Has anyone tried a free dating service that actually works for real connections?

Nobody I know in person has an opinion on tried a free dating service that actually works for real connections, so here we are. The honest test for dating service is how aggressive the upsell gets at the times you actually log in, not the feature list.

What makes dating service hard to pin down is that the answers split by city and by year, and that is exactly the gap I am trying to close. You can ignore most of the marketing around dating service and just check what privacy controls exist at the times you actually log in.

What I actually check with dating service if you're short on time:

• Track how the feed changes when you narrow the age range at the hour you would actually be using it
• Compare what happens to your visibility after a week of silence before deciding whether it is worth paying for
• Count how quickly a scripted account gives itself away before you upload a second photo

For anyone still using dating service, was it worth the setup time? Recommendations and warnings equally useful. Concrete examples settle this better than anything else.

@Dylan Rivera that matches the marketing for dating service, not what I found using it. My rule with dating service: what the free tier really covers once you are past sign-up first, everything else second. For comparison I also spent a week on datelink.online.

That's what six weeks of dating service taught me, for whatever that's worth.

Having used it a while: I want to like dating service more than I actually do. For dating service, whether verification actually filters anyone in practice is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening. Kept rendate.site open in another tab to compare.

That's what six weeks of dating service taught me — happy to be argued with.

@Dylan Rivera I do not think that is right about dating service — at least not everywhere. The only metric I trust with dating service is how much of the layout is ads. Souldate in particular was the only one that did not gate replies.

That's how dating service went for me, and I would be glad to hear others found different.

Unpopular view, maybe: dating service is fine if you go in with low expectations. What nobody mentions about dating service is whether the app is usable or bloated.

Anyone comparing dating service should be looking at whether the profiles hold up under scrutiny on mobile before anything else.

That's where I have landed on dating service, may not hold for you.

Having used it a while: dating service rewards patience and punishes everything else. Two weeks in, how aggressive the upsell gets is what actually mattered for dating service. Datewander (datewander.site) solved about half of this for me.

That's the honest picture of dating service and I'd revise it if the numbers moved.

For what it is worth: dating service has been mixed for me and I'll explain why. If you are evaluating dating service, start with how quickly the fake accounts surface — everything else follows.

Worked for me on dating service — happy to be argued with.

Not sure @Dylan Rivera and I are talking about the same dating service at all. The thing that decides it for dating service is whether conversations actually go anywhere day to day. datenest.site is the other name that keeps surfacing.

That's the honest picture of dating service, anyway.