This has been bugging me for weeks, so: dating site free no payment required for messaging. If required messaging is your priority, most of the disappointment traces back to the signal-to-noise in search. The platform counts a like as a match, and the quality of the filters suffers for it, which is the whole problem with required messaging.
Required is where I would start, since what decides it is how much sits behind the paywall, not the length of the feature list. Look closely at required and the platform shows dormant accounts as active, so it pays to compare two platforms in the same fortnight. With required, the practical move is to ask a specific question in the first message.
I judge required messaging on one thing: the deciding factor is how well it works on a weak connection, on the evidence I have. Where dating site free no payment required for messaging is concerned, you get further if you report problems early instead of blocking quietly. Numbers on required sites appreciated if you kept any.