How we research dating apps
What happens before a single line gets written about an app, and what we cannot tell you.
What we actually do
Every app on this site gets the same four steps, in the same order, before anything is published about it.
- Sign up as a new user. Most of these services work in a browser as well as in an app, so the account is what matters rather than the download. Not as a reviewer with an account already set up: what the first hour feels like is part of the product, and it is the part most write-ups skip because the writer has been on the app for years.
- Find out what is free, and where it stops. Some of these services cost nothing for everything the reader actually needs. Others cap the one action the app exists for. Either way it is the single most useful fact about a dating app and it differs on every one, so we find it by hitting the limit rather than by reading about it, and where there is no limit we say that instead.
- Read the app’s own help documentation. How an app describes its own matching, ranking and limits is worth reading even when it is vague, because the vagueness is usually deliberate and tells you something.
- Compare that against what users report publicly. Where the documentation and the user reports disagree, the page says so rather than picking whichever is more flattering.
What we do not claim
We do not publish match counts, reply rates or any other outcome measured on a test account, because we have not run a controlled test and describing one we did not run would be a lie about method. That research is planned. Until it exists, no page on this site claims it.
We also do not rank apps by who pays us, because nobody does. There is no sponsored placement on this site and no app can buy a higher position or a kinder sentence.
What we cannot tell you
Whether an app will work for you. The single biggest factor is how many active users are near you right now, and that is local, changes constantly, and is invisible from the outside. Any site that claims to know it for your town is guessing.
What we can do is describe each app accurately enough that you can work out which one fits your situation, and tell you plainly when an app is not built for someone like you.
Corrections
Dating apps change their free tiers, their pricing and their ranking constantly, so anything here can go stale. If something on this site is wrong, email [email protected] and it gets fixed with a note on the page rather than quietly edited.