[Infowarrior] - Age Discrimination for Tinder?

[Richard Forno]

Hey, Olds: Tinder's New Premium App Will Cost You Double If You're Over 30

Tinder Plus offers new features that the company says older users will pay more for, assuming they can get over the ego punch.

By Evie Nagy

http://www.fastcompany.com/3043092/fast-feed/hey-olds-tinders-new-premium-app-will-cost-you-double-if-youre-over-30?partner=rss

Last week, BuzzFeed executive editor Doree Shafrir wrote a strong argument for using Tinder to find a relationship if you're over 30, despite the app's image as a hookup facilitator for twentysomethings. The company has evidently determined that lots of people agree with her, because its new premium app, Tinder Plus, will charge people over 30 twice as much as their younger counterparts.

Tinder Plus users in the U.S. under 30 will pay $9.99 per month, while those over 30 will pay $19.99. The premium version of the app includes two main features: Rewind, allowing users to undo a left swipe, or indication that they're not interested, in case they rejected a profile by mistake, and Passport, allowing users to search for profiles in other geographic areas, for example in advance of a trip to that region.

According to NPR, Tinder's market research supported the tiered pricing by age. "Over the past few months, we've tested Tinder Plus extensively in several countries," said a Tinder spokesperson in a statement. "We've priced Tinder Plus based on a combination of factors, including what we've learned through our testing, and we've found that these price points were adopted very well by certain age demographics. Lots of products offer differentiated price tiers by age, like Spotify does for students, for example. Tinder is no different; during our testing we've learned, not surprisingly, that younger users are just as excited about Tinder Plus, but are more budget constrained, and need a lower price to pull the trigger."

It's hard, of course, not to see the move as a statement of desirability—set the entry bar higher for older users, you'll get fewer older users in the pool of available daters. But the truth is probably as Tinder claims. Older people looking for love are willing to pay more for the premium app's flexibility. We'll see if that holds once the uneven pricing is now public. Because...ouch.



Evie Nagy is a Staff Writer at FastCompany.com, newly based in the Bay Area after almost a decade in New York, writing features and news with a focus on Fast Company's Most Creative People.