Starting a thread on how active is the mingle2 dating site in suburban because the existing advice contradicts itself. The suburban sites case is instructive — what decides it is the depth of the profile fields, not the size of the ad budget. You get further if you use a photo that appears nowhere else online, which is the whole problem with mingle2 sites.
Suburban is where I'd start, since the time it takes to get a first reply is a better predictor than the price tag. Every time mingle2 sites comes up, the honest advice is to use a photo that appears nowhere else online, going by the last year or so.
With suburban, the platform keeps deleted profiles in search for weeks, and the quality of the filters suffers for it. There's a pattern with how active is the mingle2 dating site in suburban: nothing improves until you keep a note of what you actually spent. Happy to be told I'm asking the wrong question about suburban mingle2.