In February 2025, Spencer Rascoff took over as CEO of Match Group, the company that owns Tinder, Hinge, and Match.com. In his first letter to employees, he admitted something the industry rarely says out loud: dating apps have become "a numbers game" where users feel "frustrated" searching for "real, meaningful matches."
It was a remarkable confession from the man now running the world's largest dating empire. Because the truth is, the numbers game isn't a bug in the system. It's the business model.
The Math That Makes You Swipe
Match Group reported record quarterly revenue of nearly $900 million in late 2024, part of an industry that generates more than $6 billion annually. The company's portfolio includes Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish—each app carefully positioned to capture different segments of the dating market, but all sharing the same fundamental economic incentive.
Here's the uncomfortable arithmetic: Every time a dating app successfully connects two people into a lasting relationship, it loses two paying customers. The most profitable user isn't the one who finds love quickly—it's the one who keeps swiping, keeps hoping, keeps paying for premium features month after month.
Research shows the average person spends eight months on dating apps, swiping through nearly 4,000 profiles before finding a partner. During those months, they're exposed to premium upgrade prompts, limited daily likes that encourage paid subscriptions, and features that promise to move them to the front of the queue. Tinder alone generated $1.94 billion in 2024, making it the undisputed market leader.
But those eight months might be optimistic. Industry data shows Match Group's paying subscriber base has declined from a peak of 16.3 million in 2022 to around 14 million today, even as revenue has remained steady. The explanation? Revenue per paying user has increased—the apps are extracting more money from the users who stay engaged, compensating for those who leave.
The Slot Machine in Your Pocket
Dating apps don't accidentally feel like slot machines. The similarity is deliberate, rooted in decades of research into how to create compulsive behavior.
In the 1950s, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered something crucial about motivation: unpredictable rewards create far more persistent behavior than predictable ones. Rats pressing a lever that sometimes dispensed food became obsessed with the task, pressing far more frequently than rats who received food every time. The uncertainty—the maybe this time—activated their reward systems more powerfully than certainty ever could.
Modern dating apps have perfected this variable reward schedule. Every swipe is a lever pull. Most profiles result in nothing—the equivalent of the empty lever press. Occasionally, you get a match, triggering a dopamine release. Very rarely, that match becomes a conversation, then a date. The randomness is what keeps you hooked.
"The brain doesn't just respond to the reward itself," explains research from the London School of Economics. "It releases dopamine in anticipation of the reward. With dating apps, just the potential of a match is enough to create that dopamine hit." Over time, your brain learns to release dopamine preemptively—you get a neurochemical reward simply from opening the app, before you've even started swiping.
The apps understand this intimately. Tinder users were making one billion swipes per day just two years after the app's launch. Gamification features—badges, streaks, limited likes—all leverage the same psychological mechanisms that make casino gambling addictive. The apps have created what researchers call a "dopamine loop," where the anticipation of a match becomes more compelling than any actual match could be.
The Paradox That Keeps You Searching
If the variable reward schedule gets you to open the app, it's the paradox of choice that keeps you from ever closing it satisfied.
In 2000, psychologists conducted a now-famous experiment at a grocery store. Shoppers were presented with either six jam varieties or twenty-four. Twenty percent more people stopped at the table with more options. But only 3% of those people actually purchased jam, compared to 30% who bought from the smaller selection.
The conclusion: an abundance of choices doesn't increase satisfaction—it creates paralysis and regret. With too many options, we become convinced a better choice exists just beyond our reach.
Dating apps are an endless conveyor belt of jam jars. A 2020 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that online daters developed what researchers called a "rejection mind-set." As users were presented with more potential partners, they became increasingly likely to reject each subsequent person—on average, their acceptance rate dropped 27% from the first profile to the last.
The psychological mechanism is straightforward but insidious. Exposure to abundant options makes users simultaneously pickier and more dissatisfied. They report declining satisfaction with profile photos and growing pessimism about their chances of success, even as they continue swiping. Another study found that high partner availability increased users' fear of being single while simultaneously decreasing their self-esteem and increasing their sense of being overwhelmed.
It's a perfect trap: the more options you have, the more you believe you should find someone perfect, and the less satisfied you become with anyone who isn't. So you keep swiping.
The Retention Problem
Dating apps face what industry insiders call "the retention paradox." For most apps, user retention is the holy grail—you want people to keep using your product. But for dating apps, success means users leave. The challenge is keeping people engaged long enough to generate revenue, but not so successfully that they find relationships quickly.
The numbers tell the story. Industry data shows that 95% of daily active users abandon dating apps within the first month. The average monthly retention rate for dating apps is just 5.1%—among the lowest of any app category. Tinder's 30-day retention sits at 7.8%, while even the more relationship-focused Hinge manages only 10.8%.
Some companies have acknowledged this tension openly. Hinge positions itself as "the dating app designed to be deleted," celebrating its role in facilitating 50,000 dates per week, with 3,000 of those turning into relationships. The company frames this as "good churn"—users leaving because they succeeded, not because they were frustrated.
But here's the uncomfortable question: if Hinge's business model depends on a constant supply of newly single people to replace the ones who find relationships, what incentive does it have to get really, really good at creating lasting matches? A Hinge that was too effective at creating marriages would need to find 100,000 new users every week just to maintain its current user base. The math doesn't work unless most relationships fail.
How It Feels to Be the Product
Pew Research data reveals the emotional toll. While 30% of American adults have used dating apps, only 12% have found committed relationships through them. Among active users, 45% report feeling frustrated, 35% feel pessimistic, and 25% feel insecure. These negative emotions coexist paradoxically with the apps' addictive pull—users report it's easy to find people they're attracted to, yet they feel worse the more they use the platforms.
The design ensures this. Every feature is optimized for engagement, not outcomes. Limited daily likes that encourage premium upgrades. Algorithms that strategically stagger matches to maintain anticipation. Artificial scarcity that triggers loss aversion—"Someone liked you! Upgrade to see who"—exploiting the fear of missing out on a potential connection.
Match Group's financial filings show the effectiveness of this approach. Despite losing paying subscribers, the company has maintained revenue by increasing what it extracts from remaining users. Revenue per paying user has climbed to over $19 per month, up from previous levels, even as overall user counts decline. The company has shifted from growing its user base to squeezing more revenue from the users it retains.
What Success Actually Looks Like
Here's what makes this complicated: dating apps do work for some people. Research shows marriages that start online have slightly lower divorce rates than those formed offline—about 6% compared to 7.6%. Online dating has expanded options for people in small communities, facilitated more interracial relationships, and provided crucial connection points for LGBTQ+ individuals.
The problem isn't that the apps don't work. It's that they work just enough to keep you believing they might work for you next time, while not working so well that you leave quickly. The sweet spot for profitability is months of engagement with modest hope and regular disappointment.
Ten percent of partnered adults under 30 met their current partner on a dating app—a meaningful number, but one that also means 90% met their partners elsewhere. For every success story the apps highlight, there are dozens of users spending months in what researchers call the "rejection mind-set," growing more pessimistic with each swipe.
What This Means for You
Understanding the business model doesn't mean you should delete every dating app tomorrow. For many people, especially in demographics or locations with limited organic meeting opportunities, these platforms serve a real function.
But it does mean approaching them differently. Recognize that the app's incentives are not aligned with your incentives. The app succeeds when you stay engaged; you succeed when you leave. Every feature that feels compelling—unlimited swiping, the promise of better matches with premium features, the addictive slot-machine dopamine hit—is designed to maximize your time and money investment, not your likelihood of finding a meaningful relationship.
Set strict time limits. Recognize that the dissatisfaction and pessimism you feel aren't personal failures—they're predictable outcomes of exposure to too many choices combined with variable reward schedules. Understand that the profile you're evaluating is the product of deliberate psychological manipulation just as much as you are.
Most importantly, remember that feeling frustrated, pessimistic, and insecure while using these apps doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means the apps are working exactly as designed. The question is whether you're willing to keep playing a game where the house always wins—not because you'll never find a match, but because the journey to finding one extracts maximum value from your time, attention, and wallet along the way.
The apps aren't keeping you single out of malice. They're keeping you engaged out of economic necessity. Understanding the difference might not make swiping feel better, but at least you'll know why it feels the way it does.