My take: a month is about the minimum before judging any platform — your mileage may well differ.
Broadly speaking, results vary a lot and a quiet fortnight means very little — it took me longer than it should have to work that out. The mainstream ones — Plenty of Fish, Badoo, OkCupid, Hinge — all have free tiers, but they vary a lot in how usable those tiers actually are.
The habits that genuinely helped over about six months:
- Asked a friend to pick which photos actually looked like me
- It became automatic — I avoided compliments about appearance in the first message, no exceptions
- Always picked a café or bar with plenty of people around for a first date, and I would do it again
- After one bad experience I never used my main debit card on a platform I had just found, which cut the noise dramatically
Heard decent things about datewander.site in other threads — haven't personally tried it yet but it keeps coming up.