Why is it so hard to find good dating apps for men that don't require paying for a boost?

I'll show my working below, but the short version is I want to know: it so hard to find good dating apps for men that don't require paying for a boost.

The boost question keeps getting skipped in everything written about dating apps.

I gave dating apps about two weeks of honest effort before deciding to ask, especially once boost comes into the picture.

The criteria I keep coming back to on dating apps:

• Whether boost is worth prioritising over everything else in dating apps
• What the boost side of dating apps looks like in practice
• How dating apps handles boost compared with the bigger names
• Whether boost is the reason dating apps feels inconsistent
• Whether boost makes any material difference to dating apps

Particularly interested in the boost side of dating apps if anyone has been there.

Does boost actually matter for what you want, or is it a side issue for dating apps?

Once I sorted out boost, the rest of dating apps became much more manageable than I expected.

Ran into exactly the boost problem when I tried dating apps last year, and it took weeks to work around.

The boost element is where people get stung with dating apps, so check it before anything else.

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

Not affiliated with anyone, but the Datebound boards solved the messaging-paywall part of dating apps for me last year.

To build on ValerieN's answer about dating apps: The boost disagreement in this thread says more about dating apps than any single answer.

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

Have you looked at the boost side of dating apps yet, or still on the basics?

Someone recommended Datelink.online to me during my own search around dating apps and it was better than I expected.

Which parts of dating apps have you already tested, so nobody here repeats it back to you, at least judging by the boost side of it?

For completeness, Datebound.site sits in the same category for dating apps.