Source : TechCrunch
LOS ANGELES, November 2, 2026 – Dating app Hinge is testing a lower-priced subscription tier as its parent company, Match Group, looks for new ways to persuade people to pay for dating apps, as reported by TechCrunch and shared on X.
Match Group disclosed the test on Monday as it released its third-quarter 2026 results. Speaking on the earnings call, chief financial officer Steve Bailey said the new tier would broadly include additional filters and custom location boundaries, features he said women find valuable, giving users more control over who they see and where they meet people.
“It’s designed for women in particular, but also for price-sensitive users,” Bailey said. “Remember that Hinge is one of the highest-priced products we have. The revenue per payer, for example, at Hinge is almost twice that of Tinder, around $30. It also has one of the lower payer penetrations. Its payer penetration is only slightly more than half that of Tinder.”
Bailey said tests had so far improved conversion among both men and women, with a bigger rise among women. He described the early results as good and said the company expected to roll the tier out more widely in the fourth quarter. Match Group has not said how much the new plan will cost.
The move comes as dating apps struggle to convince users to keep paying, amid subscription fatigue, endless swiping and wider frustration with online dating. It also marks a change of direction for Hinge, which in 2023 experimented with a more expensive tier aimed at users willing to pay extra for added features.
Hinge is making the change despite being one of Match Group’s strongest performers. In the third quarter, its direct revenue, the money earned from subscriptions and in-app purchases, rose 19 per cent from a year earlier to US$221 million, while its number of paying users climbed 23 per cent to 2.3 million. Global monthly active users grew 12 per cent, according to TechCrunch.
Tinder brought in US$480 million in direct revenue, a slight decline of 2 per cent year on year, and had 8.9 million paying users, down 4 per cent. Match Group chief executive Spencer Rascoff said Tinder’s daily active users returned to year-on-year growth in September for the first time in three and a half years.
Match Group says it is seeing some signs of improvement in user fatigue, partly through efforts to make its platforms feel less like traditional dating apps. These include Group Hangouts and Events, which offer ways to connect beyond one-on-one matching, and which the company plans to expand in the fourth quarter.
Bailey added that Hinge’s average revenue per payer slipped in the quarter, mainly because of a new pricing model that offers targeted lower prices to users who have not subscribed after a certain number of days and seem unlikely ever to do so. He said the lower-priced tier had a smaller effect so far but could matter more later. Match Group also confirmed on the call that Hinge plans to expand into Japan in 2027.
The company also plans to begin testing real-time adaptive recommendations in the fourth quarter, a feature that will let Tinder respond to user actions within seconds rather than hours to make its suggestions more relevant.
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