How Much Does It Cost to Make an App like Tinder?
According to Statista, the Match Group’s annual dating revenue in 2018 was 1.7 billion U.S. dollars and Tinder consistently ranked among the top non-gaming app publishers in the U.S. based on revenue. Only in the first quarter of 2020, there were 6.03 million paid Tinder subscribers worldwide.
Considering the popularity of Tinder, it is no surprise that you’re contemplating building an app similar to Tinder. There are many lonely people in the world who are constantly looking to find that one right person. That is why creating dating apps have become extremely popular these days.
When you’ve decided to build an app like Tinder, some key questions need to be answered, such as how much it costs to build an app. Candidly speaking, it takes a lot of time and money to create an app that offers similar, if not the same, features and functionality as Tinder. In the world of app development, time is quite literally equivalent to money. The cost of the app is determined by:
- the hourly rate of the developers
- the number of hours they put in to build the app
And the app development equation looks somewhat like this:
Feature Set + Scale + Hourly rate = Total Development Cost
Using this equation, we can estimate the development cost of an app like Tinder to be somewhere around $80,000 to $150,000. The cost of the app depends mainly on the features and functionality of the app. Therefore, let’s discuss the features and functionality of Tinder and its estimated cost.
Core Features and Functionality of Tinder
UI/UX Design
UI/UX is one of the most crucial factors that determine your app’s success because it directly influences the user experience and improves user retention. Bear in mind that designing and animating comes at a cost. As the app’s number of screens and points of interaction increase, the hours spent on designing and animating the app increase, consequently increasing the cost of the app.
Cost: UI/UX for an app like Tinder can cost around $6,000 to $15,000 for each platform i.e., iOS and Android. The cost of UI/UX mainly depends on the number of features you wish to include in your app.
Registration & Login
To increase user satisfaction and retention, apps like Tinder make it easier for the users to register and login by reducing the number of steps involved in the process. This is done by implementing Social Login Integration, which allows the users to log in or register via Facebook.
Tinder respects its users’ privacy. Hence, to increase security, it connects with the user’s Facebook profile and then creates a unique tag that consists of the user’s credentials, which can be used for login purposes.
Cost: It can cost you around $300 to $2000, depending on the level of security you want to implement.
Chat/Messaging
Tinder’s messaging or chat feature can be replicated using cost-effective alternative services that provide real-time chat functionality like Apache Kafka, AWS, and Google Firebase.
Cost: It will take about $50 to $150 to implement real-time chat functionality, depending on the service provider you choose.
Facebook Data Integration
Tinder integrates Facebook data to discover common interests, mutual friends, and location and uses it to find potential matches for users. This results in better user experience and helps in user retention.
Cost: Facebook data integration can take around $10,000 to $13,500, depending on the amount of information you want your app to collect.
User profile
Tinder stores user’s activity data such as who the user has matched with, who the user has rejected and who the user has been rejected by, in remote servers. This would refine an individual’s search for a potential match by not showing them the same people who they have already swiped left to or rejected.
When users make changes to their profile, like adding a picture or editing their bio, the data stored on the server is altered. Anytime a user views another user’s profile, Tinder connects them to the server containing their profile’s data.
Cost: Implementing an intricate feature like this requires approximately 200 hours, and it can cost around $8,000 to $10,000. Keep in mind that the backend service maintenance cost increases as the app’s user base continues to grow.
Matching
If you have ever used Tinder, you must know how matching works. You swipe right to match with the person you like, and if they have swiped right to your profile, you both match, and then you both can start chatting. Tinder doesn’t let the other person know that you have swiped right to their profile unless they swipe right to yours. This might sound simple, but it takes a considerable amount of real-time data transferring, and implementing it properly is a complicated task.
Cost: It costs anywhere between $1,500 to $3,000 to implement this feature.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are used to increase user engagement by incorporating call-to-actions and enticing offers or alerts. When a Tinder user gets a match, they are alerted via a push notification. Push notifications are also used to alert users that they have run out of swipes to prompt them to buy new swipes in order to match with more people.
Cost: It costs around $1,500 to $2,500 to develop this feature. The cost can increase if the notifications are custom built.
Location Services
Tinder uses GPS and mapping API to detect a user’s location automatically. It helps users match with other users who live in the same area or the same city. A user can set the limit of the radius they want their potential matches to be from.
Cost: Implementing this feature costs around $3,000 to $5,000, depending on the feature’s complexity and the SDK you are using.
In-app purchases
Many apps use in-app purchases as a tool to increase their revenue. Tinder utilizes in-app purchases feature in the form of paid subscriptions that provide users access to premium features such as seeing who has swiped right to their profile, unlimited swipes, and tinder boost.
Cost: The cost of integrating in-app purchases ranges anywhere from $4,000 and $5,000.
Conclusion
Developing a dating app like Tinder can cost anywhere between $80,000 to $150,000, depending on the complexity of features and functionality. It may come off as costly, but it’s worth the money. Tinder generated $800 million in 2018 alone. A dating app like Tinder has a lot of potential to become successful in today’s era because most people rely on social media to build and maintain relationships and connections.
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