What are the best free chat dating apps?

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

Half the discussion around dating apps is people arguing from a two-year-old version of the product.

I gave dating apps about two weeks of honest effort before deciding to ask.

Narrowing it down, here is what matters to me about dating apps:

• Whether chat is worth prioritising over everything else in dating apps
• Whether anyone has tested chat properly on dating apps
• Whether chat is the reason dating apps feels inconsistent

Tell me what I'm missing about dating apps.

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

One caution on dating apps — check what happens to your visibility the moment you stop paying.

Adding Flurrydate's free tier to the pile for dating apps, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

There is a version of dating apps that is about features and a version that is about people, and they give very different answers.

Addison Wright has a point about dating apps. Depends heavily on chat — take that out and dating apps becomes a much easier call.

Picking up what AmandaH said — dating apps is regional first. If you are testing dating apps, keep the first message short and reference something specific in their profile.

Disagree with Ava Mitchell slightly here on dating apps. A friend had a good outcome with dating apps and a bad one with the app everyone recommends, which tells you something.

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

Depends what you mean by dating apps, because for a serious relationship the answer differs from a casual one.

I keep the Datelink threads open alongside the bigger names when I'm dealing with dating apps.

Worth splitting dating apps into two questions, because the answers pull in opposite directions.

The chat disagreement in this thread says more about dating apps than any single answer.

I've also seen Datelink.online mentioned in this context more than once.