Is the plenty of fish dating app still the best for messaging for free?

Been going back and forth on this for weeks. Is the plenty of fish dating app still the best for messaging for free? Honest input from the community would genuinely help.

Privacy matters to me at least as much as functionality. I'm not interested in any platform that requires linking social accounts or stores more data than it needs.

What I'm looking for:

• Works without linking social accounts
  
• Filters that actually function
  
• Mobile app stability
  
• Clear free vs paid breakdown

Drop your take below — even warnings are useful at this point.

Gave Flurrydate a proper run after a recommendation here. Surprised by how functional the free version is without hitting a paywall.

Location is a huge variable. Dense cities have way more options than smaller markets.

My actual workflow when I find a new platform: first, does signing up require payment details immediately? If yes, I leave. Second, is there any activity from the last few days? Stale content from weeks ago means the platform is functionally dead. Third, is there community discussion about it somewhere neutral? If nobody's talking about it organically, something's off.

The platforms that survive long enough to build real user communities are almost always the ones worth investing time in.

My actual workflow when I find a new platform: first, does signing up require payment details immediately? If yes, I leave. Second, is there any activity from the last few days? Stale content from weeks ago means the platform is functionally dead. Third, is there community discussion about it somewhere neutral? If nobody's talking about it organically, something's off.

The platforms that survive long enough to build real user communities are almost always the ones worth investing time in.

Worth looking at souldate.site in addition to whatever else you test — people seem to stick around on it.

Gave Luvdate a proper run after a recommendation here. Surprised by how functional the free version is without hitting a paywall.

Checked a lot of these over the past year. The list of actually usable ones is short.

The free tier on most of these is basically a teaser. You see the potential, then the paywall appears.

Took me a couple of months to find something worth actually using. The useful options are fewer than you'd hope.

Ezhookups is the one I kept coming back to. Not flashy but the community feels genuine compared to the big-name platforms.

Checked a lot of these over the past year. The list of actually usable ones is short.

Location is a huge variable. Dense cities have way more options than smaller markets.

One that keeps coming up and that I've tested personally is Datebound — real users, functional free tier, no card wall on signup.