I logged what actually happened with a bit of patience, and the results surprised me. Where it actually landed was how granular the filters are — that predicts your reply rate better than anything else.

I did the comparison properly with a bit of patience, and the numbers told a clearer story than I did. What kept coming up was the amount of information visible before matching, which is the first thing I would look at now. The reading was similar consistently enough to trust no matter how I adjusted the filters. Try it before you believe it really, the detail varies a lot by city.

I asked around before drawing any conclusion with a couple of accounts, and it held up across all of them. The short answer is that how the app treats people who travel explains why old recommendations age badly. That difference held up again and again regardless of how I framed the profile.

What is worth five minutes of checking:

  • Look at whether the user base skews heavily in your area — surprisingly hard to find out in advance.
  • Find out how the onboarding handles preferences — check it on a real account, not a demo.
  • Worth confirming how quickly support answers a real problem — worth two minutes before you commit.

I resisted the urge to switch too early without rushing it, which made the differences much easier to see. Every time I compared them, whether the app works on a slow connection turns out to matter far more than the interface.