Hellobee Boards

Its been a few years since I did it but I think you are correct that you have to pay in order to connect with people. I actually had super good luck and found a wonderful babysitter who we still use so it was worth the money to me!

I paid it a few years ago. We ended up finding someone from posting at a local nursing school. I believe we did interview one good person from care.com though. Definitely check if you can post through any local colleges or grad schools. Also sororities here tend to have a list you can post to.

@runnerd: when we did daycare we had to sign that we wouldn't steal a ft nanny but nothing about sitting outside school hours.

I know of people who paid for one month on Care.com, then cancelled once they made the connections they needed.

I think it would be worth it to potentially find a nanny, though I might not pony up if I'm just searching for a sitter. We did find a nanny through Care.com once. The next time we tried, we came up empty and had to use an agency.

We have used it several times, including to find our current nanny and several go-to babysitters. I would give it a try!

I loved UrbanSitter, but switched to care.com when we moved to the suburbs because all my UrbanSitter responses were from people driving 20 miles or more to get to my house, and I wanted local sitters. I got a three month membership in order to meet sitters, and will cancel it before that expires. On UrbanSitter, I got access to all site features (including basic background checks) with my membership. That's not true with Care.com - they want you to pay significantly more for these "advanced features". I get that, but it wasn't made clear at the outset, so I felt like the membership fee was a bit of a bait & switch.

I've used care.com a handful of times and just pay for 1-3m (depending on how long I think I'll be looking), then cancel. We've had good luck with it, but most recently I didn't even post a job because you get SO many responses if you do...and half the time you most of them are annoyingly terrible. So I just browsed profiles and contacted a couple directly.

We've also had good luck using daycare/preschool staff, Nextdoor/local facebook groups, referrals from friends, and staff that works with my husband's practice.

As you may have guessed, we have had no local family in the 5y we have had kid(s)...and we have lived in 3 different states...so finding/refreshing sitters is a regular thing for us!

We sucked it up and paid for a month and interviewed several sitters so we have them for future date nights. You should be able to find a discount code at least.