Hinge Tests a Cheaper Subscription as Paying Users Outpace Its Audience
Match Group is testing a cheaper subscription tier for Hinge, the company disclosed on its third-quarter 2026 earnings call. The new tier will include features such as additional filters and custom location boundaries. Match Group did not disclose what the subscription will cost.
Match Group chief financial officer Steve Bailey said the new Hinge tier is designed for women in particular, and also for price-sensitive users. TechCrunch's report on the test put the move in the context of Hinge's paid base, which the company reported as follows for the quarter.
Hinge direct revenue rose 19% year over year to $221 million. Paying users increased 23% to 2.3 million at the end of the quarter, while global monthly active users (the people who open the app in a given month) grew 12% over the same period. Hinge's revenue per payer is around $30, almost twice that of Tinder. Its payer penetration, the share of active users who pay, is only slightly more than half of Tinder's.
Tinder's figures moved the other way. The app generated $480 million in direct revenue in the third quarter, down 2% year over year, and had 8.9 million paid users, down 4% from a year earlier.
Hinge has tried the opposite approach before. In 2023, the company experimented with a more expensive tier aimed at users willing to pay extra. Bloomberg reported at the time that Hinge was testing a subscription priced at $50 to $60 per month, which it described as being for 'motivated daters.' The new plan moves in the other direction, adding a lower-priced option while the company points to growth in its paying base.
The broader context here is a tension in the subscription model. Hinge's paying users are growing faster than its monthly active users, while Tinder's paid base is shrinking. A cheaper tier could widen the path from free account to paid account, which would matter most for users who have stopped paying for dating apps. It could also dilute revenue per payer, the metric on which Hinge currently sits well above Tinder. Which of those outcomes follows will depend largely on price, and Match Group has not yet disclosed that figure.
The test also raises a product question that is easy to overlook. Filters and custom location boundaries are features that power users value, and moving them into a lower tier changes what a paid relationship with the app means. If the tier brings price-sensitive users into the paying base without eroding the premium offering, Hinge would gain a way to grow payers in a segment where it currently has less reach. That outcome is the one the test is designed to measure.
