New Tinder Plus to cost date-seekers $9.99 a month or more
Tinder Plus, the dating app’s first attempt at converting its millions of users into paid subscribers, officially launched Monday.
An update to the Tinder app adds buttons for two of the paid features. When either is clicked, most U.S. users are prompted to pay $9.99 a month. Pricing varies by country and by user’s age. For example, users in some developing countries pay about $2.99 a month while people 30 and older in the United States are charged $19.99 a month.
With Tinder Plus, users get to “rewind” if they accidentally reject someone and receive a “passport” to search for people outside their region. Tinder is the “dominant” dating platform in 56 countries and international usage has doubled in the last three months, Tinder co-founder Sean Rad said Monday morning on CNN.
Tinder, based in West Hollywood, has been among the few online matchmaking systems to be rapidly adopted by the 25-year-old and younger crowd. Analysts have raved about the hundreds of millions of dollars Tinder could bring in each year for IAC Corp., the media company that owns a majority of the start-up. But whether millennials, who pay for extra features in smartphone games or music and video apps, would do the same in a dating app has been up for debate.
Tinder started testing Tinder Plus in November, and the response has been positive, according to Rad.
“We’ve already tested this and we’ve already received signals from users that they love these features, they are good for the ecosystem and they are willing to pay for them,” Rad said on CNN.
The testing showed age-based pricing worked because cash-poor younger users aren’t willing to pony up as much, according to Tinder.
Plus also removes advertising -- another way Tinder plans to make money. Rad pledged Tinder’s main matchmaking features would always be free of charge. Tinder has produced 6 billion matches, up from 1 billion last March.
Twitter: @peard33
