Why Did My Match.com Subscription Renew at a Higher Price?

Most likely because your first payment was discounted and the renewal was not. Every Match subscription auto-renews. Promotional discounts and rates apply only to the first subscription period, never to the renewals after it. Your Subscription Status page shows your renewal date, the amount and your plan, and you can turn off auto-renewal there whenever you like.

When you signed up, you may have paid a promotional rate. That rate was attached to your first subscription period and nothing after it.

So the first charge you saw was the discounted one, and the renewal is the plan at its ordinary rate. From your side it looks like the price went up. From Match's side, the introductory offer simply ran out.

How big the jump looks depends on how generous that first promotion was. The deeper the discount, the bigger the difference at renewal.

All Match subscriptions are set to auto-renew. You do not have to do anything for the plan to carry on. It rolls into another period on the renewal date and charges the card or account you paid with.

That is convenient if you are happy with the plan and easy to miss if you are not. If you signed up during a promotion and forgot the date, this is the charge that catches you.

Your Subscription Status page is the place to check all of this before it happens. It lists three things:

• Your renewal date
• The amount you will be charged
• Your plan

Open it now and put the renewal date in your phone with a reminder a few days ahead. That one reminder turns a surprise charge into a decision you make on purpose.

You can turn off auto-renewal from Subscription Status at any time. Doing so does not end your plan straight away. It stops the next renewal, so the subscription ends with its current term.

That means there is no reason to wait until the last day. If you already know you do not want another period at the ordinary price, turn auto-renewal off today and keep using the time you have paid for.

If the renewal has already gone through, turning it off now still stops the one after.

Before you decide, it helps to know what the higher price actually buys. a dating coach's case for paying on Match is that it lets you search for women and write to them yourself, instead of waiting for an algorithm to pick who you see and who sees you.

On apps where the algorithm decides, a woman's filters can remove you before she ever sees your page. On Match you can go and find her. That is the feature worth paying for, and it is only worth it if you use it.

So look back honestly at the period you just had. Did you search and write to women most weeks? Or did you open the app now and then and wait for something to arrive? If it was the second, you have been paying for a tool you did not pick up.

My rule for any paid feature is that it multiplies what you are already getting, so the question is what there was to multiply.

Count what the last period produced. How many women replied? How many conversations got past a few messages? How many turned into a drink? If there were dates, the plan was earning its keep at the discounted price, and it may well be worth the ordinary price too. If there were none, paying more will not change that.

The fix for "nothing is happening" is almost never a different plan. It is a clearer lead photo, a page that says something specific about your week, and first messages that react to what she wrote instead of opening with "hey."

Make the call with a few days to spare, not the morning after the charge. Open Subscription Status, check the amount, and look at your results.

If you are keeping it, keep it and use it properly: search every few days, write short specific first messages, and answer everyone the same day. If you are not, turn off auto-renewal and spend the rest of the term trying to book one date before it runs out. Either way, the price stops being something that happens to you.