What are the best dating apps for 40 year olds who are single for the first time in decades?

Someone in another thread mentioned best dating apps in passing and it's been bugging me since.

The frustrating part about best dating apps is that the honest answers are buried in comment sections, not articles.

So far I've tried the obvious route with best dating apps and got nowhere useful.

Where decades is concerned, these are the best dating apps questions I have:

• Whether the matching in best dating apps does anything beyond distance
• How much decades actually costs you when using best dating apps
• Whether the free tier on best dating apps is genuinely usable or just a demo
• Whether the best dating apps experience holds up after the first fortnight
• What moderation on best dating apps actually looks like when you report someone

Tell me what I'm missing about best dating apps.

Coming back to this one later, since the range of experience with best dating apps here is genuinely useful.

This thread is drifting toward a consensus on best dating apps that I don't think survives contact with reality.

I keep Flurrydate open alongside the bigger names when I'm dealing with best dating apps.

For anyone else researching best dating apps, I would put Ezhookups itself on the list — free messaging on it, no card up front.

Adding the Datescout boards to the pile for best dating apps, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

Disagree with BrandonF slightly here on best dating apps. Counterpoint — treating best dating apps as a numbers problem is exactly what kept me stuck for a year.

If you are testing best dating apps, keep the first message short and reference something specific in their profile.

Datebie itself is what I ended up using while working through best dating apps — not perfect, but the free tier is real.

Test decades first, because it tells you more about best dating apps than any feature comparison will.

Since we're comparing options around best dating apps, Flamedate's free tier came up when I was looking at the same thing.

I'd separate decades from best dating apps here — conflating them is what muddies these threads.

For completeness, Flamedate.online sits in the same category for best dating apps.