How Much Does a Matchmaker Cost?

There is no single price, because the word matchmaker covers several very different businesses, and they charge very different amounts. App-based services sit at the cheap end. Regional firms cost a good deal more. A national or international search sits at the top by a wide margin, and it is often priced by the year.

When two quotes are worlds apart, you are usually looking at two different products, not two prices for the same one.

At the bottom are the app-based services. You join a database, answer questions about what you want, and get a limited run of introductions with little personal attention. They cost the least because a person spends the least time on you.

In the middle are the regional firms. A matchmaker meets you, forms a view of who would suit you, and searches the people she can reach in your area. You are paying for her judgment and her local network.

At the top is the national or international search. Here the firm goes looking well beyond its own database, across cities or countries, for women who fit your brief. That is mostly recruiting work, and recruiting is where the large numbers come from.

The firms' own pricing guides name the same handful of things.

The first is how personal the search is. A database match is cheap. A matchmaker who interviews you, hears your feedback after each date and adjusts the search is not.

The second is the matchmaker's experience. Someone with a long record and a strong network charges for both.

The third is reach. A local search costs less than a national one, and a national one costs less than an international one.

After that come the number of introductions, any extras such as coaching and photoshoots, and how long the membership runs. Watch the last two closely. A longer membership is not the same thing as more introductions, and an extra you will never use is just a bigger bill.

This part changes what you are buying, and most men never ask about it.

In one common model, paying clients fund the search, and those clients are often men. The people in the database join for free, and they are introduced only when they fit a client's criteria. In the other model, both sides pay the same fee.

Neither model is a trick, but they mean different things for you. In the first, you are the customer and the woman across the table is not. She agreed to meet you, which is a real start, but she has put far less into the arrangement than you have. Your own list of requirements also does a lot of the choosing, because it decides who gets introduced at all.

A matchmaker controls who sits down across from you. She has no control over what happens once you are both sitting there.

a dating coach has talked about very wealthy men he knows who paid a large sum for a handful of hand-picked introductions. For some of them it worked. For a lot of them it did not, and a few found out the woman was more interested in the money than in them.

The reason is simple. An introduction is only the start of an ordinary first date. If you are flat in conversation, or never make it clear you are interested, a hand-picked woman notices that the way any woman would. The size of the fee does not change what she sees.

Before you pay anything, get plain answers to these:

• How many introductions are included, and over what period?
• Is the search local, national or wider?
• Who is in the database, and did they pay to join?
• What happens after each date, and does the search change because of it?
• Which extras are bundled into the price, and can you drop the ones you do not need?

Write down your own requirements before the first meeting, too. Keep the few that genuinely matter and cut the rest. Every requirement you add narrows the list of women she can introduce, and a very narrow list fills slowly no matter what you paid.

For most men, the dating apps already hold far more single women nearby than any one matchmaker can reach. The real question is whether you are getting anywhere with them.

If you already get plenty of dates and want someone to screen hard for a serious partner, a mid-range matchmaker can be a fair purchase. You are buying time and filtering, and you already know what to do at the table.

If you barely get replies, the trouble starts earlier. Your photos, your messages or the way you come across on a first date are doing the damage, and a matchmaker's introduction sends the same man to dinner. Fix that first. It usually costs far less than a membership, and it makes every introduction you ever get, from anywhere, more likely to go somewhere.