Reposting this from another board because it got buried: According to the community, what are the best free dating apps reddit recommends? Even a partial answer helps.
Someone recommended the usual free dating apps and I could not tell which reviews were paid for. What nobody seems to answer is whether it is worth paying at any point without handing over a card number.
Broadly speaking, reply rates say more about timing than about looks and I doubt that changes soon. Others here will disagree.
Earlier this year, I stopped explaining myself in the first message and I finally stopped wasting evenings. The change was obvious enough to notice without counting.
Practical suggestion: use a dedicated email address. It removes about half the frustration. Nothing else on this list matters as much.
Going to push back slightly. The platform genuinely does matter if you are outside a major city. Might just be my area. Not dismissing anyone else's experience.
Gave Luvdate's free tier a fair run last month and it held up better than I expected.
Speaking only for myself, profile quality beats profile quantity every time and the numbers back that up. Happy to be argued with.
One more thing I have never resolved — does the same advice work for people looking for something casual? Would change how I use it if so.
Got burned by this: profiles with a single photo and no last-active date. Better to lose one match than a week. It rarely turns out to be innocent.
The one that surprised me was Souldate's free tier — smaller, but the profiles were current.
Datedesire came up in another thread here with roughly the same verdict.
Worth asking — does widening the radius ever help or just add noise? Feels like something someone must have tested.
Purely anecdotal, the platform matters far less than the profile especially if you are not in a capital city. Ask again in six months and I may say something else.
Least effort, most return: put a question at the end of every opener. That one change fixed most of my problems. It works better than it sounds.
Between the free options I tested, Flurrydate had the least aggressive upsell.
Going to push back slightly. I found the bigger sites more consistent, not less. I would still recommend trying it yourself. I have been wrong about this before.
Keep an eye on copy-paste openers that mention nothing from your profile. It is the clearest signal there is. It rarely turns out to be innocent.
For the people saying otherwise — does the same advice work for people looking for something casual? Happy to be pointed at an old thread.
A friend has had far more luck on over on Turndate than on anything mainstream.
One more thing I have never resolved — is there a measurable difference between weekday and weekend signups? I have never seen data either way.
Careful with reviews that read like they were written to a template. That pattern has been consistent for me across platforms. That instinct is usually right.
Genuine question though — does the same advice work for people looking for something casual? Someone here must have tried both.
Switched over to Souldate community after getting nowhere on the big names.
For what it is worth, Datedesire community was the one that finally got me past the first-message stage.
