The Price
The biggest drawback to Victoria Milan (and indeed, the reason why being able to send canned messages through likes, winks, and asks is so important) is that in order to send an actual message, you must be a premium member. Going premium isn’t cheap, either: The cheapest plan is over $170 for three months.
The reasoning behind the price tag is that you are charged weekly, but you can’t only pay for one week then call it quits when you get impatient. This comes with advantages and disadvantages.
The disadvantage is obvious: $170 at minimum is a lot if you aren’t confident in your ability to get what you want out of the site. And even if you are, that amounts to the monthly luxury spending of many Americans.
However, there are plenty of people for whom $170 is a measly expense. Moreover, necessitating a three-month commitment is a wise design choice.
Whether this appraisal applies to you or not, you are likely aware that many people use these kinds of sites to find sex. This means that they use these sites when they are in a particular mood.
That particular mood always ends eventually-your heart would stop if it didn’t. How easy would it be to buy one week’s worth of premium chatting time, have one bad conversation, then lose the mood and swear off the whole site forever? It would be far too easy.
A three-month premium commitment might seem strange. It is definitely unusual. If you find it necessary to do so, then the app is not working very well.
Premium subscriptions in apps like these are interesting. If you subscribed to a meal prep service, you could easily calculate the value of the service by comparing it to the cost of making similar meals bought from another source.
Many subscription services operate on this same logic: Long-term, incremental costs usually benefit both consumers and producers. The consumer gets the product they want without a large, scary price tag. The producer gets the customer they want, and the monetary security they need.
The Problem with Evaluating Dating Apps
All popular affair dating sites and apps have long grappled with this. How easy is it to calculate the value of a dating app subscription? Is it even possible? Even if it was possible, should it be done?
The act of calculating the monetary efficiency of a dating app would involve estimating the amount of time and money you needed to put in to get the greatest relative output.
So, if one app had you put in $5 a week and one hour a day to get one match, then it would be more valuable than an app that gave you one match for one hour a day and cost $7 a week.
Already you can probably see the toxicity of this mindset. It is a mindset that looks at human interaction through a microscope. Material investment is very carefully weighed, and as a result, there is an expectation of an “optimal outcome”, a material benefit to justify the investment.
When human interaction is expected to fit inside the confines 
of material input and output, anything adjacent or tangential to the desired output is considered aberrant.
This is most obvious (though by no means exclusive to) when someone is using the app or site to look for sex.
Sex and sexuality are incredibly complicated. Yet there is ultimately, always a final word that simplifies them: A yes, or a no. No matter how much of a complex you have around your sexuality, it is, at least in theory, possible to reduce your sexuality down to with whom you will and will not have sex.
