Which Dating Apps Are Free to Use?

Most of the big ones. Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Bumble and Feeld all have a free version you can download and use, and each sells paid upgrades on top. Badoo lists Premium and Extra as paid subscriptions. Free lets you browse, match and chat, with limits on how many women you can reach in a day.

The free version of an app is real, and it has a ceiling.

The clearest ceiling is the daily limit on likes. Hinge says free members can send only a select number of likes a day, while Hinge+ and HingeX subscribers can send unlimited likes. Tinder lists unlimited daily Likes under Tinder Plus, and Bumble Boost includes unlimited likes. So a free member on any of those has a cap.

The other ceilings are about convenience and reach: seeing who liked you, taking back a pass, boosting how many people see you. These are what the paid tiers sell.

Going by what each app says about itself, two stand out.

OkCupid says accounts are free, that messaging is free once two people Like each other, and that mutual Likes are always visible for free. For a man, that means a match can turn into a conversation without paying.

Feeld says its basic features are included in the free membership. That covers browsing, connecting and sending chats, images and short videos to connections.

Free is the right place to start, and a dating coach pushes back on the idea that you should never pay for anything. He says men in the game community carry a strong bias against it, and that it costs them results. His view is that paying for premium is probably worth it in most cases, if the price is not extreme.

Both things can be true. Start free so you learn which app suits you and whether women reply to you there. Pay only once you have a reason, such as hitting the like limit while still having women you want to write to.

Pick by where the women you want are, not by cost. A free app in a city where nobody you like uses it costs you the most, because the price is your time.

Choose one app, put in a full set of photos and a short, specific page, and give it a few weeks. Running three apps badly is a worse use of an evening than running one app well.

Then judge it by replies, not by the number of matches. If matches arrive and nobody answers your first message, the app is not the problem.

The danger of free is that it costs nothing to do carelessly. A man who taps right on everyone, sends "hey" and moves on is spending zero dollars and a lot of evenings.

Apps are businesses. a dating coach's point is that they make money from paying members, so they treat them well. You can use the free version and still get good results, but only with better photos and a better first message than the average man sending the free-version "hey."

What is free and what is paid changes from app to app and over time. The sign-up screen and the settings in your own app tell you what you get in your country, and which features sit behind a paid tier.