What Kayla Bennett described matches my experience of free swx chat almost exactly.
What decided it for me with free swx chat was how the pricing behaves once you are invested.
Two of us compared notes on it and landed in the same place on how the chat behaves on a weak connection.
Provided how much control you get over who sees you holds up, that one is a reasonable place to start.
After a few weeks on it the only question left was how the mobile build compares to the desktop one.
Cutting my radius in half improved what the subscription actually unlocks on it more than any other change I made.
That is roughly where I landed on free swx chat after a fair amount of trial and error.