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I imagine that making a profitable dating app is difficult. Your most successful customer is one that no longer needs your product. If you make it a subscription service, there's a perverse incentive to make sure you never find a good match. But if you make it a one-time fee, the fee has to be high enough to make a profit, but not so high that people don't want to gamble the money.

Tinder's biggest problem, IMO, has always been whether it's a dating app or a hook-up app. I've found that generally, men consider it a hook-up app, while women think it's a dating app. Granted, there's been absolutely zero rigorous study on my part, so my conclusion is easily 100% confirmation bias. However, I think it's worth noting that generally, women are already less likely to use a dating app than men, and would be even LESS likely to use a hook-up app than men.

I would bet money that if the $500/month sub added some fancy symbol to your profile so everyone knew you were paying $500/month, you would easily get more matches simply because it shows that you have money.

> I imagine that making a profitable dating app is difficult

Only if you let it be. You have a market of people who want something they know is naturally difficult. So they'll struggle to recognize if you start making it more difficult to obtain (because they already expect dating to be hard).

So you can make things more difficult for users (reducing the number of "successful customers") then ask for more money to make it less difficult.

The only risk is that if a competitor makes it too easy, people will leave your platform... but that's why Match Group exists. They buy any large enough competing platform and ensure that the average difficulty across all their owned platforms is fairly consistent.

>Van Ryswyk declined to share exactly what features you can expect to find in the new subscription model, but he says the brand is “really looking at a whole range of additional value-add services to Tinder overall” in a conversation with Fast Company

Feels like Twitter is about to get into the pimping business.

I was thinking along the same lines. For this kind of money, you can get yourself an escort every month, and save yourself dozens of hours of fruitless communication with prospective partners.
Is this the market value of our loneliness?

If so, something is deeply wrong, and it's not something hookup apps can solve.

It genuinely suprises me people pay for it in the first place
Without paying, Tinder tells you that someone has liked you, but it doesn't tell you who liked you. The only way to match with that person is to organically swipe "like" on them when they're presented to you in the "random" list of people you get shown on the app. It is however tacitly in their interest to not show you the people who have liked you, so you can swipe for a long time without actually getting shown any of the people that liked you. Couple that with the fact that you have a limited number of "like" swipes a day, and you end up in a situation where you can go days without matching with anyone simply because Tinder isn't showing you the people that liked you. So you need to exercise a level of game theory if you want to actually match with people.

Paying for Tinder, in its various tiers, lets you swipe on an unlimited number of people in a day, or, for more money, lets you just see who swiped on you as soon as they swipe "like."

I don't pay for it personally, but if you are paying for it you're saving time and reducing a lot of the (Tinder imposed) friction, so, I get that. I also get why some people might not see the value in Tinder in the first place, but it does make meeting people in a romantic context a lot easier, or at least more streamlined.

It really is an awful pattern. The whole point of these apps were to only show each other if there was mutual interest. That made it safe to swipe on someone. Now they can just pay and see all of the one sided interest.

Also as you say its in Tinder's interest to put everyone who swiped on you into a different queue and throttle the hell out of it. Drip feed matches into the stream of 'no's. As that liked queue gets bigger, your rejections grow and therefore your desperation/ willingness to pay rises. They can literally see who is already a yes and could prioritise those if they were pro-user. They do the opposite.

I've also noticed they will use this queue of people who liked you strategically. If you haven't been on in a while they will release some matches to build that reward expectation back up and then turn it down once you're doing what they want and engaging daily. (I can't prove this but it feels like the best way to get some matches is to wait for their 'we missed you' spam)

yeah it's extremely shady business imo, especially since all the major ones are owned by the same group who then apply a similar business model to all of them.
Surely this will end in a happy finish.
What a great future we’re building.