How Long Does a Tinder Boost Last?

A Tinder Boost lasts 30 minutes. For that half hour, Tinder says it makes you one of the most visible people in your area, and it says you can get many times more views than usual while it runs. You start one by tapping the purple lightning bolt icon on the main screen, and the 30 minutes begin as soon as you do.

Tapping the bolt is what starts the Boost, so the moment you tap it is the half hour you get. Tinder's help page describes it as making you one of the top profiles in your area for that stretch.

Thirty minutes is short. It is long enough to catch the women who are on the app at that moment, and it is over before most men have finished their dinner. That is the whole design: a concentrated burst, not a slow drip across the day.

So the most important decision is not whether to buy a Boost. It is which half hour to spend it on.

A Boost only reaches the women who are using Tinder while it runs. So run it when people are actually on their phones: an evening, a weekend afternoon, a quiet stretch after work.

Pick a time that also suits you. If you tap it at eleven at night and fall asleep, the women who like you during that half hour get no reply until tomorrow. By then they are talking to someone else.

a dating coach adds a second test for timing. His view is that a Boost earns the most when your account has been quiet for a stretch, so few women have come across you in a while. Run several close together and the returns shrink. So space them out, and save them for evenings after a quiet spell.

A Boost is not something to start and walk away from.

My picture of the ideal moment is a long work conference call, the kind where you have to be seen to be present but will never be asked to speak. You have to be there anyway, so you run a Boost and swipe while the call drones on. The point is not the call. It is that you are holding your phone for the whole window.

A woman who likes you mid-Boost is scrolling the app at that very minute. If you match and reply within minutes, the conversation starts while you both have the app open. If you reply two days later, that advantage is gone.

More eyes on you is all a Boost sells. Whether those eyes like what they find was settled before you ever tapped the bolt.

coach thinks of paid extras like this as multipliers. An account that normally pulls in a few likes an evening will pull in more. One that pulls in almost none just gets turned down by a larger group of strangers. Multiplying nothing still gives you nothing.

So before you tap the bolt, look at your first photo. Is your face the obvious subject, lit well, with no friends crowding the frame? Then read your written lines. Is there one specific detail a woman could picture and ask about? Those two things decide what the extra views are worth.

The matches a Boost brings are some of the warmest you will get. Treat them that way.

My habit is to reply to everyone a Boost produced before he spends another one. It stops you piling up matches you never answer, and it spaces your Boosts out without you having to think about it.

Open with something from her page rather than a greeting. A question about the dog in her third photo beats "hey, how is your night" every time. Once she is answering with some energy, suggest an evening.

Keep a simple tally. On an ordinary evening, note how many matches you get in about half an hour of normal use. Then compare the half hour of the Boost.

Follow those matches further, too. How many turned into real conversations? How many into a date? A Boost that brings ten matches and no dates did less for you than one that brought three matches and a drink on Thursday.

When the Boost wins that comparison by a clear distance, keep using it and put your effort into choosing good evenings. If it barely moved the numbers, more women saw you and moved on. That points to your photos and your first lines, not to the Boost.