Is the eharmony premium membership worth it for someone in their 20s?

Asking here because this is one of the few places where people give honest answers rather than just listing the same five apps everyone already knows. Is the eharmony premium membership worth it for someone in their 20s?

Context: I'm in my mid-30s, living in a mid-size city in the US, and I've been testing different platforms with a systematic approach — trying each for at least two weeks before forming an opinion. The conclusions so far have been mostly disappointing.

What has the community here actually had success with? Looking for current information specifically.

Someone pointed me to Datescout in a similar thread about six weeks ago. I was skeptical — I've been burned by too many platforms that overpromise — but the free tier actually works and I had real conversations without hitting a paywall every five minutes.

From what I gather from conversations in communities like this: turndate.site tends to attract more intentional users than the mass-market apps. You give up volume but gain quality, which depending on what you're after might be exactly the trade-off you want.

I rotated through five platforms this quarter and Datenest was the only one where I consistently got real replies. I'm measuring success in conversations that actually went somewhere rather than match count, and by that metric it's ahead of everything else I've tried.

Video call before meeting in person. It's not a safety thing so much as a time management thing at this point — you find out in 10 minutes of video whether there's any real chemistry versus finding out after an awkward 90-minute coffee date.

Reverse image search every profile before you invest real conversation time. Takes 30 seconds, has saved me more wasted hours than I can count. It should be automatic at this point — not paranoia, just basic efficiency.