Nobody advertises the real number.
Dating apps quote a monthly subscription and let you discover the rest — the second app you download when the first one goes quiet, the third when the second does. Matchmakers, with a handful of exceptions, don't publish pricing at all; you find out what it costs by booking a consultation, which is itself part of the sales process. Dating events tend to be the most transparent of the three by default, if only because a ticket price is hard to hide.
We wanted an honest comparison, so we built one, using real, current pricing across all three categories. No category comes out uniformly best. Each is a genuinely different trade of money for time for control, and which one is worth it depends entirely on which of those three you have the least of.
The apps: cheap per month, expensive per outcome
The headline price of a dating app subscription is genuinely low. Tinder Plus runs somewhere in the $10–20 range monthly, with Tinder Platinum reaching up to around $35. Hinge+ runs roughly $17–33, with HingeX climbing to $50–60. Bumble Boost and Premium sit in a similar $15–40 band. Pricing on all three is dynamic — it varies by age and location — but the headline figures are, on their own, the cheapest option on this list by a wide margin.
Two things complicate that math in practice. Most serious users aren't on one app: the standard advice is to run two or three at once to see which algorithm surfaces the best matches locally, which turns a single subscription into something closer to $50–65 a month once more than one platform is running. And the subscription is a cost of access, not a cost of outcome — it buys visibility and features, not a date, and there's no refund if the month produces nothing. Add the time cost, which is real and rarely counted: swipe volume has been rising even as match quality per hour hasn't kept pace, which means the effective price of an app subscription is mostly paid in hours, not dollars.
Matchmakers: opaque pricing, wide range, real service behind it
This is the category where the number is hardest to get in advance. Across the industry, entry-level, database-driven matchmaking tends to start around $1,000–$5,000 for a handful of introductions pulled from an existing client list. Mid-range, regional services with active sourcing and coaching run $5,000–$25,000. High-end firms doing proactive national recruiting, styling, and extensive vetting run $25,000–$100,000, and the ultra-exclusive end of the category — international search, concierge service, tiny client rosters — climbs past $100,000, occasionally well past it.
Success-rate claims in this space are almost always self-reported by the firms making them, with no independent verification and no consistent definition of what counts as a success. Worth treating any specific number here, from any operator, as marketing until proven otherwise. What the price is genuinely buying, done well, is a person rather than an algorithm doing the search — the labor of sourcing, vetting, and judgment that an app can't sell you at any price.
Luvo, sits toward the lower end of the mid-range tier, and does something the category mostly doesn't: publishes its pricing outright. Three packages, from $3,250 up to $7,500, each including a personal consultation with the founder and a defined number of curated introductions, sourced from people the team has actually met through its own live events rather than pulled from a static database. Whether it's the right fit depends on what someone's looking for, but it's a rare data point in this industry for what transparent, human-sourced matchmaking costs at the accessible end of it.
Structured events: the middle of the cost curve, and the most per-dollar exposure
This is the category most people underprice in their head, usually because "speed dating" still carries connotations from a decade ago rather than what the format has become.
A Relish structured social evening runs around $37–$40 a ticket. For something more personal, Relish Introduction packages — a fully arranged, individually matched date rather than a group rotation — start from $695. Run the math on the evening and it works out to roughly $3–5 per introduction across eight to twelve real, in-person conversations in a single night: cheaper per person met than a month of stacked app subscriptions, with the weight of an actual conversation behind it rather than a swipe. It isn't trying to match the depth of vetting a five-figure matchmaker retainer buys. It's priced as the considered middle option between algorithmic volume and bespoke, expensive search.
The matching itself is handled through Relish Select, guests submit private selections at the end of the evening, and if the interest is mutual, both parties are connected — no public rejection, no algorithm deciding who gets shown to whom in the first place. The cost structure stays transparent because there's very little to obscure: a ticket price, a venue, and a private matching step at the end of the night.
So which one is actually worth it?
Worth it is the wrong question, phrased that way. The right one is: worth it for what?
Short on cash, with real tolerance for volume and your own time as the input cost — apps are the rational choice, eyes open about what the subscription doesn't include. Short on time and search capability, with money genuinely not the binding constraint — a properly vetted matchmaker buys the thing apps can't sell: someone else doing the labor of the search. Short on signal, tired of text and photos standing in for a person but not ready to spend five figures finding out who someone actually is across a table — a structured evening is priced for exactly that gap: cheap enough to try more than once, real enough to tell you something a profile can't.
Most people end up using more than one of these at different points — an evening or two to recalibrate what's actually out there, an app for volume in between, and for some, eventually, a matchmaker once the criteria are clear enough that a dedicated search is worth paying for. None of them is a shortcut around the other two. They're different tools, priced differently, for different amounts of the two things that are actually scarce here: time and money.
Relish hosts structured social evenings for driven professionals across 50+ cities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia since 2014, and offers curated matchmaking through Luvo. Find an evening near you →