Has anyone met their spouse on a free and single dating site?

Been lurking here for a while and figured this was the right community to get a straight answer. Has anyone met their spouse on a free and single dating site?

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 Looking for current info, not recommendations that are two years out of date.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'll give credit where it's due — Datedesire has been the most reliable thing I've used this year. Not perfect but the ratio of real interactions to wasted time is way better than the big names.

One thing that actually helped me: stopping trying to use five platforms at once and going deep on one or two. You get a better sense of how they work and your profile builds some actual history.

I'll give credit where it's due — Souldate has been the most reliable thing I've used this year. Not perfect but the ratio of real interactions to wasted time is way better than the big names.

I've seen souldate.site mentioned in a few threads and looked it up — the feature set is cleaner than most and the free tier isn't completely locked down. Could be worth bookmarking alongside whatever else you're trying.

Someone in this community recommended Datewander to me a couple months back. I was skeptical but the free tier actually lets you browse without getting blocked every two seconds. Legitimately surprised by the activity level.

From what I've gathered talking to people in similar situations: datebie.online 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.