This is, as it happens, how professional matchmakers tend to charge.
If the payment is a one-time advance payment, I would imagine this disincentives the business to truly do their best, since they already have your money.
I would think, idealistically, maybe the best model would be an advance payment but with a money-back guarantee of say half the payment if you don't find a match through them.
Legally establishing that you don't find a match could be troublesome though, since the "couple" that actually liked each other could both claim they didn't match, get their 50% back, but you as a business would have no recourse if they got together and lived their lives happily ever after, behind your back. You don't have "rights" to their personal life together as a business.
Unless of course it was a government-run dating service that had marriage, housing, and financial records of everyone. That might work. And for many reasons it's in the best interest of the government to get as many people married as possible.
The one thing single-shot service-provider businesses (including professional human matchmakers) will do, though, is to calculate a quote for their service, corresponding to how much trouble they think your account is going to be for them. They don't usually bill more if it turns out to be even more of a challenge, but they do refine their quote process after each experience.
Though also, back to refunds: a refund guarantee doesn't need to be part of an explicit business-model, to be part of the effective business model. Dating sites charge people's credit cards. Large one-time charges from unknown companies you don't have an ongoing relationship with are exactly the type of thing that banks/credit-card companies are happy to do charge-backs for. Whether they offer refunds or not, the system will offer refunds for them — and kill their business by taking away its payment-processing if too many users ask for said refunds.
And those companies are in the business of matching spherical cows in a vacuum.
Efficient markets are useful as a simple model, but you don’t get to wish away real-world problems by pretending the world conforms to that model.
It just-so-happens that dating sites don’t currently follow this model, because an external force (Match Group) came in and explicitly chose to consolidate the market into a cartel, where 95% of “competing” dating sites are actually in collusion due to shared ownership. But there’s no reason to expect that situation to last forever, any more than there’s reason to expect the dominance of the currently-dominant social network (MySpace/Facebook/etc.) to last forever.
Here’s why: it assumes that the only form of power or leverage that exists is supply and demand. However there are all kinds of forms of leverage in the real world. There is legal power. Voting. Guns. Unions. Price fixing. Cultural norms. Marketing. Blackmail. All of these are forms of leverage and they are not special cases; rather, supply and demand is one special case which comprises a fraction of the total pressure on wages and prices and success or failure at any moment.
You could always message people for free outside the platform, considering any profile worthy of messaging probably lists enough information to find them on, say, LinkedIn or Facebook, and users likely often drop their personal websites or Instagram/Twitter IDs on their dating profiles.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure that's been a business model for a very long time.
The (mostly) men answering these messages, pretending to be women, get paid around 0.15€ per reply. And obviously writing messages where they try to prolong the conversation and turn down real life meetings or changing to other (free) messaging system "for now"
I would have thought that of all places Scandinavia would not price-discriminate users based on their gender ...
Or until the women find out that all the men are online and figure out that maybe they need to get an account too?
I mean, the numbers are still close to 1:1 so ultimately it should work out if you treat men and women equally.
If you make men pay you are only propagating stereotypes that men should always pay (and indirectly as a result) that men should get more pay, and that men should be leaders and women should be followers. Treat both equally and start we start eliminating these stereotypes. Women can and should be leaders as well in modern society, including in initiating relationships.
I mean, in cave people times, yes, men had roles and women had roles, but this is 2021, and we should be a whole lot more civilized than assuming roles based on gender, no?