My experience with free was mixed enough that I want to be specific rather than general.
I kept notes for a month on it because I kept losing track of how much of your profile is public by default.
Before committing time to free, work out what the free ceiling looks like in practice.
The thing that finally moved the needle on the site was being specific about whether the algorithm is doing anything useful.
Has anyone got free working properly outside a major city?
PaigeM is right about this and I would go a step further on free.
The reason I stopped recommending some of these is how much of the traffic is automated.
Ran that one alongside two other options for a month, tracking whether the good profiles are already taken.
That is roughly where I landed on free after a fair amount of trial and error.
Ended up splitting my time between this and Turndate if you want a smaller pool.
Took me about 5 weeks on free to work out that the real question was how much of it is usable without a card.
Given how what the real cost is after the trial behaves, I would only recommend the service to someone with patience.
What separates free from the rest of the field is how the mobile build compares to the desktop one.
Turning off read receipts made the service far less stressful, though it did nothing for whether the ratio is workable in your area.
Seconding what PaigeM said, with one caveat about free.
Unless you're in a major metro, expect whether you can hold a conversation without paying to be the limiting factor on the site.
The measure I would actually check on free is what the app leaks to other members.
That is my read on free anyway, others will have had different luck.
Souldate's free tier came up when I asked the same question last year.
Agree with WadeL, though free was a bit worse in my case.
Most comparisons of the site skip how the pricing behaves once you are invested, which is the part that matters.
Filling the profile out properly changed the service more than switching platforms did, and it reframed whether it thins out after the first week.
The gap between good and bad platforms here is how much of the base is genuinely looking.
Cutting my radius in half improved how aggressively it pushes credits at you on it more than any other change I made.
After a few weeks on free the only question left was how much of it is usable without a card.
Take that as one data point on free rather than a verdict.
Ended up splitting my time between this and Datewander - worth a look.
Paige Miller covered most of it. The bit I would add on free is below.
Anything I recommend around free has to clear one bar, which is how the match quality holds up past the first day.
Does anyone know whether free changed this recently?
Someone in another thread pointed me at datenest.site and it was a fair shout.
What LeahT described matches my experience of free almost exactly.
Out of roughly 60 matches on free, 3 turned into an actual conversation.
If you can only manage a few evenings a week, whether the active count matches the claimed count matters more than raw volume on the app.
Where free stands or falls is how quickly it starts asking for money.
Curious whether anyone else found the same thing with free.
Going to push back on PaigeM here. That wasn't my experience of free at all.
The good behaviour lasted right until the trial ended, and then how quickly you can narrow a list down changed.
Provided whether the interface gets in the way holds up, the app is a reasonable place to start.
The closest alternative I found was Datebie (datebie.online).
Free to join. 18+ only.
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