Over half of adults in Los Angeles identify as single — one widely cited figure puts it at 52%, among the highest of any major American city. By population alone, this should be an easy place to meet someone.
It isn't, and most Angelenos will tell you why before you finish the question: the city is 500 square miles wide, the person worth meeting in Silver Lake might as well live in a different state if you're in Santa Monica, and forty minutes in a car is the actual, non-negotiable cost of almost every date before either of you has said a word. LA doesn't have a dating shortage. It has a distance problem, and distance, in this city, is the one variable that changes every other number on this list.
We priced apps, matchmakers, and events the way people here actually use them — and factored in the one cost every other city on this list gets to ignore.
The apps: same subscription price, a much bigger geography behind it
Tinder Plus, Hinge+, and Bumble Premium cost roughly what they cost everywhere — $15 to $60 a month depending on tier, more once someone's running two or three apps to compensate for a thin local match rate. What's different in LA is what "local" means. A five-mile radius filter in Manhattan covers most of the borough. A five-mile radius in LA might get someone from Culver City to Mid-City and stop there, which is why most serious LA app users end up widening their radius considerably just to keep the pool from feeling empty — and then discover that a promising match forty minutes away, across two freeways at the wrong time of day, functions less like an opportunity and more like a scheduling problem with romantic stakes.
This is the hidden LA tax that doesn't show up on a subscription receipt: every first date here has a built-in transportation cost, in gas, in parking, in the hour-plus round trip that turns a casual coffee into a half-day commitment. A $20-a-month app subscription in a city where the average first date requires 45 minutes of driving each way is a meaningfully different product than the same $20 subscription in a city you can cross on foot.
Matchmakers: LA prices like an industry town, because it is one
Los Angeles has one of the most developed, most publicly visible matchmaking markets in the country, largely because it's home to a concentration of high-earning, high-privacy-need clients — studio executives, founders, entertainment professionals, athletes — who have specific reasons to want an introduction handled discreetly rather than swiped on. It's also the city that produced Patti Stanger's Millionaire's Club, whose top tier reportedly runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and whose "Mixer" events alone are priced at $35,000 for a room of pre-screened singles — a fair encapsulation of how far LA matchmaking pricing can stretch at the top.
Below that ceiling, the market has real range. Entry-level LA matchmaking services start around $5,000–$20,000. Mid-range, boutique firms serving working professionals typically run $20,000–$25,000 for a defined search. Premium services — proactive recruiting, coaching, styling, national reach — run $45,000 to $150,000 or more, and the celebrity-adjacent, ultra-discreet end of the market clears $300,000 annually without much difficulty. Several LA-based firms have built specifically around this: NDAs as standard practice, client rosters capped in the hundreds, and marketing built almost entirely around privacy rather than volume.
Against that backdrop, Luvo's three published packages — $3,250, $5,250, and $7,500 — sit well below even the entry tier of most LA competitors, while still offering the thing the category is actually supposed to sell: a founder consultation and curated introductions sourced from people the team has met in person, not pulled from a static list. It isn't positioned to compete with the six-figure end of this market. It's a genuinely accessible way into human-sourced matchmaking in a city where the going rate has been set, for years, by an industry with unusually deep pockets.
Structured events: built around the exact geography that makes everything else expensive
This is where LA's sprawl actually works in favor of the format, rather than against it. Relish runs across the city rather than anchoring to one neighborhood — recent evenings have been hosted at AC Terrace on Wilshire near the Beverly Grove/Fairfax corridor, at the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills, and at RhuBAR and Mya Rooftop out in Burbank and Glendale — which means the format is explicitly built around LA's polycentric shape rather than assuming everyone lives near one central downtown the way a more compact city might.
A ticket runs in the same general range as other major Relish markets — typically in the high $30s to low $40s — for 8 to 12 in-person introductions in a single evening. Run the math against the driving-cost problem above and the value case gets sharper, not softer: instead of six separate 45-minute round trips across the city for six separate first dates that may or may not go anywhere, a single evening compresses that same number of introductions into one trip, one parking spot, one night. At roughly $3–4 per introduction, it's meaningfully cheaper than a month of stacked app subscriptions, and it eliminates the specific LA cost that neither category above it can touch: the tax of geography itself.
Matching runs through Relish Select, the platform at events.mycheekydate.com — private selections submitted at the end of the night, mutual interest connected the next day, with no public rejection and no algorithm deciding in advance who's worth showing to whom.
What the LA math actually says
Every category on this list costs roughly what it costs elsewhere in the country — apps in the $15–65 range, matchmaking from a few thousand dollars to well past six figures, structured evenings under $45. What's different here isn't the price tag on any one option. It's that Los Angeles adds a cost the other cities don't have to price in at all: the physical distance between two people who might actually be a match. Apps don't solve for it — they widen the pool without shrinking the map. High-end matchmaking solves for it at a price only a small fraction of the city's 52% single population can pay. The structured evening is, of the three, the only format built explicitly around collapsing that distance into a single night out — which may be the most LA-specific argument for it there is.
Relish hosts structured social evenings across Los Angeles, and offers curated matchmaking through Luvo. Find an evening near you →