Who Pays for Dating Apps?

The members who buy the paid extras pay, and that can be men or women. The big dating apps are free to join, and you do not have to pay to use them. They earn their money from subscriptions and one-time purchases such as Boosts. Those sell more visibility, more information about who likes you, and finer control over who you see. No app publishes a count of who pays, so be wary of anyone who quotes you one.

a dating coach's explanation is simple: a dating app is a business, not a public service. Some start out free to build a user base. Tinder did. Over time they have to make money, and the way they do it is by selling things to the people who use them.

That has a consequence for you as a user. The app has every reason to keep its paying members happy, because they pay the bills. My reading is that an app looks after its paying customers by showing them to more people and showing them more attractive people. He thinks of it the way a club handles cover charges and bottle service: the best treatment goes to the highest spenders, up to a point where it gets silly.

Treat that as his experience and his belief, not as a published rule. None of the apps says it that way.

The paid features on the apps we looked at fall into three groups.

Visibility. A Boost on Hinge puts you front and center for one hour, and a Superboost does it for 24 hours. Paying means more women see you.

Information. Tinder's Likes page, behind the heart icon, shows who already liked you, and it is a Tinder Gold and Tinder Platinum feature. Feeld's paid tier, Majestic, shows who liked you as well.

Control. Hinge's free version filters on gender, distance, age range, ethnicity, relationship type and religion. Subscribers can filter on more, including height. Bumble's advanced filters are part of Bumble Premium. Feeld's paid tier adds extra filters and unlimited likes.

Notice what none of these changes: your pictures, your words, or the message you send. Paying changes how many women reach you and how well you can sort them.

No. Feeld says free members can connect and chat. Hinge has a free version with its own set of filters. Tinder shows you people through normal Discovery without a subscription.

My advice is to start free, and he is firm about a condition: get some matches before you pay. His reasoning is that almost every paid feature is a multiplier, and a multiplier on zero is zero. If your free account earns a few matches, extra visibility can turn a few into more. If it earns nothing, you have paid for a bigger audience to pass on you.

Many men think so. coach describes a strong bias among men who study dating against paying for anything, as if buying a subscription meant supplicating to women. He compares it to refusing to buy a woman a drink on principle, keeping your integrity, and going home alone.

His answer is that money for time is an ordinary trade. If you make a decent income and your time is valuable, spending a little to reach women faster is efficient, not weak. What a woman judges is what she sees when she opens your page, and a subscription is not part of that.

My method is to test one thing at a time.

1. Use the free version first and write down how many of your likes become matches.
2. Pick one cheap feature that fits the problem. If women are not seeing you, test visibility. If your time is the limit, test seeing who liked you.
3. Try it for a short stretch and compare your numbers with the free week.
4. Keep it if it moves them, and drop it if it does not.

He also points out that on sites with real search and messaging, such as Match, the paid ability to write to members yourself is often worth it. You then reach a woman an algorithm might have screened out, instead of waiting for it to choose.

Do not stack paid plans on three apps at once. If results are slow, the problem usually sits in the shared pictures and words, and three subscriptions pay for the same problem three times.

Some men type this question when they mean the bill. That is a different question with a simple default: if you invited her, paying is the usual choice. Keep first dates short and inexpensive so the bill never becomes a debate.

The apps themselves are the other kind of paying, and the order of work is the same for both. Make sure the thing you are paying for is already working a little, then spend.