Unlimited likes and unlimited rewinds are great features, and worth paying for. I often accidentally swipe left on people I am interested in, and being able to go back doesn’t leave me wondering what could have been. Likewise having a limited number of likes per day could kill the fun of the app pretty quickly, which is undoubtedly why Tinder made unlimited likes a paid feature.
Tinder Platinum
Message before liking is an attractive feature for people who don’t want to wait for a match but it does take away what originally made Tinder into “Tinder”: mutual matching. This reduces the platform based on mutual attraction to just a chat app. It might as well be Instagram.
Priority Likes allow Tinder Platinum users to have their profile appear before anyone else’s to users they’ve liked. If you’ve liked someone, your profile will be shown to them before those of people who have not liked them, or who don’t subscribe to Tinder Platinum. To be perfectly honest, this feature has been built into the algorithm all along, it just looks like now Tinder is going to make you pay for it!
Why should I pay for Tinder?
Tinder Gold offers two main features Tinder Plus doesn’t: see who likes you and the ability to swipe on every Top Pick.
Being able to see who likes you seems to be a completely useless feature right out of the gate. Within 20 minutes of downloading Tinder, I had nearly 600 people already like me. When I left it for 12 hours, this number ballooned to 3,000. Sifting through them to find someone I liked back felt no different than just using the regular swiping feature.
Furthermore, sometimes I would swipe left on a profile that had already liked me, and they’d reappear in my regular feed or my Top Picks where I’d just have to reject them again.
The Top Picks is supposed to be a set of curated profiles matching your preferences deduced from your location, education, and more. I suspect another criteria is people who are swiped right a lot because they do seem to be a more attractive group than the regular Tinder stack. However, like caffmos the rest of Tinder, being able to see and swipe on a Top Pick doesn’t mean they’ll see and swipe you back.
Tinder Pricing based on age
Tinder Plus costs only $9.99 per month if you’re under age 30, and $ per month if you’re over age 30. Tinder Gold will cost you even more. As if you needed any more financial motivation to find love before the big 3-0, your dating app expenses increase!
Tinder pricing depends on where you live. Different regions will differ by a few dollars, so if your friend on the other side of the country is paying less for Tinder Plus, that’s why.
Is paying for Tinder worth it?
If this is your app of choice, pay a little extra for Tinder Plus! The added features to get unlimited likes and choose who sees you are worth it. While it’s nice to see who likes you and the Top Picks are okay, neither is worth the cost of Tinder Gold.
That said, my overall experience from Tinder is they don’t actually care for the user experience at all. They’re only trying to make money on subscriptions.
Therefore, the focus isn’t actually on getting you matches at all. It’s purely about getting you to pay. Treat Tinder like a fun game on your phone, because that’s all it actually is.