Dating App Add-Ons Can Run $800 a Month. One Mom Found a Match for Free.
Dating app add-ons can quietly run $500 to $800 a month. I’ve seen the statements, and the first time I did, I honestly couldn’t believe a dating app could cost that much. So I dug into the charges, and the subscription wasn’t the problem at all. It was the add-ons: the boosts and all the other little purchases that promise you’ll finally be seen. They pile up the way those charges always do, and before you know it the month is over and you’re no closer to meeting anyone.
What strikes me is that so many of the warm, funny, accomplished women paying for those boosts don’t need one to be worth meeting. So why the spend? I’ve come to suspect that the men who would actually suit them are sitting behind a paywall, and they’re paying over and over to get past it. On top of that, friends in the same city often get shown the same men. They text each other about it, and once one of them has gone out with him, the others are out. The pool looks big, but it really isn’t.
Filters are part of the story too. Most apps let you filter on a lot more than city and age, but people tend to lean on the easy settings, like a height minimum. If height matters to someone, I’d leave that alone, although it does seem to matter less the older you get. What I’d rather talk about is everything else: the things worth filtering for, and worth listening for once a conversation actually starts, that never make it into the settings people are paying to push.
Would You Let Your Mom Set You Up?
So I went looking for an app that would let a mom set up her grown child in a way that fits how people date now. What I wanted seemed obvious to me. She makes the profile, and her adult child edits it and approves it. She sets the filters. She meets the other mom first, long enough to tell whether that family is steady or a little unhinged, and then she passes along only the matches that made it through all of that. There’s no new profile to build and no Saturday spent on someone who was never going to fit the life her grown child actually wants. I couldn’t find that app anywhere, which surprised me, because moms are oddly good at this. We’ve spent years watching what lines up and what doesn’t, and the apps simply had nowhere to put that.
A friend told me about a mom named Claire, and Claire was kind enough to let me call her. Her daughter, Olivia, was 28 and about a year out of a five-year relationship. She had moved back to her home state and was working in beauty, not in an office full of men. She’d been on Tinder and a couple of other apps, and since she had always wanted marriage and a family, Claire was quietly watching the clock.
One day Olivia showed her mom the phone, and Claire was startled by the photos. They were revealing and dressed to get attention, and they just weren’t Olivia, who didn’t need any of that. In the family photos Claire had posted, Olivia was striking on her own, with no Facetune on her nose, cheekbones, or lips, and none of the edits so many women run on a dating picture before it goes up. Her face was already enough, but on the apps she came across as a tactic. She’s also quite religious, and you’d never have known it from her profile.
Claire asked whether she could set Olivia up on Upward herself, building the profile and choosing the filters, and Olivia said yes. The idea amused her, since her mom could have some fun with it and Olivia wouldn’t really have any skin in the game. They agreed on the rules first: Claire would say up front that she was the mom, and Olivia would take over if a man seemed worth it. Claire used Upward’s basic filters and wrote a note she could paste at the start of each chat, trying it out on a few friends before she ever sent it:
“Hi, this is Olivia’s mom. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m on here to help her find a great guy she deserves. She is successful and beautiful and is sick of the dating apps. I’m pre-screening on her behalf. I know what she wants, and we are very close.”
About 80 percent of the men who got that message wrote back and were fine with it. They answered her questions about their work and about why they were on that particular app, and Claire was listening for a person rather than ticking boxes on a form. After a week or two she showed Olivia five men she had already narrowed down to serious contenders, along with their profiles and the message threads, and she didn’t say which one she liked. Olivia picked the same man. He was open in the way he wrote, he owned a small business (Olivia owns one too), and he shared her faith. Olivia took the phone and wrote to him that he was finally talking to Olivia herself. They moved to FaceTime, went on a date that weekend, and started something serious.
Can Mom’s Input Work Better Than Paid Matchmaking?
A matchmaker charges thousands of dollars to meet you once and come back with a short list. Claire already knew which photos were a costume and which belief had never made it onto Tinder, and her first pass cost a week and a basic profile. That’s one family, not a study, but it’s still the result a paid matchmaker hopes for and can’t promise.
The homemade version did have a hole in it, though. Claire had no way to see or chat with Daniel’s mother for that extra layer of insight before Olivia ever wrote a word. The rules lived in a kitchen conversation, and the men hadn’t signed up for any of it. Most of them were kind about it, but you shouldn’t have to count on that.
I’ve also seen the other kind of miss, where two people like each other right away even though their lives were never going to share a month, much less a decade. Very often a mother could have seen that coming from the photos and the interests alone, and someone who has known you since day one can save everyone that time.
That, to me, is the case for a mother over a matchmaker, and over yet another boost. The matchmaker met you last month, and the app only knows what you tapped. A mother knows what kind of partner you actually want, and she knows which of your rules are doing real work and which ones you could let go. She isn’t cheaper because she’s worse at this; she’s cheaper because she already knows you.
What Would a Dating App With Mom’s Input Look Like?
I don’t expect anyone to delete their apps, and I think a lot of people would use KNOWSBEST right alongside one, especially the ones who still enjoy that little thrill of being picked by a screen. The design is what I couldn’t find anywhere else. Mom builds the profile, and the dater edits it and locks it in. Mom sets the filters. The two moms message each other before anything is shared, which is exactly the conversation I wanted all along, the one about whether the other family is steady. Only then do the daters see the match, and it takes a yes from both of them to go any further. Nobody has to build a profile from scratch, there are far fewer hours spent messaging someone the photos had already ruled out, and the rules are set before a stranger ever writes back.
Spending $800 on add-ons can buy you a month of searching without the one thing that matters most, which is someone who truly knows you doing the vetting. Claire did that job for free, on an app that was never designed for it, and found Daniel. Even she hit a wall, though, because she had no way to reach his mother and ask the questions only another mom can answer before Olivia ever typed hello.
That’s the missing piece. It isn’t more profiles or better filters. It’s the other mother, reached first, before all the hours of messaging and the first date that was never going to work.
Join the KNOWSBEST Waitlist
We’re building KNOWSBEST for moms setting up their grown children, and for the adult children who would quietly welcome a little help. If you’ve watched someone you love pour time and money into apps that don’t really know them, I’d love for you to join us. You can sign up for the KNOWSBEST waitlist.
About the author
Kristi Brandt is the founder and CEO of KNOWSBEST, a mom-curated dating app. She started it after watching too many adult children burn out on the apps, and after failing to find a product that would let a mother do the first pass with her adult child’s permission. She is a former management consultant and a Northwestern alum, and she lives in Florida with her husband. She writes about dating, maternal judgment, and what the apps still get wrong.
