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Free Tinder Plus? Use these tips instead – Metro US

Free Tinder Plus? Use these tips instead

The reviews for Tinder Plus have come in, and they’re scathing. Tinder is courting controversy with its new features; Tinder Plus has tiered pricing based on age, and Tinder now limits how many people you can “like” in a day (Tinder Plus has no limit).

Metro talked to online dating expert, Virginia Roberts, to get her thoughts on Tinder Plus, and some tips on how to avoid it all together:

So Virginia, what do you think about Tinder Plus?

I think that its heart is in the right place, but the implementation is pretty misguided. I think that they’re going to continue to see backlash and probably eventually have to lower the pricing and change how some of the these features work in order to appease their existing market base.

And that market base is?

Broader than people think. I would say obviously it’s a lot of people in their 20s, but it goes beyond that, and I think that the older Tinder users are, the more likely they are to use Tinder to find a relationship and not just a hook up, and in that way a lot of these new features are kind of tone deaf.

What do you think about the pricing variations?

Of course that feels punitive and wishy-washy when it starts to get out and people compare notes. That’s a really understandably shady PR move and you know they [Tinder] say ‘Oh! Services like Spotify do that by subsidizing for students’ but somehow a student marker is different than a “you have crossed this age threshold marker.” so I think there’s some understandable upset and backlash over that. The other thing to point out is that it’s pretty darn expensive for something that used to be free.

OkCupid for example is 20 bucks a month (Editors Note: Pricing for OkCupid A-List varies), charging up to 20 bucks a month for a significantly scaled-back set of features that recurs every month and you don’t even get any kind of bundle pricing for a six-month package or something. That’s surprising. I think that a lot of people are going to feel really “backlashy” about it. I can only assume that they’re either really out of touch in their market research or they’re planning on starting high and lowering the prices.

Any tips for getting the most out of Tinder without upgrading to Tinder Plus?

If you were a “swipe-yes-to-every-single-person’ type of swiper and you’re now hitting that daily rate limit, what I would suggest doing is playing around with your geolocation settings, filter for a tighter radius and then swipe a little as aggressively as you did before, but just know that the limit you’re going to hit is going to hit a more relevant set of people.

The swipe undo thing is an almost useless feature unless for those people who are basically robots going at it. If you just adjust your behavior and [go] a little slower in a human way, you’re basically getting the exact same thing as these new pay levels provide.

As for the location thing – it really is just gaming when and how you use Tinder. You can change your Facebook native zip code. Or you know, Tinder does update to your current location … being strategic when you’re at work in Chelsea instead of Astoria [for example] is all you need to do. You really don’t need a paid tier to achieve that, you just need to kind of approach it with a little more intentionality.

Matt Lee is a Web producer for Metro New York. He writes about almost everything and anything. Talk to him (or yell at him) on twitter so he doesn’t feel lonely@mattlee2669.