Dateworthy

Dating that’s worth your time.

Not launched yet. Dateworthy is coming to iPhone and Android: testing first, then the App Store and Google Play. There is no sign-up form here and no waiting list. This site exists so the policies, the safety rules and the way to reach a human are public before anyone downloads anything.

Why any of this exists

How the other apps actually work

Everything below is quoted from a company’s own filing, its own website, a court record, or named reporting. Every claim carries its source. If we could not source it, it is not on this page.

• Bumble lists people finding love as a risk to its business. In the risk-factor section of its annual report, among the things that can hurt revenue: “there is a decrease in member retention as a result of members finding meaningful relationships on our platforms and no longer needing to engage with our products.” The same sentence was in the paperwork when the company went public in 2021. To be fair to them, that same filing also says churn “is sometimes a cause for celebration.” Bumble Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, filed March 16, 2026, Item 1A. And Bumble Inc., Form S-1, filed January 15, 2021.
• Match Group told investors that making things better for users costs it money. From the same kind of filing: the company said it now places “greater emphasis on improving user outcomes, particularly for women,” through changes “some of which have in the past and in the future may again drive short-term decreases in both revenue and user numbers.” Its chief executive said the same thing out loud to analysts: Tinder revenue would keep falling “as we continue to make product changes to improve user outcomes,” with “short-term revenue trade-offs.” He frames it as an investment. Match Group, Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, filed February 26, 2026, Item 1A. And Match Group Q4 2025 earnings call, February 3, 2026, remarks of chief executive Spencer Rascoff.
• Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid and Plenty of Fish are the same company. Match Group owns all of them, and says so in its annual report. Switching apps after a bad run often means switching to another brand owned by the people who built the last one. Match Group, Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, filed February 26, 2026, Part I, Item 1.
• Tinder ranked people by desirability. It says it stopped. In 2016 a Fast Company reporter got Tinder to show him his own internal score, and the company’s chief executive and engineers described the system on the record. In 2019 Tinder published that “Elo is old news at Tinder. It’s an outdated measure and our cutting-edge technology no longer relies on it.” Both of those are true and we are printing both. Austin Carr, “I Found Out My Secret Internal Tinder Rating And Now I Wish I Hadn’t,” Fast Company, January 11, 2016. And Tinder, “Powering Tinder: The Method Behind Our Matching,” March 15, 2019, updated July 11, 2022.
• Seeing who likes you on Tinder requires paying. That is in the annual report. The filing says a user must subscribe “to enjoy premium features, such as unlimited use of the Swipe Right feature or the ability to ‘See Who Likes You’.” Match Group, Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, filed February 26, 2026, Part I, Item 1.
• Hinge says on its own website that it set the free-like limit partly because people were paying. Their words: “Research has shown us that eight is the magic number. When our members had more free likes per day, their matches were worse. When they had fewer, they were paying to send more.” That is the whole argument for a daily limit, published by the people who set it. Hinge, “The Hinge mission, values, principles, and approach to online dating,” hinge.co/mission, accessed September 22, 2026.
• Grindr credits its revenue growth to “paywall optimizations.” From its own annual report: “Year-over-year growth for revenue was driven by enhanced paywall optimizations and merchandising strategies.” Grindr’s chief technology officer has also said publicly that Grindr has no recommendation algorithm and sorts by distance. Grindr Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, filed March 2, 2026, Item 7.
• OkCupid published that it lied to users about compatibility, on purpose, to see what happened. Its co-founder wrote it up on the company blog under the title “We Experiment On Human Beings!”, and concluded: “if you have to choose only one or the other, the mere myth of compatibility works just as well as the truth.” Christian Rudder, “We Experiment On Human Beings!”, OkTrends (OkCupid’s official blog), July 28, 2014.
• Nine in ten recent users say the people they saw disappointed them. “Vast majorities of current or recent online dating users say they have been disappointed (88%) … at least sometimes by people they have seen on the platforms over the past year.” Same survey: 52% say they came across someone they think was trying to scam them, 38% were sent a sexually explicit message they did not ask for, and among women who felt overwhelmed by messages the figure was 54% against 25% of men. Pew Research Center, “From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.,” February 2, 2023; 6,034 U.S. adults surveyed July 5 to 17, 2022, margin of error ±2.0 points.
• Most people do not believe the algorithms work. Asked whether an algorithm could tell if two people will fall in love, 35% said it could not and 21% said it could. The largest group, 43%, was not sure. Pew Research Center, “From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.,” February 2, 2023.
• The Federal Trade Commission sued Match. It settled for $14 million, admitting nothing. We are going to be careful here, because the headlines were not the whole story. The FTC alleged in 2019 that Match used fake love-interest ads to sell subscriptions. Those headline counts were thrown out in March 2022 on Section 230 grounds. The case settled for $14 million, and the order states that the defendants “neither admit nor deny any of the allegations.” An allegation is not a finding, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Federal Trade Commission v. Match Group, Inc., N.D. Tex.; complaint filed September 25, 2019; settlement announced by the FTC, August 12, 2025.
• Six people sued Match Group saying the apps were built to be addictive. No court ever decided it. The complaint alleged Match “intentionally designs the Platforms with addictive, game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop,” and quoted a Tinder co-founder saying he was inspired by the Skinner experiment that “turned pigeons into gamblers.” Match called the suit “ridiculous and has zero merit” and said “we actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps.” A judge sent the whole thing to private arbitration in December 2024 and the case was terminated. Nobody ever ruled on whether any of it was true. We are telling you that part too. Oksayan et al. v. Match Group, Inc., No. 3:24-cv-00888, N.D. Cal., filed February 14, 2024. Match Group’s response quoted in NPR, “Maker of Tinder, Hinge sued over ‘addictive’ dating apps that put profits over love,” February 14, 2024.

What we fixed

Every one of these is in the app right now. None of it costs anything. This list grows as we ship.

Money

• Who liked you is free, and always will be. The whole list, with their comment, sorted however you want. This is the single thing the other apps charge for most, and it is the one we are never going to sell. It is written into the app’s rules.
• There is nothing to cancel. No subscription exists yet. When one does it will be one price, one tier, cancel any time, and it will never include anything on this page.
• No boosts. Nobody pays to be seen. You cannot buy your way to the top of anyone’s deck and nobody can buy their way to the top of yours. There is no product here that sells attention.
• Sorting your likes is free. Newest, or by how many of your stated preferences they actually meet. Neither one hides anybody from you.
• Undo is free. Passed on somebody by accident? Take it back. Liked somebody by accident? Take that back too, and the match goes with it.
• Everyone you passed on is still there. Second Look keeps them. Second Chance wipes every pass you have ever made and puts all of them back in your deck. Free.
• No ads, ever, and nothing about you is for sale. There is no ad SDK, analytics SDK or cross-app tracking in the app. This website has no scripts and no cookies, and it loads nothing from anywhere else. You can check.

Who gets seen

• No looks score. We do not rate how attractive you are, we do not keep a number on you, and nothing in the ranking is derived from your face. What ranks people is what you said you wanted.
• Nothing is hidden from you to sell it back. There is no shadowban and no throttle. The one thing we deliberately do not show you is how many of someone’s private answers matched your private filters, because that number would let you work out what they answered. That is a privacy decision, and it cuts against us.
• Twenty profiles a day, and you can like all twenty. The limit is on how many people we put in front of you. There is no eight-likes-a-day ration.
• A pass sticks for three months. The same faces do not come back around next week. If you want them back, that is what Second Look is for.
• Dead accounts do not show up. No activity for seven days and you come out of the deck until you come back. You are not swiping on people who left.
• Nobody at their limit shows up either. Someone already running five conversations is not in your deck and not in your likes, because you could not start talking to them anyway. They come back on their own when a slot opens. There is no waitlist to join and no greyed-out card announcing how in demand they are.
• Your filters can lean instead of slam. Every filter on something people show, age and distance included, is either a dealbreaker or a preference. A dealbreaker hides people. A preference hides nobody and just moves the ones who fit closer to the top. You pick, per filter. Filters on private answers only ever lean. Nobody drops out of your feed over a private answer, so nobody can find out what someone answered by watching who disappears.

Safety

• Block or report anyone, from anywhere, without giving a reason. Reports are read by a person. So are appeals. You can block or report from a profile or from inside a chat, or report just one photo or answer from the sheet that opens when you tap it. You never owe an explanation, and you never have to argue with a bot to be taken seriously.
• Photos sent to you in chat arrive blurred. All of them, from everyone. You decide what you look at. Nobody’s photo lands on your screen unblurred unless you tap it, or you turn on auto-show in Settings yourself. It is off until you do.
• Nobody can message you until they have verified their face. A selfie, checked against their photos, before the composer opens. Free, and no exceptions.
• Abusive first messages are held before they reach you. Until you have replied, a like comment or message with a threat, sexual content, a slur or a degrading insult is stopped on our side. You never see it and you are never asked whether it bothers you. A person reviews it, and the sender is told.
• A ban sticks to the person, whatever account they come back on. We keep a hashed record of a banned account’s number and its photos, so the same number cannot verify again and the same photos cannot be re-uploaded by anybody. Coming back with a new email does not work.
• If you get banned, you get told why, and a person reads your appeal. Every moderation action carries a readable reason and names the rule. A borderline first offense warns you and strips the offending line instead of ending your account. The appeal goes to a human and, if they agree with you, the ban lifts and the photo and number blocks lift with it.
• A report that involves danger is treated as dangerous, whatever words you used. We decide the severity on our side from what happened, however calmly you phrased it. Physical danger jumps the queue, and the app hands you 911 and the National Domestic Violence Hotline on the spot. Three reports against the same person flags them automatically, and no report closes without a written resolution.
• You can report a catfish with the photo you took. Up to three images as evidence. Only the safety team ever sees them, and they are deleted when the report closes.
• Video messages are ten seconds and watch-once. Screenshots and screen recording are blocked. If someone tries on an iPhone, you are told they tried.
• Everyone signs the same thing before they get in. No history of dating violence. Not on any sex-offender or violent-offender registry. It is the first screen, before anything else, and it is in the Terms. It is a signed attestation. We do not run background checks, and we are not going to dress this up as one.

Whether the person is real

• Every photo has to have exactly one face in it. No face and it is rejected, so a photo of your truck or your dog won’t pass. More than one and it is rejected too, because we are not guessing which one is you.
• Photos have to be from the last three months, and they stay that way. The app reads the date off the file and refuses an older one, and when the file has no date you affirm it yourself. Three months after a photo was taken or went up, whichever comes first, it has to be replaced. You get a heads-up ten days before, and until you swap it you’re out of Discover.
• One clear face photo and one full-body photo are required. Six headshots is not a profile.
• You cannot browse or message on an empty profile. Every question is answered before you get in. Every answer carries an icon, plus its label wherever the answer alone could be misread, and tapping About on any profile explains every icon. There is no bare word sitting on a profile that you have to guess the meaning of.
• Relationship status is on the profile, and lying about it is a ban. Single, separated, divorced, widowed, or married and openly non-monogamous. Mark it truthfully and nobody cares. Hide a marriage and you are gone.
• Nothing here is written by AI. Nobody’s bio or opener is generated. If it is on a profile, a person typed it.

Conversations

• You have to read the whole profile before you can pass or like. The buttons are not there until you reach the bottom, so nobody decides on a person from one photo and nobody plays the numbers game. That goes for everyone in Likes You and Second Look too. A like goes on one thing, a photo, an answer or a detail, whatever actually caught your eye. A Worthy is the only thing you send to a whole profile.
• Five conversations at a time. For you and for everybody else. To start a new one you have to end one, by closing it or unmatching. Letting it go quiet does not free the slot, and that is on purpose: leaving someone to rot in your inbox is exactly the stringing along this is here to stop. At five, your deck closes until you finish one.
• You cannot send a bare like. A like attaches to something specific, like a photo, an answer or a single line of their profile, and it always comes with a comment. When you match, that comment is already the first message, quoting what it was about. Nobody opens with “hey” because nobody can.
• No reply timers. No match expiry. Ever. Nothing disappears because you were asleep or at work.
• Read receipts are off, for everyone. There is no setting to go find. They are just off.
• You can end a conversation quietly. Not feeling it closes the thread with no notification and no report. Clearing your list should not require ghosting anybody.
• Everyone writes one honest line for their matches. A short heads-up, shown once when you match. It gives the other person something real to answer.
• You can hear somebody before you match. An optional voice prompt on the profile, played right from the deck.
• A badge you cannot buy. “Shows up” goes to people whose recent behavior shows follow-through: they read profiles, they comment, they answer their likes, they reply to their matches, they confirm dates. Nobody can buy it, and it comes off when the behavior stops.

Privacy

• Shadow Search. Private questions you answer for yourself. The answers never show on your profile and are never shown to anyone. Other people can filter on them, and all that ever comes back is who shows up, never an answer. The person filtered out gets no signal at all. Give to get: you can only filter on a question you have answered yourself. Answering is free and filtering on them is free.
• Kink and dynamics, free and private. What you are into and how you play, answered privately like any other shadow answer. It never shows on your profile and it is not behind a paywall. 18+ only, and off unless you turn it on.
• Nobody ever gets your exact location. Distance is rounded and a city label is a city label. Precise coordinates are never returned to another user, and one gatekeeper decides what leaves the server, so a new feature cannot leak them by accident.
• Health and intimate answers are encrypted where they sit. They are encrypted in the database itself, on top of your login.
• We never ask for your ID. There is nothing to photograph and nothing for us to lose. Verification is a live selfie check, run on our own servers and, whenever they aren’t sure, checked by a person.
• Deleting your account deletes it. Profile, photos and private answers are purged and your login stops working immediately. You can export everything we hold first.
• You never hand over a phone number. Chat stays in the app, and if a conversation starts drifting toward contact details too early, the app asks if you are sure.
• Nobody is here to sell you an OnlyFans. Profile text is screened for usernames, handles, phone numbers and the usual dodges, and chat asks before contact info goes out. The accounts that do this are the ones every other app tolerates because they drive engagement. Here they get removed.
• Ask for money and you get reported. A chat message asking for money, gift cards, crypto or a payment app goes to our safety team the moment it is sent, and the person it was sent to sees a warning under it.

Who counts

• “Women” includes trans women. “Men” includes trans men. Pick women and you see women, trans women included. If you want to be more specific than that, pick the specific option. We are not building a filter whose only job is to exclude trans people, and we are not going to let a quiet string comparison make that decision for us either.
• Your gender is your answer, from nine options. You choose whether it shows on your profile at all. Same for your pronouns and your orientation.
• Ethnicity, pronouns, company and school are optional. Every other profile question is required, because an empty profile wastes everybody’s time. Those four are yours to skip, and so are prompts and the voice prompt.

Where people actually are

• Passport is free while you are actually traveling. Get more than fifty miles from home and the app shows you people where you really are. No charge, because you really are there. Paying to pretend you are somewhere you are not is a different thing, and that is the part that costs money.
• Distance is a preference or a dealbreaker, your call. Same as everything else. Set it to hide people outside your radius, or set it to keep them and just rank the close ones higher.