Love Behind the Paywall: New Groundwork Report Explores How Dating Apps Turn Finding Love Into a Monthly Charge
Love Behind the Paywall: New Groundwork Report Explores How Dating Apps Turn Finding Love Into a Monthly Charge
Dating has never been more difficult or expensive, with subscription apps charging as much as $600 per month for matches
Today, Groundwork Collaborative released a new report detailing how apps like Hinge, Tinder, Bumble and more monetized the search for love. Dating apps keep users paying by hiding better matches, restricting basic features for free users, charging older users more through surveillance pricing, and relentlessly pushing for paid upgrades. With a majority of revenue tied to subscriptions and in-app purchases, dating apps’ corporate owners have a financial incentive to keep users swiping and paying, even as they promise to help them find a lasting match.
The paper, “Swipe Right to Pay: How Dating Apps Turned Love Into a Subscription Service” by Emily DiVito, Yasmine Chokrane, and Agatha Pinheiro, offers a slate of policy recommendations including requiring more transparent pricing, protecting consumers from runaway subscription costs, and reining in corporate use of personal data to save consumers time, money, and frustration on the apps. Lawmakers should enact policies to empower users and improve fairness and transparency for singles looking for love online.
Groundwork’s Senior Advisor for Economic Policy Emily DiVito, a co-author on the report, commented:
“Dating apps have strayed from their early purpose of facilitating social connection and instead become rich data mining operations for the corporations that own them. Without intervention from policymakers, consumers looking for love will continue to be met with ever-increasing fees, slowly degenerating algorithms, and fewer opportunities for quality dates. Congress and regulators should implement data privacy protections, reasonable cancellation rights, and price transparency to make a match with consumers.”
Key Takeaways:
- Corporations design algorithms to keep users single while misusing intimate user data. Dating apps algorithmically determine individualized matches for users, then deliberately put those matches out of reach without payment. Paywalled matches are not necessarily more selective or less available; the algorithm has simply programmed them to be locked away, creating artificial match scarcity and driving users to pay to unlock. Once users provide enough information and establish patterns on the app, companies share, or even sell, this sensitive data — including match and conversation history, demographic information, and social media activity — with third parties.
- Market consolidation discourages price competition amongst dominating companies. Just two corporations, Match Group and Bumble, control the majority of the dating app market. Their subsidiary apps, including Tinder, Hinge, and Match.com under Match Group, and Bumble’s namesake app and friendship versions like Badoo and Bumble BFF, use similar tactics to push users to subscription memberships without the pressure of competition to lower prices while often charging the same user for multiple subscriptions across apps.
- Daters want to break up with the apps. As of early 2026, more than half of adults under 50 have used online dating or apps to find romantic partners. Among adults with partners, one in ten met their match online. Still, frustrated dating app users report wanting to meet a partner more organically. According to a 2025 survey, a total of 78% of respondents reported feeling emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by dating apps and their inability to find promising matches.
- Policymakers should take action to protect consumers from deceptive and extractive business practices. Users are entitled to price transparency when signing up for dating apps as well as clarity about why their price is what it is, and should have reasonable cancellation rights when they want to delete their profiles. Corporations should be subject to rigorous data privacy regulations to protect users’ intimate information.
