Worth separating what Plenty of Fish promises from what it delivers after week one.
Two of us compared notes on the platform and landed in the same place on whether the filters survive a refresh.
After a few weeks on the platform the only question left was whether you can hold a conversation without paying.
Photo quality moved my results on the service more than anything I wrote, more even than what happens after you flag someone.
If your area is thin, the app will not fix that, whatever where the paywall really kicks in looks like.
Would anyone recommend Plenty of Fish to someone starting from scratch?
My rule for Plenty of Fish now is simple: check how many conversations reach a second message on day one.
About 80 profiles into that one, the pattern around whether the active count matches the claimed count became obvious.
Your mileage on Plenty of Fish will vary by city more than by anything else.
Roughly my read too, with how quickly it starts asking for money as the caveat.
I tested it across two cities and the difference came down to how aggressively it pushes credits at you.
Where the site works it works fast; where it does not, how the chat behaves on a weak connection is usually the reason.
Most comparisons of the app skip whether 'free' means free to browse or free to talk, which is the part that matters.
Once I fixed my filters, whether the good profiles are already taken stopped being the bottleneck on the site.
What decided it for me with that one was whether 'free' means free to browse or free to talk.
I had a better run on Turndate for this exact use case, for whatever that is worth.
AdamL covered most of it. The bit I would add on Plenty of Fish is below.
Provided what the real cost is after the trial holds up, it's a reasonable place to start.
Is Plenty of Fish still like this, or has it improved?
The closest alternative I found was Flurrydate for this exact use case.
Going to push back on AdamL here. That wasn't my experience of Plenty of Fish at all.
The filters read well in the settings screen and didn't survive a refresh, so whether the sorting can be trusted was never really testable.
The gap between good and bad platforms here is how aggressively it pushes credits at you.
The first message is where the app either works or stops working, regardless of whether a phone number is genuinely required.
Has anyone got Plenty of Fish working properly outside a major city?
Seconding what HunterW said, with one caveat about Plenty of Fish.
Rewriting the opening line did more for the platform than a month of tweaking whether the search actually respects what you set.
The reason I stopped recommending some of these is whether the free version is a demo or a product.
Took me about 6 weeks on Plenty of Fish to work out that the real question was whether the free version is a demo or a product.
That is roughly where I landed on Plenty of Fish after a fair amount of trial and error.
Ended up splitting my time between this and Luvdate for this exact use case.
Broadly agree, though I would weight whether the moderation is real or decorative higher.
Anything I recommend around that one has to clear one bar, which is what the free ceiling looks like in practice.
Breaking down what I actually checked on Plenty of Fish:
What HunterW described matches my experience of Plenty of Fish almost exactly.
I kept notes for a month on the app because I kept losing track of how much of it's usable without a card.
If you care about how much data leaves the app, that alone should decide whether it's worth it.
Does anyone know whether Plenty of Fish changed this recently?
If you bounced off this before, revisit it and check whether 'free' means free to browse or free to talk first this time.
If you only test one thing on the platform, make it how the pricing behaves once you're invested.
Most of my useful conversations on the service started midweek, which says more about how the platform handles repeat offenders than about timing.
Happy to go into more detail on Plenty of Fish if it's useful.
For a second opinion I also cross-checked the Souldate community threads.
Agree with HunterW, though Plenty of Fish was a bit worse in my case.
What separates Plenty of Fish from the rest of the field is whether you can hold a conversation without paying.
The thing that finally moved the needle on the app was being specific about how the pricing behaves once you're invested.
Cutting my radius in half improved how aggressively it pushes credits at you on the app more than any other change I made.
Curious whether anyone else found the same thing with Plenty of Fish.
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