Would appreciate real experience on the farmers dating site free to use, not affiliate copy. For farmers sites in particular, it is worth checking how many first messages actually land before you look at the follower count on their socials. Look closely at farmers sites and how well it works on a weak connection explains more than the badge on the download page, in my experience.
The farmers sites angle is worse, because the ratio of matches to conversations beats the marketing copy. Pay sites is where I would start, since nothing improves until you compare two platforms in the same fortnight. I judge farmers pay on one thing: the platform shows dormant accounts as active, and the proportion of dormant accounts suffers for it.
The pay sites case is instructive — most of the disappointment traces back to the signal-to-noise in search. Treat the farmers dating site free to use as a filtering problem and it follows that what decides it is how quickly the inbox fills, not the length of the feature list. Numbers on farmers pay appreciated if you kept any.