I want to start by saying that I am not anti-technology and I'm not one of those people who thinks dating apps are inherently evil or that we should all go back to meeting people at church dances or whatever the nostalgic fantasy is. I met my last serious boyfriend on a dating app. Several of my closest friends met their partners online. The concept is sound — use technology to connect people who might never have crossed paths otherwise. Brilliant. The problem isn't the idea. The problem is the business model. And once you understand how most free dating apps actually make their money, you start to see the whole experience in a very different and honestly quite depressing light.
The Uncomfortable Truth About "Free" Apps
Here's the thing that took me embarrassingly long to figure out: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. We all know this intellectually when it comes to social media — Facebook sells your data, Instagram sells your attention to advertisers, and so on. But for some reason, we don't apply the same critical thinking to dating apps, even though the same principle applies. The major free dating apps make their money in two main ways: advertising and premium subscriptions. And both of those revenue streams rely on one crucial thing — keeping you on the app for as long as possible.
Think about that for a moment. The app makes money when you keep using it. The app stops making money when you find a partner and delete it. So what possible incentive does a free dating app have to actually help you find a lasting relationship? Genuinely none. In fact, their financial incentive is the exact opposite. They need you to keep swiping, keep scrolling, keep coming back day after day, because every session is another opportunity to show you adverts or to dangle a premium feature in front of you that you didn't even know you needed. It's not a conspiracy theory — it's just basic business logic. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
I spent years on these apps, swiping endlessly, paying for the occasional boost or super like or whatever the gimmick of the month was, and I never stopped to ask myself why I wasn't getting anywhere. I just assumed it was me. That I wasn't attractive enough, or my profile wasn't good enough, or I was doing something wrong. And sure, maybe some of that was true to a degree — we can all improve how we present ourselves. But the bigger issue was that the platform itself was designed to keep me in a state of perpetual almost-getting-somewhere without ever actually arriving.
Paywalls on Basic Human Connection
Let me talk about the paywall situation because it genuinely makes my blood boil. On most major free dating apps, you can swipe for free. Great. You can match with people for free. Lovely. But then — and this is where it gets cynical — basic features that you'd need to actually have a meaningful experience are locked behind a subscription. Want to see who liked you? Pay up. Want to undo an accidental left swipe? Pay up. Want to know if someone actually read your message? Pay up. Want more than five likes per day so you can actually use the app in a meaningful way? You guessed it — pay up.
And the pricing is wild. I was on one of the big apps last year and the premium subscription was something like fourteen quid a month, and that was the discounted rate if you committed to six months. For a single feature tier. The "platinum" or "gold" or whatever-branded top tier was pushing twenty-five pounds a month. For a dating app. That's more than my Netflix, Spotify, and gym membership combined. And the worst part is that even when you pay, the experience doesn't fundamentally change. You're still swiping. You're still competing for attention in the same gamified environment. You've just paid for the privilege of having slightly fewer artificial limitations placed on your experience.
What really gets me is that these apps have essentially taken something that should be straightforward — connecting two people who are interested in each other — and deliberately complicated it so they can charge you to uncomplicate it. It's like if a restaurant seated you at a table but wouldn't give you a menu unless you paid extra, and then charged you again to actually order food. The whole thing is backwards, and the fact that we've all just accepted it as normal is honestly a bit mad.
The Gamification Trap
The other thing that I think doesn't get talked about enough is how aggressively gamified most dating apps are. The swiping mechanic itself is basically a slot machine — you never know what the next profile is going to be, which triggers that same dopamine hit that makes gambling addictive. The limited daily likes create artificial scarcity that makes you feel like each swipe matters more than it does. The match notification with its little animation and sound effect gives you a burst of validation that keeps you coming back. None of this is accidental. These apps employ teams of behavioural psychologists and UX designers whose literal job is to make the app as habit-forming as possible.
And the result is that using a dating app starts to feel less like trying to meet someone and more like playing a game. You get caught up in the mechanics — optimising your profile for maximum swipes, strategising about when to use your boosts, analysing your match rate like it's a football league table. Somewhere along the way, you forget that there are actual human beings on the other side of those profiles. I certainly did. There were times when I'd be swiping so mindlessly that I couldn't even tell you what the last five people I swiped on looked like. It had become a reflex, not a decision. That's not a healthy way to look for a relationship, and it's entirely by design.
How Kommons Actually Does Things Differently
I joined Kommons about six months ago, honestly a bit sceptical because I'd heard the "we're different" pitch from apps before and it had always turned out to be marketing fluff. But I have to say, after half a year of using it, it genuinely does feel like a different kind of experience. And I think that comes down to a few fundamental choices they've made about how the platform works.
First, the UK focus. This might sound like a small thing, but it makes a surprising difference. The platform is built specifically for the UK dating market, which means it understands the cultural context in a way that the big American apps just don't. The way British people date is different from the way Americans date — we're generally less forward, more likely to suggest a casual pub meet than a formal dinner, more sarcastic in our humour, and more uncomfortable with the performative vulnerability that a lot of US-centric apps seem to encourage. It gets that, and the design reflects it in ways that are subtle but meaningful.
Second, the community aspect. Rather than treating users as individual consumers competing for attention in a marketplace, it feels more like an actual community of people who are all trying to do the same thing. The discussion features, the shared content, the way the platform encourages genuine interaction rather than just rapid-fire swiping — it all contributes to an atmosphere that feels less transactional and more human. I've actually had interesting conversations with people on the app that didn't lead to dates but were still worthwhile interactions. On other apps, if a conversation didn't go somewhere romantic, it felt like wasted time. On here, it just felt like meeting someone new, which is what it should feel like.
Third, and most importantly, the reduced gamification. There's less of that slot-machine-dopamine-hit design that makes other apps so addictive and so ultimately unfulfilling. The experience is calmer, more intentional. You spend less time on the app but the time you do spend feels more purposeful. I actually find myself enjoying the process of getting to know people rather than mindlessly swiping through an endless scroll of faces. And that shift in how the experience feels has made a real difference in the quality of connections I'm making.
Why the Business Model Matters More Than You Think
I know some people will read all of this and think I'm overthinking it, that an app is just an app and you should just use whatever works. And look, fair enough, if you're happy with your current setup then carry on. But I do think the business model behind a dating platform matters enormously, because it shapes every single design decision the platform makes. An app that makes money by keeping you single will, consciously or not, make choices that keep you single. An app that makes money by building a loyal, satisfied community has a completely different set of incentives, and those incentives lead to a completely different user experience.
The platform isn't perfect — no app is, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But I genuinely believe their approach is closer to what online dating should look like. Less manipulation, less artificial scarcity, less gamification, more genuine human connection. The fact that it's focused specifically on UK users means it's not trying to be everything to everyone — it's trying to be really good for a specific group of people, and in my experience, it succeeds at that.
I've been on dates with three people from Kommons in the last six months. One didn't go anywhere, one became a genuinely good friend, and one is someone I'm currently seeing and really like. That might not sound like a massive success rate, but compared to the approximately one million dead-end conversations I had on free apps over the preceding three years, it feels like a revelation. The difference isn't that the app found me better people — it's that the whole environment is set up to facilitate actual connection rather than endless engagement.
What I'd Tell My Younger Self
If I could go back and talk to 25-year-old Nadia, newly single and downloading her first dating app with nervous excitement, I'd tell her this: be suspicious of anything that's free. Not because free things are inherently bad, but because when it comes to dating apps specifically, "free" almost always means "the product is you." I'd tell her to think critically about why the app is designed the way it is, whose interests it's actually serving, and whether the frustrating experience she's having is a bug or a feature. Spoiler: it's usually a feature.
I'd also tell her that it's okay to expect more from a dating platform. We've set the bar so low for these apps that we accept genuinely terrible user experiences as normal. Endless swiping, ghosting, conversations that go nowhere, the constant low-level anxiety of putting yourself out there into what feels like a void — none of that is inevitable. It's the result of specific design choices made by companies whose primary goal is engagement, not connection. And there are alternatives. Kommons is one of them, and I'm sure others exist too, but the key thing is to be willing to try something different rather than just doing the same thing on the same apps and expecting different results.
The free dating app model is broken, not because the technology is bad but because the incentives are misaligned. When an app profits from your dissatisfaction, your dissatisfaction is guaranteed. I'm not saying it has solved every problem in online dating — the fundamental challenges of meeting strangers and trying to figure out if you like each other are always going to be there regardless of the platform. But at least with Kommons, I feel like the platform is actually on my side, which after years of feeling like I was fighting against the very apps I was supposed to be using, is a genuinely refreshing change. That alone makes it worth trying, in my opinion. Your dating life is too important to leave in the hands of an algorithm that doesn't want you to succeed.