Frequently Asked Questions About Donating

This page lists frequently asked questions about donating to Duolicious.

Why should I donate?

Duolicious asks for less than 1% of what Tinder charges its average user per month.¹ That's less than 2¢ per user each month. For that small cost, Duolicious provides a fully-featured dating app to every single user, without any of the paywalls which the biggest dating apps have.

Duolicious isn’t funded through subscriptions, ads, or selling data about users for profit. Instead, Duolicious is supported by its community—People who find value in Duolicious and want to support its continued success. This financial model enables Duolicious to remain committed to finding you a great partner quickly, so you can spend less time dating online and more time with them.

How is my donation used?

Donations go entirely towards third-party providers. Nobody at Duolicious gets paid through donations. The third-party services we use are:

Google Cloud Platform Compute Engine
- What it does – Gives Duolicious the servers it needs to run.
- Why it’s needed – This provides interactive elements of Duolicious, like generating your matches and letting you chat with them.
- Typical monthly cost – $216 USD
OpenAI ChatGPT
- What it does – Verifies accounts.
- Why it’s needed – Verified accounts protect Duolicious members from scammers, catfish accounts, and bots.
- Typical monthly cost – $100 USD
verifymail.io
- What it does – Provides an up-to-date database of disposable email domains.
- Why it’s needed – We use verifymail.io to block the use of disposable email addresses. Disposable email addresses are frequently used by people who want to abuse Duolicious and evade detection or bans. Blocking disposable email addresses increases the safety of legitimate users.
- Typical monthly cost – $25 USD
Cloudflare R2
- What it does – Stores and delivers user-uploaded images via the internet.
- Why it’s needed – So you can see if the person you’re talking to has good taste in memes, or is otherwise attractive.
- Typical monthly cost – $10 USD
Amazon Web Services Simple Email Service
- What it does – Sends emails.
- Why it’s needed – We use AWS SES to send you an OTP when you sign up or sign in, and to send offline message notifications.
- Typical monthly cost – $45 USD

In total, typical monthly hosting costs come to around $400 USD.

Donations exceeding our monthly requirement go into a fund specifically for Duolicious and roll over to the next month. Excess donations are greatly appreciated as sustaining healthy financial reserves is considered a best practice for organizations of all types.

Why not run ads or offer subscription features instead of asking for donations?

There’s three main reasons we prefer donations over running ads or offering subscriptions:

Focus on long-term relationships – Using ads to fund a dating app incentivizes companies to make people use the app for as long as possible. This goal aligns well with apps that focus on casual dating, but Duolicious focuses on long-term compatibility. Our goal is to help you find a great partner quickly, so you can spend less time here and more time with them.
Respecting the value of love – While we understand why other dating apps monetize the search for love, we believe love should be respected by keeping it out of the marketplace. Love and relationships are deeply personal and vital for our well-being, and have been central to cultures as long as humanity’s existed. Turning them into products for profit can strip away the meaning and depth of these experiences. By asking for donations instead, we prioritize your genuine connections over corporate profits.
Ads are annoying – Ads just suck ass.

How can I donate?

There’s three main ways to donate:

You can donate money via our Ko-fi page, Bitcoin, or Ethereum.
If you can’t donate money, you can donate code via GitHub.
Finally, you can donate marketing by sharing Duolicious with friends on social media. Almost all our members found Duolicious through friends or social media, which makes this a very influential way to contribute.

Footnotes

Our “1%” figure is computed by using Match Group’s Q1 2024 Earnings Letter. The table “Revenue and Key Drivers” (page 12) states that Tinder’s direct revenue for the first quarter of 2024 was $481,487 thousand, which is $160,496 thousand per month. The same letter also says “Tinder serves approximately 50 million MAU.” ($160,496 × 1000) ÷ (50 × 10⁶ MAU) = $3.21 per MAU. That is, Tinder makes $3.21 from each MAU per month. Note that Match Group earns indirect revenue in addition to direct revenue, so $3.21 is likely a low estimate of Tinder’s monthly revenue per MAU. On the other hand, Duolicious asks for $400 per month in donations and has a little over 20,000 MAU at the time of writing, which is $0.02 per MAU. $0.02 is less than 1% of $3.21.