The Dream of a Dating App That Doesn’t Want Your Money

Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. When you swipe and swipe and nothing’s working out, it could be that you’ve had bad luck. It could be that you’re too picky. It could be—oh God—that you simply don’t pull like you thought you did. But sometimes, whether out of self-protection or righteous skepticism of corporate motives, you might think: Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.

The gnawing suspicion is a common one. In one 2024 study, researchers analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits. The study’s co-authors called it the “conflict of interest theory”: that dating-app companies (which want customers) have interests fundamentally at odds with those of many dating-app users (specifically, those who want to find someone and delete the app ASAP). The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.

Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love. Last year, a class-action lawsuit argued that Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and several other apps, locks its users into “a perpetual pay-to-play loop” at the expense of “customers’ relationship goals.” (“We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps,” Match Group responded in a statement. “Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.” In December, a judge sent the case to arbitration.)

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Whether for-profit app companies are in fact trying to hinder people’s romantic game is questionable. Match Group keeps the details of its algorithms and strategies under lock, but a spokesperson told me that “the best scenario for us is for someone to find their partner using one of our products, and then tell other people about it … Our algorithms are designed to prioritize active users and mutual compatibility—not to keep people stuck in an endless loop.” And it’s not like companies need to worry about there being a finite supply of single people. You wouldn’t expect a therapist to undermine her clients’ treatment for the sake of income; plenty of people have problems that could use some talking through. Brutally, that 2024 paper determined that app skeptics might just be avoiding responsibility for their own “dating failures,” blaming a lack of matches on evil capitalist overlords instead of “their own actions or attractiveness.” (I flinched.)

Regardless, the fact that so many believe the theory suggests that modern dating isn’t working for a lot of people—and that for-profit matchmaking companies have, to a significant degree, lost the trust of their base. American romance isn’t exactly thriving, as I’ve reported: Some singles are quitting the apps, and others are quitting dating altogether. But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date (rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute). What I wanted to find, really, was a site that doesn’t try to make money: a nonprofit dating app.

A handful of them actually exist. Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.

The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Last fall, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government launched a dating platform, Tokyo Enmusubi, which uses AI to suggest matches—and which, according to the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, cost $1.28 million to develop. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in 2023; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates. Terengganu, a region in West Malaysia, is developing an app too, which the local government said on Facebook is designed to “strengthen the family institution in the state.” If it sounds a little creepy for political leaders to be reaching into people’s intimate lives in this way—well, you might not be wrong.

Researchers did tell me that state dating apps have some potential benefits. Users might hope, for instance, that such platforms share their goal—that governments looking to raise marriage and birth rates, as well as increase trust in the state, want people to swiftly find love. And governments may have less incentive to share users’ data with third parties, or to inundate them with sponsored profiles and advertisements, than some for-profit apps do.

A state platform could also be effective at providing certain kinds of security. Luke Brunning, a University of Leeds philosopher who co-runs the Ethical Dating Online research network, told me that some for-profit companies might fear that requiring too much information at sign-up could turn away potential customers. Many governments, by contrast, are accustomed to collecting data on their residents and might not hesitate to demand information from dating-app users—which, in some cases, could help ensure that people aren’t bots, catfishers, or scammers, and could help keep track of users in case of bad behavior. (Tokyo Enmusubi, for one, mandates that users provide a photo ID, proof of income, and even official proof of singlehood; it also asks them to sign a pledge promising that they’re looking to wed.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

The major commercial dating apps do grant users the ability to report a profile in the case of perceived abuse. They use AI and human moderators to detect suspicious activity, and have begun allowing, though not demanding, people to submit a selfie video in exchange for a mark showing that their profile is “verified.” Tinder users in the U.S. can run their own background checks on potential dates (for a fee, after two freebies), though the process requires people to enter information they might not have—including, for a criminal background check, an individual’s last name, city, and birth year. Even with these safeguards in place and many millions spent on trust-and-safety teams, users of commercial dating apps continue to encounter fake profiles—and to report sometimes-harrowing experiences.

Of course, even if governments collect more information on individuals, one can’t assume that they will be earnestly invested in protecting their apps’ users. The Communist Party of China has been accused in recent years of censoring women’s accounts of gender-based abuse and of using sexual violence for political ends. When Iran launched the dating app Hamdam in 2021, Firuzeh Mahmoudi, the executive director of the NGO United for Iran, told Vice World News that the app “treats women like property,” matching them with bachelors and then keeping those couples “under the watchful and constant eye” of marriage counselors employed by the state. The administration decreed all other dating apps illegal.

That’s the major underlying issue: Inevitably, a government platform will be shaped by political motivations. Imagine if South Africa’s government had created a dating app during the apartheid era, Jennifer Lundquist, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist, told me; it certainly wouldn’t have facilitated interracial relationships. And even if you trust your current leaders, power changes hands over time. A future state, Lundquist pointed out, might become more autocratic or fascist—and would have, thanks to its dating app, a trove of data on people’s romantic and sexual preferences.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

Beyond all that, apps designed to boost birth rates serve only certain users. Lots of people aren’t looking to marry or have kids, or to find one person and then delete an app forever, Brunning told me. Anyone who’s queer or polyamorous or kinky, he said, or who wants to have casual sex, might be better served by commercial options. He’s not expecting to see a state app that “facilitates gay BDSM hookups” anytime soon.

Even if the state were committed to guiding people to whatever kind of relationship they want, it might not be the right candidate for the job; no evidence suggests that governments know any better than commercial apps what makes lovers compatible. People also might hesitate to use a government dating app because, let’s face it: It’s not cool. Singapore’s Social Development Network, a governmental body that for many years held meetup events—singles’ cruises, tango-dancing sessions, speed dating—was initially called the Social Development Unit, and people joked that SDU stood for “Single, Desperate, and Ugly.” In 2023, the SDN, citing declining membership, announced that it would end its dating events and instead focus on funding other organizations’ initiatives. “Today,” a ministry spokesperson told Singapore’s The Straits Times, “there are better alternatives offered by the private sector, including online dating apps.”

God help us, I thought to myself at this point in the search: Are dating apps all run by institutions that people famously do not trust? Then I heard of another type of nonprofit player, one that many Americans also dislike but perhaps not quite as much: scientists.

For the past couple of years, Elizabeth Bruch and Amie Gordon, University of Michigan researchers, have been working on Revel, a dating app being beta tested by 200 students. The problem with online dating, if you ask Bruch and Gordon, is that the major apps aren’t in the business of relationship science. Some of them do have behavioral scientists and other researchers on staff, but they’re likely to be somewhat limited in their ability to figure out what makes people click. For-profit companies aren’t always well suited to carrying out long-term scientific investigations, which can stretch on for many years and might not yield immediately useful (read: profitable) results. In a commercial setting, Bruch told me, a CEO can decide on a dime to prioritize some new direction, and a whole research project can be abandoned.

Besides, even researchers who study romantic chemistry for a living don’t yet understand it. In one 2017 study, psychologists tried to predict people’s compatibility using a mathematical model based on more than 100 measures of traits and preferences that their subjects self-reported; every combination of those characteristics failed to correlate with how much the participants hit it off when they met.

That’s why Bruch and Gordon started wondering if, however strange it might sound, they could be the right people to make a dating app. Bruch is a sociologist who has studied how people look for mates, as well as the idea of dating “leagues” (as in, she’s out of my league); Gordon is a psychologist interested in what makes some relationships work and others fail. Their app doubles as a scientific study—“For science,” Revel’s website reads, “not profit”—and they collect data in the name of research: seeing who matches, asking why a user did or didn’t “like” someone, following up continuously with pairs who’ve met in person. How many profiles, they want to know, can a person see in a day before feeling overwhelmed by “choice overload”? Does seeing more information about other people lead to better connections? How can the app help support different relationship goals, whether a long-term partnership, a short fling, or a meaningful platonic connection?

[Read: The people who quit dating]

Scientific knowledge might truly be a better incentive than financial gain—not only because people like Bruch and Gordon are invested in unlocking love’s mysteries, and because studies legally have to adhere to certain ethical guidelines, but also because the research community has norms around transparency. Unlike private companies, which generally fear helping out their competitors, or governments, which aren’t always open with their citizens, scientists tend to be eager to publish any findings of note. Revel’s website lists exactly what user data are collected and on what basis pairs are made. Bruch and Gordon plan to open the app to the whole University of Michigan community this fall; eventually, they intend to share their discoveries with other researchers and also with the app’s users, in hopes that doing so might illuminate a dating experience they know can be confusing and emotionally fraught.

Making scientific advances and, in turn, ameliorating the pain of courtship: That’s a lofty aim, and also one that could take a lot of time to work toward. Not all single people want to play the long game in their own life; they might be less concerned with society’s collective grasp of human chemistry, or even with understanding their own romantic needs and tendencies, than with finding a partner—or a kiss, or a wedding date, or a threesome—right now.

Perhaps more significantly, existing apps have already conditioned people to a new way of dating, and a not-for-profit platform is unlikely to reverse that. Scrolling through people on an app makes looking for love or sex feel like choosing products in a grocery store, Anil Isisag, a consumer researcher who studies dating-app user experiences, told me. An abundance of options, he said, “gives people the idea that there could be something better around the corner,” which is a solid recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction. At this point, many people may be so deeply Tinder-brained that using a different product—or even meeting potential dates in person—wouldn’t change the way they think about courtship.

Still, who’s running those platforms, and how transparent they are, matters a great deal. The people frustrated with dating apps aren’t all bellyachers who expect only romantic success; they just know that a consequential, incredibly personal part of their life is at the whim of a mysterious strategy, and they feel helpless. Perhaps, to empower them, app companies don’t need a flawless product. They just need to be more open, about both the workings of their algorithm and the fact that no algorithm can predict the coveted spark—not now, and maybe not ever.