Dating Apps Have Never Proven They Work. We Funded Them Anyway.
The loneliness epidemic is real. The companies profiting from it have no obligation to fix it. And nobody in a position to demand accountability has bothered to ask the right questions.
Greed is good when it comes to the investors that back dating apps.
I want to start with a number.
New York City has 3.8 million single adults. That is the largest concentration of single people in any city in the United States. 58% of adults in this city are unmarried. 1.6 million of them are actively dating right now: swiping, matching, messaging, going on first dates, getting ghosted, paying for premium subscriptions, downloading new apps, deleting old ones, and starting the cycle over.
Now I want you to pair that number with a question.
How many of those 3.8 million people found a lasting relationship through a dating app last year?
You don’t know. I don’t know. And here’s the part that should stop you cold: neither do the apps.
Not because they haven’t thought about it. Because measuring it would be bad for business.
The Loneliness Epidemic Nobody Wants to Own
In 2023, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring loneliness a public health crisis. He cited research connecting social isolation to a 29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia. He compared the mortality impact of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
This is not fringe science. This is the United States government telling its citizens that the epidemic of disconnection is killing people.
At the same time this advisory was being written, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge were generating a combined $311 million in a single month. The dating app industry as a whole pulled in $6.18 billion in 2024. These companies spend approximately $21 million every month on advertising — not on improving their product, not on researching outcomes, on acquiring new users.
Read those two paragraphs again and tell me something doesn’t add up.
We have a documented, government-declared loneliness crisis. We have a multi-billion dollar industry that exists specifically in the space where that crisis lives. And we have virtually zero accountability connecting what that industry charges to what it delivers.
This is the story I want to tell. Not because I enjoy being angry; though I’ll admit, after five years of building a matchmaking business from personal savings while watching apps collect billions, I have earned some frustration. But because I think the general public has been so conditioned to accept this arrangement that they’ve stopped seeing how absurd it actually is.
What “Success Data” Actually Means in This Industry
Let’s start with the most basic question any consumer should ask before spending money on a product: does it work?
For dating apps, the honest answer is: we don’t know, and they’re not going to tell you.
What dating apps publish as “success stories” falls into one category: surveys. Self-reported, unverified, voluntary responses from users who chose to share positive outcomes with the company that was asking. There is no independent audit. There is no methodology you can scrutinize. There is no denominator; meaning you never see the number of people who used the app and did not find a relationship, which is the only number that would make the success rate meaningful.
“93% of Hinge users who got married met on Hinge” is the kind of statistic that sounds rigorous until you realize it was produced by asking married Hinge users which app they met on and reporting the result. The question of how many Hinge users got married at all, and how that compares to the general population, or to people who didn’t use dating apps, is never answered. Because answering it would require the kind of honest accounting these companies have no incentive to perform.
Think about any other industry where you spend significant money. Pharmaceuticals must demonstrate efficacy through clinical trials before they can claim their product works. Financial advisors must disclose performance records. Universities are increasingly pressured to publish graduate employment outcomes. Gyms, nutritionists, therapists; all of them operate in an environment where consumers can ask “does this work?” and expect something more than a curated testimonial.
Dating apps have carved out an exception to this expectation so thoroughly that most people don’t even realize they’ve never been given a real answer.
The average American spends years on dating apps. Multiple platforms simultaneously, the average New Yorker is on three or more at any given time. Subscription costs alone run $2,400 to $6,000 over five years on a single app. Add professional photos, wardrobe, grooming, the cost of dates that go nowhere, and the therapy required to process the emotional toll of the whole experience, and you’re looking at $15,000 to $25,000 in total expenditure over a typical multi-year dating app journey.
For that investment, you are entitled to know whether the product works. You have not been given that information. And you have been so thoroughly normalized to this gap that most people reading this sentence will still feel faintly embarrassed for demanding it.
That embarrassment is manufactured. It serves the apps, not you.
How These Companies Actually Get Built
To understand why accountability doesn’t exist, you have to understand the incentive structure that creates these companies from the beginning. And that means understanding how venture capital works in this space.
A dating app begins with a founding pitch. The pitch is almost always some version of: we are going to fix how people find love. The market is enormous; hundreds of millions of single adults globally, all of whom have a deep emotional need the current options aren’t meeting. Investors respond to this pitch because the TAM (total addressable market) is real and the emotional stakes create natural retention. People don’t give up on finding a partner the way they give up on a language learning app.
Seed funding arrives. The goal at this stage is product development and early user acquisition. The metric investors care about is growth: downloads, signups, engagement. Not outcomes. Nobody at the seed stage is asking how many couples you’ve created because you don’t have enough data to answer and the question feels premature.
Series A follows. Now you’re talking about scaling. The pitch to Series A investors is about growth rate, retention, and monetization potential. Daily active users. Monthly active users. The ratio of paying subscribers to free users. Again, not outcomes. The KPIs that govern whether this company raises its next round have nothing to do with whether people are finding relationships.
By Series B and beyond, the business model is mature. And here is where the structural problem becomes impossible to ignore: the users most valuable to the business are the ones who stay. Users who find partners leave. They delete the app. They stop paying. They are, from a pure metrics standpoint, churn.
The incentive to actually solve loneliness, to get users out of the app and into relationships, is in direct tension with the incentive to grow revenue. A company optimizing for both simultaneously is fighting against itself. And since revenue is what investors measure, revenue is what wins.
This isn’t a secret. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the math of attention-based business models applied to romantic connection, and it produces a product that is structurally better at keeping you searching than helping you find.
Then comes the exit. IPO or acquisition. The founders and early investors who understood this dynamic from the beginning, who built a retention machine and called it a love machine, cash out. The singles who funded the whole enterprise through years of subscription fees and emotional investment are still on the app, still searching, still wondering why it’s so hard.
The Data You Don’t Know You’re Giving Away
There is a second dimension to this that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, and I want to be direct about it because I think the framing matters.
When you use a dating app, you are generating a behavioral profile of extraordinary intimacy. Not just your age and location, though those matter. You’re revealing your physical preferences through swipe patterns. You’re revealing your emotional availability through response times and messaging habits. You’re revealing your insecurities through which profiles you linger on. You’re revealing your psychological state through when you open the app; late at night, repeatedly, on Sunday afternoons.
This data has commercial value that extends far beyond the app itself. It informs advertising targeting, product development, and the acquisition strategies used to find the next generation of users who share your profile. In some cases it is sold to third-party data brokers. In all cases it is retained long after you delete your account, governed by terms of service that almost nobody reads and that are written to protect the company, not the user.
You were told you were the customer. You were the product.
I want to be precise here because this argument is sometimes dismissed as paranoia, and it isn’t. I am not claiming these companies are malicious in some dramatic sense. I am describing the documented business model of attention-based platforms, which dating apps unambiguously are. The product they sell to advertisers and data partners is behavioral data derived from your intimate choices. The product they sell to you is the hope of connection; not connection itself, because connection ends the commercial relationship.
This is the arrangement you agreed to. Most people didn’t know they were agreeing to it because it wasn’t explained clearly. And the people who regulate these industries haven’t caught up to what’s actually happening in the space where technology meets the most private parts of human experience.
The Loneliness Business Model
I want to give this its proper name: the dating app industry runs a loneliness business model.
Not in the sense that they want you to be lonely; I genuinely don’t think that’s true for most of the people who work at these companies. In the sense that their revenue is structurally dependent on the persistence of loneliness. If loneliness were solved, the business would end.
This creates a specific kind of product design. Features that feel like progress but extend engagement. Algorithmic systems that surface enough attractive profiles to keep you hopeful but not enough matches to make you satisfied. Premium tiers that promise better outcomes but deliver incremental visibility within a pool that has the same structural problems at every tier. Gamification elements: streaks, boosts, super likes, badges; borrowed from casino design because casino design is extraordinarily good at keeping people engaged past the point where it serves them.
None of this is accidental. These are deliberate product decisions made by smart people optimizing for the metrics that investors care about. The problem is that those metrics are engagement and retention, not connection and outcomes.
The average New Yorker, as I mentioned, is on three apps simultaneously. That is not a sign that the apps are working. That is a sign that no single app is working well enough to make the others unnecessary. The multi-app behavior is the market’s honest verdict on the product, and the market’s honest verdict is being ignored because each app is still collecting its subscription fee regardless of what’s happening on the others.
What This Looks Like From Where I Stand
I’ve spent five and a half years building Met By Nick from personal savings. My sister Melissa and I built QUALITY alongside it because we believe deeply in human matchmaking as the alternative this market needs and deserves.
I know exactly what it costs to actually help someone find a partner. It costs 15 to 30 hours of recruiting per qualified introduction. It costs investment in networks, in events, in vetting processes that no algorithm replicates. It costs showing up when the process gets hard and the client gets frustrated and you have to hold the line on what you know to be true about compatibility and timing. It costs your own money, your own time, your own emotional reserves.
I charge at a minimum $5,000 for matchmaking services because below that number I am subsidizing the work from my personal savings and the business becomes unsustainable. I did that for years because I believed in attracting more people to this alternative. It nearly broke me financially and professionally. I understand now why veteran matchmakers in this industry never went below that floor.
Here is the comparison that I think about constantly.
Dating apps charge $45 a month; Hinge’s current premium rate, double what it cost in 2020. That’s $540 a year for a product with no verified success rate, no accountability to your outcome, and a business model that profits from your continued presence on the platform. Over five years, that’s $2,700 on a single app, and most people are paying for multiple.
I charge $10,000 for a service where I invest more of that back into recruiting for you specifically, where I am directly accountable to your outcome, where I succeed only when you succeed, and where I have built a network over five years specifically to find people that apps will never surface because they’re not on apps.
I am not saying matchmaking is right for everyone. I am saying the comparison deserves honest scrutiny, and that the billion-dollar marketing budgets of the app industry have so thoroughly shaped the cultural conversation that most people have never been invited to make it.
The Questions Nobody Is Asking
This is the part of the piece I most want people to sit with, because I think action is possible if the right people start demanding answers.
To dating app investors: When did you last ask for verified outcome data? Not engagement metrics. Not subscription revenue. Not DAU growth. Actual data on relationship formation; how many users who paid for your product found lasting partnerships, and how does that compare to a control group that didn’t use the app at all? If you have never asked that question in a board meeting, I’d like to know why. You are funding a product that claims to solve one of the most significant public health crises of our time. You should want to know if it’s working.
To journalists and media: The dating app industry receives enormous coverage: new features, new pricing models, new controversies about algorithms and fake profiles. The question of whether the product category actually produces the outcome it promises receives almost none. This is a $6 billion industry touching the most intimate parts of hundreds of millions of people’s lives. The accountability journalism here is almost nonexistent. That is a gap worth filling.
To lawmakers and regulators: Our government health organizations have declared loneliness a public health crisis. Tech’s role in the mental health crisis of young people is under active legislative scrutiny. The intersection of those two conversations, the documented harms of social media and the structural incentives of dating platforms, is sitting right in front of us. The data privacy issues alone, given the intimacy of the behavioral profiles these apps generate, warrant serious regulatory attention.
To the 1.6 million people actively dating in New York City right now: You are entitled to know what you are buying. You are entitled to ask for outcome data before spending thousands of dollars and years of your life on a product. You are entitled to comparison shop; including against options like matchmaking and in-person events and community-based approaches that the app industry’s marketing has spent enormous resources training you to dismiss as old-fashioned or desperate.
You are not desperate for wanting human-mediated connection. You are rational. The desperation is in continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results, and the app industry has spent $21 million a month making sure you feel embarrassed about noticing that.
What Accountability Would Actually Look Like
I want to be constructive here because I think the framing of “these companies are bad” without specificity is easy to dismiss. Here is what actual accountability would look like in this industry.
Verified relationship formation rates, independently audited. Not surveys. Opt-in relationship status confirmation at six, twelve, and twenty-four months, verified against user activity data and audited by a third party. Reported publicly in aggregate. This is not technically difficult. It requires only that the companies want to measure it.
Transparent pricing relative to measurable outcomes. If your premium tier costs $45 a month and produces no statistically significant improvement in match quality or relationship formation over the free tier, that should be disclosed. Consumers deserve to know what the premium actually buys. Right now they are paying on faith.
Readable data usage disclosure. Not a forty-seven page terms of service engineered to obscure rather than inform. A plain-language, one-page summary of what behavioral data is collected, how long it is retained, what third parties it is shared with, and what happens to it when you delete your account. Every major app should be required to produce this.
Investor accountability for outcome metrics. If you sit on the board of a company whose stated mission is helping people find love, you should be asking for outcome data at every board meeting. The absence of that question is not neutral, it is a choice. It is a choice to prioritize the metrics that serve the business over the metrics that would tell you whether the business is delivering on its promise.
None of these standards are radical. They are the baseline we apply to industries where the stakes are high, the power asymmetry is real, and the consumer has limited ability to verify claims before spending. Dating is all three of those things, and it is overdue for the same scrutiny.
This Is Going to Change
I believe the reckoning is coming for this industry. I have believed it since I started Met By Nick and I believe it more now than I did then, because the signals are everywhere.
Dating app downloads are declining. User satisfaction scores are at historic lows. The cultural conversation around app fatigue: the exhaustion, the burnout, the sense that something about this whole system is broken, has gone mainstream in a way it hadn’t five years ago. People are deleting apps. People are going to events. People are asking their friends to set them up. People are, increasingly, finding their way to matchmakers like me.
The apps will respond to this by launching new features, rebranding, and spending more on advertising. That is what they know how to do. What they will not do, absent outside pressure, is restructure around outcomes rather than engagement. The business model won’t allow it.
So the pressure has to come from outside. From investors who decide they want to be part of building something that actually works. From journalists who decide this story is worth telling. From regulators who decide the public health stakes are high enough to warrant scrutiny. From consumers who decide they’ve been patient long enough and start demanding the answer to the question that has always been theirs to ask.
Does this product work?
That question has a real answer. It just hasn’t been required yet.
We should require it.
Nick Rosen is the founder of Met By Nick and co-founder of QUALITY, human matchmaking services operating across New York City, San Francisco, Miami, Austin, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Toronto, Naples, and beyond. He writes about the dating industry, matchmaking economics, and the public health case for human connection.
If you’re tired of the apps and ready for something different, learn more about working with us.
