was too scared to do.

Maddie would start by messaging people on the site before moving the conversation over to WhatsApp or Snapchat. “The messages were flirty, but because I would never send any sexual images, I wasn’t getting any money from it,” she says.

Like Becky, Maddie also struck up a longer term relationship with one man. He was a lecturer at Sheffield University at the time. “He had lost his wife and was looking for more companionship than anything else. The messages were flirtatious but I would also send him my uni notes and stuff to look over,” she laughs.

With seeking arrangements Maddie set up her profile using pictures of herself but with a fake name. With the texting site, all the profiles of the operators were anonymous fake profiles, with the sugar daddies messaging these fake accounts. The youngest man she came across was 18 years old and the oldest was a man in his 70s. 

Although Maddie didn’t make as much money as she would have liked, she still managed to get some things out of her time on the sites. “The lecturer sent me a £100 ASOS voucher and I had another guy who sent me £500 after I sent him my PayPal link. On the texting site I was probably earning about £50 a week,” she says.

Looking back now do either of them regret their time on the site? The answer is no, but they both agree that they were maybe too young to be using it at the time. “I don’t think I’d be able to do it now, I have a good job now and great connections in my life. I look back on it quite fondly, but sometimes I do think I could have been a bit more careful,” Becky says.

“It’s something I would be open to doing again and exploring now I’m older. I joke with my boyfriend that if we ever break up, I’m going back on there because I know there are people out there who will happily buy pictures of my feet,” Maddie says.