If you get a message from someone you never matched with on Tinder, it’s not a glitch — it’s part of the app’s expensive new subscription plan that it teased earlier this year, which allows “power users” to send unsolicited messages to non-matches for the small fee of $499 per month.
That landscape, in fact, is largely populated by apps owned by Tinder’s parent company: as Bloomberg notes, Match Group Inc. not only owns the popular swiping app, but also Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge, and The League.
Match Group CEO Bernard Kim referred to Tinder’s subscriptions as “low-hanging fruit” meant to compete with other, pricier services, though that was before this $6,000-per-year tier dropped.
This move seems absolutely wild, and I think Match knows it; which is why it’s only available to such a small segment of users.
If too many users have this feature (and who knows how many that would be?) it’'s going to scare away all the regular users. What’s the point in swiping no if that user can just veto your decision anyways?
This move reminds me a lot of what I’ve heard about mobile gaming. The 500USD/month users are whales, but the whales need regular people to play with or they’ll get bored and leave.
Right now, keeping the number of whales to a minimum is important to keep the regular users happy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future some cost/benefit analysis shows that they can take the hit on regular users to squeeze out a few more whales.
It also seems like a bonkers move to pay 500 dollars to talk to someone who doesn’t want to talk to you, too. (But that’s a different issue.)