Match Group tests cheaper Hinge tier as users tire of paying for dating apps

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Lauren Forristal techcrunch.com

Match Group is testing a cheaper subscription for Hinge, the dating app whose marketing slogan is "designed to be deleted." The company announced the move during its third-quarter earnings call, pitching a lower-priced tier aimed, in the words of CFO Steve Bailey, at "women in particular, but also for price-sensitive users." Match Group did not say what the new plan will cost. The pricing talk papers over the arithmetic that defines the business. Hinge earns roughly $30 in revenue per payer, almost twice Tinder's rate, yet converts only slightly more than half as many of its users into payers — the highest prices in Match's portfolio buying the lowest willingness to pay. Meanwhile Tinder, still the cash engine at $480 million in quarterly direct revenue, is shrinking: 8.9 million paid users, down 4 percent, with direct revenue down 2 percent. Hinge is the growth story — 12 percent user growth, 23 percent more payers, $221 million in quarterly revenue — and the fix for slowing conversion is, again, a new tier of features to buy. Match Group says it sees "some signs of improvement in user fatigue," partly thanks to efforts to make its platforms feel less like traditional dating apps — Group Hangouts, Events, and real-time adaptive recommendations that respond to user actions within seconds rather than hours. All of these are, like the subscriptions, ways to keep people inside the app. The structural fact survives every pricing experiment: a dating app earns money only while its users keep failing to find someone. The 2023 premium tier, the budget tier now in testing, and the group-event features share one assumption — that the people who leave happy will be replaced by people who pay. Hinge's own slogan remains the most honest description of a business model the company has no intention of following.