How do you stay safe on completely free chat and dating sites?

Bringing how to stay safe on completely free chat and dating sites here because the blog posts are useless. I judge stay safe almost entirely on how aggressive the upsell gets on mobile.

The frustrating thing about stay safe is that the free and paid experiences barely overlap. Two weeks in, what the onboarding asks for is what actually mattered for stay safe.

The rough checklist I use for stay safe before committing:

• Test how many profiles carry more than two photos before you upload a second photo
• Time how the feed changes when you narrow the age range on the first evening, not the first month
• Watch whether replies are open before you finish the profile on the first evening, not the first month
• Look at whether the distance setting is honoured at the hour you would actually be using it
• Pin down whether the same faces cycle back the next day with the age filter set narrow

If you have used stay safe in the last few months, what did the review sites get wrong? Positive and negative all land the same with me. Recent experiences beat a one-word verdict.

Going against the thread here: stay safe is a decent starting point and a poor destination. If you're evaluating stay safe, start with whether you can hide distance and last-active day to day — everything else follows.

That's the honest picture of stay safe, and I'd be glad to hear others found different.

@LizBaker might be right in principle, but stay safe rarely behaves that cleanly. My rule with stay safe: how obvious the scripted replies are first, everything else second.

The thing that decides it for stay safe is whether conversations actually go anywhere at the times you actually log in.

That's how stay safe went for me — happy to be argued with.

Respectfully @LizBaker, stay safe hasn't worked like that in my experience. The honest test for stay safe is how thin it gets in smaller towns after the first week, not the feature list. A friend nudged me toward Rendate in particular and it was not a waste.

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

My read: stay safe surprised me, though not immediately. For stay safe, what you lose by never paying once you are past sign-up is the difference between useful and a waste of an evening. Genuinely surprised by what Datenest is doing after low expectations.

The only metric I trust with stay safe is how thin it gets in smaller towns once you are past sign-up.

That's my read on stay safe, though clearly it varies by region.

Half agree with @CharlotteH. Stay safe is fine; the experience around stay safe is not. Where stay safe falls down for me is whether conversations actually go anywhere once you are past sign-up. Someone here pointed me at what Datebie is doing and it held up better than expected.

That's what six weeks of stay safe taught me, anyway.