Worth the Upgrade? A Sentiment Analysis of Premium Dating App Reviews

Purpose of Analysis

When you download a new, free app, there’s a good chance they’ll probably try to upsell you premium features or a premium version once you actually start using it. And a really interesting case of this happens specifically with dating apps.

Dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge all have their own niche quirks and target users. But despite these differences, we’ve identified two overlapping metrics used to measure user satisfaction: “match success” and “user experience.”

Now, people have probably already explored each app on their own and personally seen what pros and cons all offer. So instead, we wanted to visit territory that’s been a bit less explored — to understand how these two metrics compare for the premium (paid) version of each app against the free version. And not from just one perspective, but thousands.

The Analysis

To run this analysis, we collected thousands of reviews from the app store for Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and ran them through Cotera’s Copilot program to do a quick sentiment analysis. It was able to filter for premium users only and then break down positive/negative sentiment across the categories “Match Success, “User Experience,” and “Worth the Price.”

But before we get into the data, here’s what we should keep in mind. People who reviewed the premium version of each app almost certainly had the free version first. So when premium users write a review regarding “Match Success” or “User Experience,” it’s pretty likely they’re writing about it comparatively to their experience with the free version.

For example, a proportion of 50% positive sentiment regarding “Match Success” would imply that 50% of premium users saw an improvement in “Match Success” compared to when they didn’t own the premium version.

But now that we got that out of the way, let me show you what we found.

Here’s what we ended up with for Tinder.

You can see that around 59% and 56% of premium users felt there was an improvement in “match success” and “user experience.” And similarly, around 55% of users felt these improvements were worth the price. Tinder’s premium version is less costly than the other apps, so this makes a decent amount of sense.

Next, we did the same for Bumble.

The proportion of people who felt there were improvements in match success and user experience was 61% and 58%. This was a slightly greater proportion (around 1-2% more) compared to Tinder. However, only 54% of users felt the price was justifiable.

And finally, we did the same analysis for Hinge.

Hinge had the greatest proportion of positive sentiment surrounding match success and user experience among all 3 apps. It seems that a similar proportion of users felt Hinge Premium was worth the price too.

Meaningfulness of Results

All in all, there are a few inferences we can make based off of this data.

The app with the lowest percentage of positive sentiment for “Match Success” and “User Experience” was Tinder, the app with the highest was Hinge, and smack in the middle was Bumble. This implies that Tinder’s premium features offer the least additional value compared to their free version, while Hinge offers the most.

Hypothetically, a perfectly priced app should be one where the proportion of positive sentiment in “Match Success” and “User Experience” matches the proportion of positive sentiment in the category “Worth the Price.” Most of these apps do a pretty good job, but this is actually where Bumble is lacking.

Only 53% of premium users believe Bumble Premium is worth the price, while 58% and 62% of these users believe there are pretty decent benefits to matching and user experience that come with the premium version. This could mean up to 9% of Bumble’s premium users end up churning even if they feel that the premium version is an improvement, simply because it’s overpriced.

Solutions here could include either adding even more benefits to back up their high price or potentially lowering their price. For the former, understanding how to further improve the premium version can be easily done by doing an even deeper sentiment analysis. This way, Bumble can identify specific overlapping complaints and fix them before users start churning.

And that’s exactly what Cotera was made to do.

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