EXPRESS: Design and Pricing of Online Dating Subscriptions

Online dating is now the most common way for new couples in the U.S. to meet, with more than 30% of U.S. adults having used a dating app and with global industry revenues exceeding three billion dollars annually. Most dating apps monetize primarily through subscription pricing, offering users fixed periods of access to paid features for recurring fees. However, applying subscription pricing to online dating apps presents some unique challenges. Unlike other digital services, users' valuations of dating app services typically decline with use, as continued participation can be costly in terms of both time and emotional effort, and repeated renewals signal unsuccessful app-mediated searches. Moreover, users who achieve their goal of finding a partner subsequently exit the platform, creating an apparent tension between providing value by successfully matching users and a dating app’s goal of generating profit and sustaining a large userbase of paying subscribers. Given these unique challenges and the transient nature of user engagement with dating apps, it is interesting to note that leading U.S. dating apps, such as Hinge and Bumble, have begun offering increasingly long subscription options, including lifetime subscriptions. In this paper, we analyze the performance of subscription pricing strategies with varying period lengths for online dating platforms. We propose a natural model of dating app monetization and use it to evaluate how subscription length affects both profit and steady-state userbase size. We find that suitably priced lifetime subscriptions can Pareto-dominate all finite-period subscriptions over both objectives, providing a compelling explanation for their emerging use. We then extend our analysis to subscription menus with two options and show that offering one short-term subscription option and one lifetime option guarantees approximately 59.4% of the optimal two-option menu performance.