Premium Dating is Hard - A Closer Look at The League

While traditional apps have been fighting hard for growth, niche apps have been sprouting and attempting to grow their own communities.

One of these niche apps, and the most expensive dating app you can download right now, is The League, an app that sells itself as the ultimate solution for professionals, and membership starts at $99/week.

And that's just the base tier. Its most expensive tier costs $999/week!

While The League is technically free, getting in without paying requires being on a waiting list. Once you're off the waiting list your ability to interact with others is extremely limited - very different than traditional apps like Tinder and Hinge.

With such limited access and such high prices for gaining real access, is The League even real?

According to our App Intelligence, the LinkedIn of dating apps brought in $1.4M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play in July - it's biggest haul to date. And yes, most of that revenue (97%) did indeed come from the App Store.

Definitely looks real to me. But how big is it?

The League has 4 tiers and offers weekly and monthly pricing for each, making it challenging to back out an accurate user count. But if we take an average of all tiers and lean it a bit towards the "cheaper" tiers and divide we'll get roughly 3,600 paying members.

That's a very rough estimate, but it gives you an idea of how big the community is.

So while revenue-wise it feels real, at just 3,600 members, I think it's too early to call it a real threat to traditional dating apps. Its aggressive pricing is both a selling point but also a hurdle to growth, so like traditional dating apps, I won't be surprised if it makes its free plan a bit better to keep its momentum and hope it doesn't erode its user-base.

Traditional dating apps saw downloads and revenue decline in 2023 but both trends have reversed this year. While challenging, I expect to see more niche dating apps launching now that traditional dating apps are seeing growth.