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.
On Tinder it would not be in the same context that what you experienced. In OKCupid it’s part of the rules that you can send messages without a match. So people are OK (I guess) with it. On Tinder it’s going to come as unexpected and unwelcome. You will start with a disadvantage. Unless the woman is only interested in money (if you can spend $500/month on an app then you are probably among the wealthier half of the population).
I agree, but that just makes this even scummier on Tinder’s part. The people who own and make the app know that, they’re doing this anyway. So they’re targeting people who are already desperate and lonely, and giving them what they will inevitably see as a “lifeline” which actually may make their chances worse.
Oh, it most definitely is scummy. It’s no news that Tinder does not care about people well-beings. Actually, they want you to get stuck to the platform as long as you can; if everyone was finding their partner after a week their platform would not be profitable anymore.