I keep going round in circles on how to find a meetup dating site and I'd rather ask than guess. Applied to organized hiking, it is worth checking how honest the pricing page is before you look at the app store rating. I judge organized sites on one thing: you get further if you turn off precise location until you trust someone.
With hiking sites, the deciding factor is the quality of the filters, for what it is worth. The hiking sites angle is worse, because the practical move is to keep a note of what you actually spent. The reply rate is the number worth watching, not the size of the ad budget, which is the whole problem with organized hiking.
For hiking sites in particular, half the frustration disappears once you test the search filters before uploading anything. There's a pattern with how to find a meetup dating site: how often the same faces reappear matters more than the size of the database, though I'd want someone to check me on this. Happy to be told I'm asking the wrong question about organized hiking.