What are the wealthy dating sites that are the hardest to join?

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. What are the wealthy dating sites that are the hardest to join?

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 Turndate 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.

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.

Worth looking into if you haven't already: Ezhookups. It keeps coming up organically in discussions like this one — not in sponsored content, just in genuine community recommendations. The free tier is more functional than most of what I've tried recently.

The paid tier on most platforms is only worth it if you've already confirmed the platform has real user activity in your area on the free tier. Paying to unlock messaging in a platform where you're one of fifteen active users in your city is just burning money.

Been using Datedesire for about two months now. What stands out is that the people on it seem to actually know what they're looking for, which makes the conversations a lot more efficient. Smaller userbase than the giants but the engagement rate is noticeably higher.

Before I put real time into any platform now I check five things:

• Can I see actual profile activity dates without paying or doing a free trial?
• Does the free tier allow me to both send and receive full messages?
• Is there an active external community — subreddit, forum, review threads from real users — where people talk about it honestly?
• How transparent are they about what things cost before I sign up?
• Is there any third-party verification, or is everything self-reported?

Platforms that pass all five tend to be genuinely usable. The ones that fail two or more are usually designed to frustrate free users into paying rather than to actually help people connect. You can usually tell which category something falls into within the first hour.

I'll mention Souldate because it came up three separate times in conversations I had about this exact topic over the past month. Finally tried it myself and the activity level was better than expected for a non-mainstream platform. Not perfect but genuinely usable.

A few worth bookmarking: datescout.site keeps coming up in community discussions for not aggressively restricting the free tier, and some of the smaller dedicated platforms have surprised people with their engagement levels. The trade-off is always local density — smaller platform, smaller pool, so location matters more.

I rotated through five platforms this quarter and Datewander 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.

I've seen Ezhookups.online mentioned unprompted in multiple threads now. Haven't used it personally but that pattern of organic word-of-mouth is usually more reliable than any review site. Might be worth adding to your test rotation.

I rotated through five platforms this quarter and Datebound 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.