You have probably had the thought and then talked yourself out of it. The app is not working, and it is somehow not working in a way that keeps you opening it. Then you decide that is paranoid, because a company that never matched anybody would go out of business, and you go back to swiping. The suspicion is closer to right than the correction is, and the reason is duller than a conspiracy.
The arithmetic
Subscription revenue is one multiplication: the number of people paying, times the number of months they pay, times the amount charged each month. There is no fourth term, and nothing in that line rewards a relationship. Someone who meets a partner in week three stops contributing to all three numbers at once.
You can watch that multiplication being managed in public, because these are listed companies and they have to show their work. Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid and Plenty of Fish among others, reported total revenue of roughly $3.5 billion USD for 2025, flat against the year before. Underneath the flat line, the number of people paying fell 5 percent to 14.2 million, while the average monthly amount taken from each remaining payer rose 5 percent to $20.09 USD. Bumble showed the same shape more sharply: revenue down about 10 percent to $966 million USD, paying users down 11.5 percent to 3.7 million, revenue per paying user up again.
Nothing sinister produced those numbers. Both companies lost payers and charged the ones who stayed a little more, which is an ordinary response to a shrinking base. It is also exactly what the incentive looks like from the inside: the people who remain are worth more every year.
What the filings say
Match Group's most recent annual report opens its list of business risks with the possibility that the company might fail to retain existing users or add new users
, or fail to turn the ones it has into payers. Its own text says financial performance has been, and will go on being, determined largely by adding members, keeping them, and converting them into subscribers.
Now the part that matters for honesty. No dating company's filings name members forming lasting relationships as a business risk. There is no disclosure anywhere in these documents that warns investors about couples. If there were, this article would be shorter and a great deal more dramatic.
What the filings do instead is quieter and harder to answer. They record leaving as a single category. A member who deletes the app in exhaustion and a member who deletes it because they are moving in with someone are the same event in the accounts, and no platform publishes the split between them. The risk register does not ask why you left.
Nobody has to give the order
An incentive does not need an instruction to operate. It works by selection, over years. Product changes get assessed against a revenue forecast, and a change that keeps people present clears that bar more easily than one that shortens a member's stay. Infinite feeds, notifications timed for when you are least busy, paid visibility, seeing who liked you only if you upgrade: none of these requires anyone to act in bad faith. Each survives review on its own merits, and the merits are measured in time spent and conversion.
The pressure becomes visible at the edges, where regulators look. In August 2025, Match Group agreed to pay $14 million USD to settle a case the United States Federal Trade Commission had brought in 2019 over Match.com. The agency alleged, among other things, that the site told non-paying members someone was interested in them, including where those accounts had already been flagged internally as likely fraudulent, and that cancelling was harder than it should have been. Match denied the allegations and admitted no liability. The order requires it to state guarantee terms clearly and to offer straightforward ways to cancel.
That case is about billing rather than matching, and it belongs here for that reason: it is the same gradient surfacing in a different part of the product. The money is in the subscription starting, and in it not stopping.
The best objections
There are four, and they are not weak ones.
The most uncomfortable is Hinge, owned by Match Group, which has marketed itself for years as the dating app Designed to be Deleted
and built whole campaigns around a mascot who meets a grisly end whenever a couple works out. If the incentive were decisive, that positioning ought to be punished commercially. It has been the reverse: Hinge grew direct revenue 26 percent year over year in the final quarter of 2025, while the rest of the portfolio shrank.
Second, someone who meets their partner on an app is the cheapest advertising that app will ever have. Acquiring a stranger costs marketing money and a cut to the app store; a recommendation from a friend costs nothing.
Third, switching is easy. Match Group's own filings describe an industry with low switching costs and a steady stream of new entrants. A platform that visibly failed people would be abandoned for one that did not.
Fourth, relationships end. Someone who leaves happy at thirty and returns at thirty-four is a customer twice, and the platform they come back to is usually the one that worked.
Why they do not settle it
Each of those is a reason the incentive is not the only force acting on these companies. None of them is a reason it is absent.
Hinge sells subscriptions. The slogan is a promise about intent; the billing is a structure, and the structure still counts revenue in payers times months. A promise can be entirely sincere and still be the thing that has to argue against the forecast every quarter. Word of mouth pays out only on the members who succeed, and it competes with the revenue from everyone who does not.
Switching is also easier than it looks and less useful than it sounds. Match Group alone runs Tinder, Hinge, Match, Meetic, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Pairs, Azar, BLK, Chispa, The League, Archer, Upward, Yuzu, Salams and HER. Leaving one of those in frustration very often means arriving at another one, on the same set of accounts. We set the major apps beside each other, and what each one actually sells, in a separate comparison.
The number that would settle it is the split between members who left partnered and members who left tired. Nobody publishes it. We do not know it, and neither does anyone outside those companies. What can be said without it is that one side of that split is a cost and the other is revenue, and that no member has any way of telling which side the app is built around.
What Kindred does instead
Kindred charges once. One payment, at joining, a one-time $50 CAD, with the first 1,000 founding members free and a one-time $25 CAD for pilot members after that, locked permanently at the rate you joined at. No recurring billing, no premium tiers, no boosts, nothing to buy once you are in. Kindred is a Canadian federal not-for-profit, so no shareholder's return rises with your engagement, and there is nobody in the structure who gets richer when you stay single longer.
That is not a promise to behave better than the incumbents. It is a different set of accounts. A subscription, even a nonprofit's subscription, would quietly rebuild the same gradient, which is why there is not one.
It is worth being precise about what this does not buy. It does not make Kindred better at predicting who you will fall for, because nobody is good at that. In 2017, Samantha Joel, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel ran the most direct test of questionnaire matching yet attempted and found that desire between two specific people was not predictable from what either had said about themselves beforehand. A worldwide replication of the related earlier finding reached the same conclusion across cultures in 2024. Kindred is built on that result rather than in spite of it, which is why it publishes no compatibility percentages.
What the structure buys is narrower and more durable than a matching claim. You do not have to care about the business model. You just benefit from it being different.
If that sounds less exciting than the app currently open in your other hand, that is the intention. Less exciting by design. Kindred is open now in the Greater Toronto Area, where the first 1,000 members join free for life. Everywhere else, the waitlist is open, and each registration counts toward opening that city.