What Hily Premium Includes

Hily Premium is an optional subscription. It highlights your messages and lets you write to people without waiting for a match. It also adds boosts, shows you who has already liked you, removes the ads, and gives you Incognito mode and advanced filters. You subscribe inside the app, and the price is shown in your App Store or Google Play account.

Here is what the subscription adds, in one place.

• Highlighted messages.
• Messaging people before you match with them.
• Boosts for your profile.
• Seeing who has already liked you.
• No ads.
• Incognito mode.
• Advanced filters.

None of it is required. A free account can like, match and chat. Premium adds reach, shortcuts and control on top of those basics.

Premium lets you highlight what you send, so it catches her eye.

Treat that as a spotlight, not a fix. A highlighted "hey" is still "hey". Highlighting helps a message that is already specific to her and easy to answer, and it does nothing for one that is not. Get the words right first, then decide whether they deserve the extra attention.

The second big feature is writing to someone without waiting for a match. On Hily this is done with a Major Crush, sent from her card in Finder, and Premium subscribers get Major Crushes every day depending on the plan.

a dating coach rates this kind of feature highly. Choosing who you write to, rather than waiting for the app to decide who sees you, is in his view one of the most valuable things you can pay for. He also warns that writing first gives away a little power, so the message and the chat after it need to be good.

A boost pushes your profile in front of more people for a while.

coach is a fan of boosts and recommends testing them rather than guessing. Use one, then see how much it changes your results compared with a normal day. He also makes a point that settles a worry many men have: a woman who sees you during a boost does not know you paid for it. Nothing on your card says so. It is between you and the app.

Pick a sensible time for a boost, when plenty of people are likely to be on the app and you are free to reply to whoever likes you back.

On the free plan, some of the people in your Likes tab are blurred. A subscription gives you Unblurs every day to reveal them, and liking one of them back makes an instant match.

That list is warm. Every name on it has already said yes to your card. Answer it quickly, but only like back the women you would actually take out.

The last three are smaller.

Removing ads makes the app calmer to use. Incognito mode is available as a setting you can turn on. Advanced filters let you narrow Finder further than the free filters do.

Filters deserve a word. Narrower is only better if it is narrower in the right direction. Set them to the women you would genuinely date and within a distance you would really travel for a first drink. A tighter feed of women you want beats a huge feed of women you do not.

Go to your Profile in the app and tap Get Hily Premium. The price and the plan options appear through your App Store or Google Play account, which is also where the charge is made and where you manage the subscription afterward.

coach has no patience for the rule that you should never pay for anything on a dating app. He calls that bias a hindrance. The apps are businesses, he argues, and they have every reason to look after the people who pay them.

He is just as clear about the limit. Paid features multiply what you already get, and if you are getting nothing, a multiplier leaves you with nothing. If your photos and your first messages are not earning any matches on the free plan, fix those before you pay for anything.

When you do pay, run it like an experiment. Write down your matches, conversations and dates over two weeks on the free plan. Then subscribe for the next two weeks and count the same things.

If the second list is clearly longer, Premium is working for you. If the two look alike, cancel and keep the money. Either way, put the renewal date in your calendar the day you subscribe, so the decision is yours and not the app's.