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Comment by EE84M3i | Hacker News Reader

They should be more transparent about their pricing, but it seems to me like they offer different demographics fundementaly different services so charging different amounts isn't unreasonable.

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> fundementaly different services

Like what?I went through tinders sales page for their tiers and can't see anything that would offer a different experience based on any demographic: https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004487406-T...

I get the feeling you may respond telling me that people over 30 are looking for a different type of relationship, to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price, and even if it did, it is impossible to know which users are looking to have a fling and which are looking for an SO.

People have wildly different experiences on tinder based on gender and age, among other things. It would follow that they value the premium features differently and be willing to pay more or less for them too.

>to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

It doesn't actually follow though does it? Some uber christian 20 y/o girl may want to get married and have kids within the year. Some 46 year old man might just be looking to bone down with his peers.

Someone can use any of those premium features to facilitate any of those possibilities, and more. Having more likes or options to message along with a super-like doesn't mean someone is looking for anything in particular.

It is simply true that some people

> value the premium features differently and be willing to pay more or less for them too.

But that's it. There's nothing about age or whatever in there.

The primary way that different demographics have different experiences on tinder is not related to who they're looking for, it's related to who's looking for them. Users that get lots of matches with minimal work fundamentally aren't going to pay as much for a product that is designed to get them more matches.

So to follow your logic further, would you have any problem with charging black women and asian men more than everybody else too, as fewer people are looking for them, and they are more willing to buy a product designed to get them more matches?

It's literally the same thing but with age. Just how much do you think we can squeeze out of 30+ black women eh?

The practice is despicable. I'm not saying you're advocating for the above, but if the approach is to just extract the maximum because you can extract the maximum, which is the logic you're advocating, this is an expected result.

To add to this, as someone who has used the app before I'd be genuinely surprised if the experience they are given was in fact substantially different enough to warrant some people AU$7 while charging others over AU$30 (!!). The paid version allows you to change your swiping location (meaning you can match with someone in a different city), have a few more "super likes", and a couple other features. It's possible there are things I don't know about, or that some of the shoppers also added on the extra "gold" membership[1] in the article, increasing the price, but considering the experience already I think they're just doing differential pricing based on demographics and not actually giving a different experience.

1: The paid membership gives you a lot of features, but one thing you can additionally pay extra for is the ability to see who has liked you directly, so called "Tinder gold".

As a woman that uses Tinder, I can say first hand that the experience for women on the app is completely different. Paying for Tinder Gold lets you see the likes, infinite swipes, etc. like it does for men, but the value of that data is less useful. I buy Gold because I liked the features nonetheless, but the list of likes is useless - I’m constantly pegged at 9,999+ likes, the list freezes every five seconds, and there’s no meaningful way to sift through it.

I don't think a different algorithm counts as a different service, and other than that what could be different about it?

Women don't need infinite likes, their match rate is very high so 100 likes per day is more than enough to get more conversations than they can handle. So in practice women already have infinite likes for free since they aren't used up anyway. Men's match rate is often less than 1%, so they need hundreds of likes just to talk to a single woman, without infinite likes chances are they will use up all their likes for the day and not get a single match.

So, if we take that into account women get maybe 25 free matches per day and men maybe 0.5 free matches per day. Men pay so they can get more matches per day, women don't. The service cost is per match and not per like. A man liking 1000 candidates costs as much as a woman rejecting 1000 candidates.

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