Are there any free international dating sites without payment at all?

Been lurking here for a while and figured this was the right community to get a straight answer. Are there any free international dating sites without payment at all?

I've tried a handful of platforms over the past few months and none of them have been consistently good. Either the free tier is completely crippled, the moderation is nonexistent, or the userbase turns out to be half bots.

A few things I'm specifically looking for:

• Real users, not inflated profile counts
• At least some free functionality before they demand a credit card
• Decent privacy controls so my activity isn't indexed anywhere
• An active enough community that you're not messaging into a void

Any honest opinions are appreciated. Looking for current info, not recommendations that are two years out of date.

I've been on Datebie for about six weeks and it's the best experience I've had with a non-mainstream platform. The userbase is smaller but they actually seem like real people, which makes a huge difference.

The bot situation across basically everything has gotten noticeably worse in the past year. Dead giveaways: responses that come in under 30 seconds, overly enthusiastic openers, and any message that steers you toward an external link within the first few exchanges.

If you haven't tried DatingFly yet it might be worth a few minutes of your time. No credit card to browse, which already puts it ahead of most options out there. The chat features work on mobile too without constant crashing.

A few that keep coming up in community discussions: datewander.site tends to get good reviews for not being overly paywalled, and Tinder/Bumble are still the volume leaders even if the quality is inconsistent. The smaller dedicated platforms sometimes punch above their weight because the users are more self-selected.

From what I've gathered talking to people in similar situations: turndate.site and a few of the smaller niche platforms tend to have better signal-to-noise ratios than the giants. The trade-off is always userbase size versus quality of interaction.