I gave up on guessing and just measured with a bit of patience, and stopped assuming the obvious answer was right. It turns out the share of accounts that are dormant moves the numbers more than anything else.

I trialled the free tiers only with a couple of accounts, and it held up across all of them. Every time I compared them, how the app treats people who travel can be tested inside a week. The contrast was sharpest more than once when I compared like for like. That is the short version ultimately, before changing anything else.

What is worth five minutes of checking:

  • How many prompts the profile format offers — worth asking about before you invest time.
  • Find out whether conversations sync across devices — it matters more after the first month.
  • Whether the distance filter goes wide enough — it changes the experience completely.
  • Find out how easily you can change your location — this is where the free tiers diverge.

I went back through my own messages to check over a few months, before I trusted my own conclusion. What kept coming up was whether notifications can be tuned, which is what people are really complaining about. It came out the same fairly clearly regardless of how active I was. Do not take this as gospel frankly, and I would not pretend otherwise.