Having trouble finding the love of your life on Tinder? Don’t dig deep and work on yourself, just fork over $500 every month to the platform to find your soul mate.
Tinder recently announced that it will be rolling out an ultra-premium membership for its most active users for the low price of several hundred dollars every month, reports Bloomberg. The program is called Tinder Select and is invite-only. The outlet reports that only the most active part of the platform’s user base, about 1%, was selected to join. While invitations were already sent out, the company will reportedly open applications on a rolling acceptance basis. Tinder Select will include member-only features like souped-up search, matching, and conversation capabilities.
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Phillip Price Fry, a Tinder spokesperson, would not provide specifics on Tinder Select’s features, and referred Gizmodo to Bloomberg’s report.
“We know that there is a subset of highly engaged and active users who prioritize more effective and efficient ways to find connections, and so we engaged in extensive tests and feedback with this audience over the past several months to develop a completely new offering,” Mark Van Ryswyck, Tinder’s chief product officer, told Bloomberg.
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Tinder is owned by Match Group, the same company behind the likes of Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish, for example. Match Group CEO Bernard Kim said that Tinder Select is a bid to compete with rivals, according to Bloomberg. Similarly, the company’s president Gary Swidler said at a conference a few weeks ago that he expects Tinder Select to attract a small sliver of users on the platform. Given the lofty price, his bets are probably not far off.
Charging users for a dating app is nothing new, but it does call into question who really is picking your significant other: you or a faceless corporation. Hinge previously told Gizmodo that it “[does] not withhold possible matches from users” in the sense of shadow-banning those looking for love. Despite this, Hinge users will frequently point to Rose Jail as evidence of the contrary. Rose Jail is jargon in which the app paywalls your most likely matches behind a tier that you can only access by sending them a digital rose. Users on Hinge get one rose for free every week and are encouraged to pay $3.99 for more.
Update September 25 3:00 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include Tinder’s response to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
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