Paying to play the field: Why singles like Carly are deleting dating apps

Writer Carly Sophia has, like around 3 million Australians, been on and off dating apps. She’ll install them, then delete them, mentally exhausted after all the swiping and small talk that comes with them.

Now there’s something new going on and, like so much, it’s about cost. She recently downloaded the dating app Hinge and would get one or two “likes” on her profile each day. On another smaller dating app, Feeld, she received hundreds in her first week.

It wasn’t until she stumped up for Hinge’s paid version that the likes started rolling in.

“I went from having tumbleweeds to 53 likes in a single afternoon. I am firmly of the opinion that if you’re not buying pay-to-play versions, they’re actively cockblocking you until you do.”

Hinge sees it differently. “Cost-effective subscriptions empower daters,” a spokeswoman says when asked about Sophia’s experience.

Since their launch just over a decade ago, dating apps have redefined romance for an entire generation of Australians and built a global industry worth more than $7.5 billion dollars.

Now, the enormous growth in user numbers for the two major app companies – Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and many others, and Bumble – has come to an abrupt halt.

App users, exhausted from an average 90 minutes a day swiping, liking, exchanging messages, being “love-bombed”, ghosted or, in the worst cases sent a dick pic, have began to tire of them.

Once-skyrocketing user numbers have flatlined across the industry. At giants Tinder and Bumble, they’re falling.

In response, the companies have dramatically raised prices; a Tinder subscription in 2020 was as low as $7 a month for young female users. Today, its premium “platinum” subscription is up to $49.99 a month. Match has been particularly aggressive, introducing new tiers across Tinder and Hinge against the backdrop of share price sitting at $US30 ($45), down from a high of $US169 during the pandemic.

Bumble made its name empowering women to make the first move. Then, with user numbers falling, and its share price tumbling from $US75 three years ago to $US10 today, it ditched that defining pitch: it allowed men to reach out first.

Bumble also leaned, clumsily, into the zeitgeist releasing ads portraying women so frustrated with online dating they considered celibacy.

In one, a woman swears off dating to become a nun only to abandon her new life when she sees a sexy shirtless gardener and is given a phone with Bumble’s updated app.

Bumble later apologised, CEO Lidiane Jones telling a Wall Street Journal event the intent was to say women were in control. “We just made a mistake in how that landed. We felt really terrible about it.”

Despite falling user numbers, earnings per dating app user continue to grow, as the companies apply the squeeze on their remaining customers. Revenues are mostly growing as this dynamic outruns lovelorn log-offs, and financial analysts are bullish on their futures.

US investment research firm Zacks last month found users in Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries of Match’s apps, which include Tinder and Hinge, earned the company $US14 each year per person five years ago. Today it’s $US19 per user.

Those users have noticed.

“Everything that was good about dating apps now has a price tag attached – if you wanted more likes, if you want to see who likes you, you have to pay,” said Brenda Van, a Melbourne woman who had used the apps to date and became so disillusioned she began a business organising dating events.

“People [are now] clued in, especially your Gen Zs and Millennials – they said ‘We’re not gonna pay for this. Like, this is extorting money from us for the worst reason’. And then when the money slowed down, the companies just said ‘What other features can we monetise?’ That was the wrong way to go.”

Van said the result of women dropping off the apps in greater numbers had led to men behaving worse when vying to get the attention of fewer and fewer women. The 30-year-old saw an opportunity, launching her business, Dating Apps Suck, that organises “in real life” events for singles.

Van said there had been a big shift in the dating landscape since the pandemic ended.

“People have become digitally fatigued with the [dating] apps. Your phone already was so much work and the inorganic nature of trying to message and keep these conversations running with strangers you’ve never met before. People just got really sick of it.”

“Over time it became clear this is not, like, a great way to meet the love of your life,” said Van, who now works in Sydney as a project manager in tech.

Disaffection for the apps stretches beyond value for money. Match Group, Bumble and other smaller dating app companies this week handed the Albanese government a voluntary industry code that they say will “help make dating safer for all Australians”.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland demanded the code after the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2022 found three in four people using dating apps experienced some form of sexual violence, including sexual harassment, threatening language, image-based sexual abuse and stalking.

Rowland on Friday said the federal government had worked hard to improve safety on dating apps and would have more to say “very soon” after reviewing the industry’s proposed code.

It isn’t the only move against the dating apps government agencies have made. Last year, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission commenced Federal Court proceedings against dating site eHarmony Inc, alleging it breached consumer laws by making misleading statements about “free dating”. That case is working its way through the courts.

Lisa Portolan, an author and academic at University of Technology Sydney who in 2023 published her PhD on dating apps, said Australia, like the rest of the world, was souring on dating apps.

She said the dating app companies knew precisely what they were doing, and even though their algorithms were opaque, they clearly sorted users into two groups: “High-value profiles, where people get a lot of swipes, and a low-value profile where you are swiping a lot and not getting any matches. If you’re in this low-value profile space, you are served less to people. But if you purchase a premium package you might get on the right side of the algorithm.”

Portolan began her research in the field when she realised that, while dating apps had changed society by altering the mechanism for how many people met, they were rarely taken seriously or talked about except when things went horribly wrong for users.

“There’s not a whole heap of examination around what the dating apps have done for relationships and intimacy and how they have changed society overall. We treat these dating apps as a bit of fluff but in reality they’ve led this massive shift where nobody meets face to face any more.”

Some say the apps haven’t just made face-to-face “meet cutes” harder – in the US, a group of singles using Tinder and Hinge have taken to the courts, to argue they’ve been locked “into a perpetual pay-to-play loop” by the apps, which place profit above one app’s mantra that it is “designed to be deleted” (because it will lead to love).

These users say in their class action lawsuit that Match Group created a “business model that depends on generating returns through the monopolisation of users’ attention … fomenting dating app addiction that drives expensive subscriptions and perpetual use”.

Brady Robards is an associate professor of sociology at Monash who has studied gender, sexuality and digital cultures, with some of his research looking at dating apps.

Robards says the dating apps certainly have “a commercial interest in keeping people engaged” but must simultaneously make women feel safe. “They’ve got to appear concerned … but they are commercial entities so they need to keep users engaged and clicking every day. So it’s hard to disentangle those competing interests.”

Part of Robards’ research has been into whether people who use the apps know how to use their various safety features.

“What the platforms are offering, a lot of people didn’t know some of those features exist, and when they did know that they existed, they didn’t trust the platforms or the solutions the platforms had put in place,” Robards says.

Robards said he’d found a very US-centric focus for many of the apps, even those portraying themselves as feminist. “Bumble as a dating app is founded on this idea of safety and putting women’s safety in these spaces first compared to other apps. But we did find that the platforms, because they’re based in the US, often refer to US agencies and complaint lines. So there was a US-centric nature to them.” A spokeswoman for Bumble in Australia said its in-app safety centre linked out to local resources like 1800RESPECT and eSafety.

Robards also said research he had been involved in showed that dating apps, while the focus was often on young people in media reporting, were being used successfully by older age groups.

“Young people are using dating apps to reshape intimacy, but the research shows that a lot of older people are turning to dating apps because meeting people is more challenging. The apps were seen as a tool for people in that re-partnering, in that middle-life phase. And it’s quite a positive tool.”

Asked whether the dating apps were a net positive, Robards was philosophical.

“There are so many stories of people finding really positive encounters, long-term romance, love and marriages which you can’t say that’s bad. But what sort of effect has it had on how people think about intimacy or relationships? Some might say the apps turn dating into a kind of marketplace: if one person doesn’t tick all your boxes then you just re-roll the dice, and you’ve got another date lined up the next day. That commodification of intimacy can be a really big problem.”

More serious concerns have also been raised, particularly around the way the apps tend to funnel some men towards misogyny.

So bad did things become on one app, Plenty of Fish, that they introduced a “No dick pics” badge that women could display on their profile. They sold it as “something to really celebrate”.

On the biggest dating apps, male users far outweigh women. A Business of Apps report found Tinder internationally was 84 per cent male, while Hinge and Bumble were around 60 per cent.

The lack of success in finding intimacy via a dating app that some young men in particular experience is a topic regularly discussed in the “manosphere” – an umbrella-term for an array of online groups and figures who promote anti-feminism, hateful ideas about women, and often violently misogynistic ideologies.

Joshua Thorburn is a Monash PhD candidate who has done research into online “incel” (involuntary celibates) forums. There, he found dating apps a constant source of discussion.

“Near universally, people find dating apps to be frustrating,” said Thorburn, adding the caveat that the forums he studies are where single people discuss their experiences. “So you’re not hearing the happy side of people that have met on these apps.”

Among the disillusioned, he says, “there’s this sense that the apps are really superficial, there’s this sense of discrimination from people who think that they’re more unattractive, there’s frustration about ghosting, there’s frustration about spam accounts.”

Artificial intelligence has also become ubiquitous on the biggest dating apps, reinforcing cynicism about paying for fake interactions.

One man used ChatGPT as his dating assistant chatting with 5239 women on Tinder, scheduling more than 100 dates and ultimately finding a partner.

Worryingly for the dating apps, few Australians who haven’t used them already seem willing to try, polling in April by YouGov showed. “Of those who haven’t yet dabbled, only a small minority are willing to consider doing so,” it found. Rising numbers wanted to meet in person rather than on a dating app, along with increased worries over safety and privacy, and having to share too many personal details.

Stacked alongside these issues is the price. Subscribing to dating apps has simply become far more expensive.

In 2020, Choice reviewed Tinder’s pricing scheme and found it ranged from $7 to $34 a month.

At the time Tinder used variable pricing, so a male in his 50s would pay four times as much for a subscription as a queer female under 30 for the same service.

Today Tinder’s top “platinum” package is $24.99 a week or $49.99 a month.

Tinder, and Match Group which owns the brand, did not respond to a list of questions put to them about pricing in Australia on their apps.

A Bumble spokeswoman said its basic package was $14.99 a week and its top Premium+ subscription $39.99 a week. She said the company offered as much for free as it could.

“Our focus is always to ensure that the free version of our product provides a safe and high-quality experience for our members, and there are countless couples who have found each other this way,” the spokeswoman said.

“Our paid features cater to those in our community who are looking for a more efficient or tailored experience.”

And she said safety was a top priority, with the company using a combination of human moderators and automated systems to monitor and review interactions for harmful content.

For Sydney woman Carly Sophia, the idea that apps are acting to protect female users is a joke.

“Every woman I’ve spoken to about this feels the same way. If dating apps took our safety as seriously, they would be asking for government ID and cross-checking names and ages to ensure people were being honest about who they were,” she says.

“[They] could be uploading a police check to prove they had no history of sexual or physical violence against women.”

Sophia has thousands of Instagram followers, and recently she polled the men who follow her about whether they would have any issue with uploading a government ID showing their name and age.

Hundreds responded; 78 per cent said they would happily upload their details.

Still, Sophia has again deleted her dating apps.

“I can’t see myself going back on them any time soon. It is incredibly freeing knowing I can just concentrate on my life; that my looks and personality aren’t reduced to four photos and three prompts, packaged up and presented for cheap, quick and callous swipes.”

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