Tinder Plus – Are We Making A Mountain Out Of A Molehill?

Tinder Plus is going to cost anyone between the ages of 18-27 £3.99 a month yet anyone over the age of 28 will have to pay £14.99…

So, Tinder announced a while ago that they will add Premium features to their popular ‘dating’ app thus making it possible to rewind rejections etc. While this has been a greatly anticipated move, it didn’t attract nearly as much attention as their decision to charge older users more money. It was widely criticised as unfair, ageist and even ‘sleazy’.

True, the price difference for UK Tinder membership is staggering. Users aged between 18 and 27 have to pay just £3.99 a month in order to use Tinder Plus while all users above the age of 28 pay a monthly fee of whopping £14.99! That is nearly four times as much as the younger clientele.

Battle of the Ages

However, realistically it doesn’t seem that unfair – especially if you look at it from Tinder’s perspective. First of all – it’s slowly but surely gained the most popular spot in mobile dating services. As paying dating sites raked in 2.2 billion dollars in sales in 2014 in the United States alone, it’s no wonder Tinder as the most popular of all of them doesn’t want to be left with nothing. There have been talks about Tinder introducing some sort of paid membership scheme before, so it can hardly come as a surprise.

As to the difference in how much you have to pay for using the premium account – surely most of the avid Tinder users belong in the under-28 category anyway. It’s also true that they tend to have less money than people in their thirties who usually have established a career by that time and can therefore afford to pay a higher price. Tinder has faced accusations that this is a plot to keep out older users and market this actively for young people. However, that seems extremely unlikely for what would they gain from it?

All that aside, there seems to be a lot of fuss over nothing as Tinder’s free version is not going to disappear anywhere. You can still keep using it without the few extra features that the new Tinder Plus now has.

These new features are:

1) Unlimited likes

This sounds like a big deal! Is there going to be a maximum limit to how many times I can swipe right? Well, yes and no. It is true that unpaid users can only make a certain number of right swipes but in reality – as Techcrunch explains this is not going to affect majority of the users swiping right in good faith. This feature has been added mainly to prevent spammers and bots abusing the system – a normal user is unlikely to hit the like button so many times as to hit the paywall. In the very unlikely event that you are a person who REALLY likes EVERYBODY, you will just have to wait until the next day and then you can keep on swiping right.

2) Undo your last swipe

I admit that this happens – sometimes you swipe left when what you really meant to do was to swipe right. Once that had happened there was absolutely nothing that you could do about it. That match was lost and gone forever… As this was one of the most common complaints sent in to Tinder, they finally decided to add the ‘Undo’ button to rewind the last decision.
Potentially a lifesaver – yes. Absolutely essential so that you’d have to fork out £3.99 to £14.99 in order to ‘Undo’ that automatic left swipe? Hardly.

3) Change your location

Again, I admit that this is a useful feature if you’re travelling around and want to meet people wherever you go. Makes complete sense. Then again, Tinder has a geo-locator already installed. That means that if you travel with your smartphone, it already figures out you’re in a deifferent country and will find matches for you there. Yes, it only does it once you have already arrived, which means you can’t set up dates with potential matches in advance but Tinder is a dating app for the spontaneous and adventurous folks anyway!

4) Turn off ads

Ads are annoying wherever they hit us. So far Tinder has been ad free for everyone so it’s hard to decide what it will be like once the ads are allowed. However, there are a lot of apps, which operate the same way – e.g. are ad-free for paid users. Most of them are still good to use!

That’s it, that’s the four new features added to Tinder Plus. If you look at most paid dating sites they don’t let you do almost anything without handing them your hard-earned cash first – and much more than Tinder asks anyway. So I say. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. Tinder can still be easily used as a free platform – even for those who are ‘clearly’ over the hill…

About the Author

Aet Suvari has been reviewing and writing about the world of online dating since 2008 and the launch of Online Dating Help. A stickler for promoting ethical practices within the UK dating industry she champions the sites that get it right while highlighting those holding it back. You can follow her on Google+