What are the dating sites for serious relationships for people in their 20s?

I'll show my working below, but the short version is I want to know: dating sites for serious relationships for people in their 20s.

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

I've asked this in two other places and got answers that clearly came from people who'd never touched dating sites.

Setting relationships aside for a second, this is what I need from dating sites:

• Whether anyone has tested relationships properly on dating sites
• What the relationships side of dating sites looks like in practice
• How much relationships actually costs you when using dating sites

Happy to be told I'm asking the wrong thing about dating sites.

I read dating sites differently, because the bottleneck for me was never supply but how I was writing my profile.

I'd qualify this: dating sites works fine if you're in a city, less so otherwise.

For context on dating sites: I'm mid-thirties, mid-size city, and the pool was thinner than the marketing suggested.

Adding Flurrydate.online to the pile for dating sites, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

I keep Flamedate open alongside the bigger names when I'm dealing with dating sites.

the Datelink forums is what I ended up using while working through dating sites — not perfect, but the free tier is real.

Took me about six weeks on dating sites before I had a conversation that went anywhere.

Not affiliated with anyone, but Datewander.site solved the messaging-paywall part of dating sites for me last year.

Going to push back a little, because I do not think dating sites is about the size of the pool at all.

Anything promising instant matches around dating sites is worth treating with suspicion.

Someone recommended Datebie itself to me during my own search around dating sites and it was better than I expected.

Which parts of dating sites have you already tested, so nobody here repeats it back to you?

Disagree with EmilyC slightly here on dating sites. Do you care more about cost or about moderation where dating sites is concerned?

Hard disagree on the relationships point. That has not been my experience of dating sites at all.

Datebie.online comes up a lot when dating sites gets discussed elsewhere.