The Foundation: The Anatomy of a Dating Product
Dissecting the ecosystem behind Tinder: From PWA and lifecycle marketing to payments and trust layers.
I am writing this not as a theorist, but as an operator who has launched dating products from scratch. As a co-founder of Meetville.com, I helped scale the platform to $5M ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Later, as Head of Growth at Seeking.com, I drove revenue growth by $20M. I have built dating projects entirely from the ground up and on top of white-label solutions like SkaDate.
In this article, we are going to dissect a product like Tinder to understand exactly what a modern dating app is made of.
Imagine Tinder. You’ve likely used it. Let’s freeze it in time for a moment. Freeze the product and the traffic—no new users arriving, no one leaving. Now, let’s look at it under a microscope to see the infrastructure required to keep it alive.
We see thousands of users currently active inside the ecosystem. However, we see them accessing the product through different platforms:
Native Mobile Apps: Android and iPhone apps.
Desktop Web: The browser version on a computer.
PWA (Progressive Web App): The mobile browser experience that behaves like an app.
Let’s break down why these distinctions matter for a founder.
The Platforms: Native vs. Desktop vs. PWA
Native Apps (iOS/Android)
With native apps, the math is simple: these platforms are much stickier and typically drive 3.5X higher LTV (Lifetime Value) compared to the mobile web. The primary reason is push notifications. They allow you to activate and retain users effectively—bringing them back into the app repeatedly. We will discuss the mechanics of this later.
Desktop Web
Users open dating sites on desktop when they are in a calmer, more deliberate context: at home, on a laptop, checking email, or clicking a link from a notification. The larger screen fundamentally changes behavior. It facilitates reading profiles, viewing photos in detail, and—crucially—typing long-form messages.
Desktop users swipe less and chat more. This platform isn’t about rapid discovery; it’s about deepening interactions. Therefore, a desktop version complements mobile apps by driving up engagement metrics and conversation quality, even if it represents a smaller slice of your total traffic.
PWA (Progressive Web App)
A PWA is essentially a website that acts like an app.
Here is how it works: A user opens your site in a mobile browser (via a link, search, or ad). They register and start using the product. Then, you prompt them to “Add to Home Screen.” Once installed, the PWA opens in its own window without the browser interface and, crucially, can receive push notifications.
The PWA Revolution
The watershed moment came in 2023 when Apple added support for web push notifications in Safari on iOS. Before this, PWAs were a compromise. Now, they are a legitimate retention channel comparable to native apps. A PWA can live on the user’s home screen and ping them with “You have a match” notifications—a feature critical for high-frequency apps like dating.
If you look at the bigger picture, this is part of a platform war. Google has historically bet on the open web, where products reach users directly. Apple acts as a gatekeeper, controlling access via the App Store. Apple’s support for Safari push notifications wasn’t altruism; it was a forced move in this competition.
Why PWA Matters for Niche Founders
For certain niches, a PWA isn’t just an alternative—it’s the only option. Categories like Sugar Dating, Adult, or other “sensitive” verticals face constant friction with the App Store and Google Play: rejection during review, inconsistent moderation, and the looming risk of getting de-platformed overnight.
In these high-risk verticals, a PWA allows you to own your distribution. You exist outside the store ecosystems while retaining a mobile-first experience and the ability to re-engage users via push.
(Note: I will write a separate deep-dive article on the technical implementation of PWAs, including installation prompts and notification logic.)
The Traffic: Acquisition vs. Re-engagement
Let’s look at how those users inside our “frozen” Tinder got there.
Acquisition (New Users)
Some clicked an ad banner on Instagram, downloaded the app, and are currently onboarding. Others searched “dating apps” in the App Store—this is your organic search traffic (ASO).
Retention (Returning Users)
But how did the existing users get back into the app right now?
Some received a transactional push notification: “You have a new like” or “You have a match.”
Some are replying to an ongoing conversation.
Others hadn’t opened the app in weeks and received a marketing push designed to trigger FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), such as:
“Swipe Surge is live. Let others know what you’re down for. Tap to join now!”
“And the award for the most anticipated return to Tinder goes to Alexander.”
“We’ve got new people popping up every day, but it’s not the same without you...”
Email as a Retention Channel
Email works similarly but serves a different context. The same triggers—matches, likes, messages—can be sent via email, specifically targeting users who haven’t opened the app recently or are desktop-heavy users. Email is often used for “softer” re-engagement. It doesn’t demand immediate attention like a phone vibration, but it gently reminds the user that activity is happening waiting for them.
The Engine: Lifecycle Marketing
All notifications in a dating product generally fall into two buckets:
Event-Based (Transactional): Triggered by a specific product action (a like, a match, a message). Users expect these. They rarely perceive them as spam. These notifications drive the “Aha-moment” and facilitate actual dates.
Lifecycle (Marketing): Dependent on the user’s state, not a specific event. Is the user dormant? Did they stall during registration? Did they stop replying? These are used to resurrect users. They are powerful but dangerous; if you send them too often or without context, you will burn out your audience.
To manage this, you must understand that a user is not static. They move through a User Lifecycle:
Onboarding: Just registered, looking around.
Active: Swiping, chatting daily.
Fading: Hasn’t opened the app in 3 days.
Dormant: Gone for 30+ days.
A signal that helps a new user (e.g., “Complete your profile to get 5x more matches”) is annoying noise to an active user. This is why Lifecycle Marketing exists. It determines the right message, channel, and time for every user segment.
The Tech Stack
In practice, dating products rely on specific tools to handle this orchestration:
Push Notifications: Firebase or OneSignal. They handle the delivery of native, web, and PWA notifications triggered by product events.
Transactional Email: AWS SES or SendGrid. The priority here is deliverability—ensuring the “Verify your email” or “You have a message” email actually hits the inbox, not the spam folder.
Marketing Email: Mailchimp, Customer.io, or Iterable. These allow you to build logic chains (e.g., “If user doesn’t open app for 7 days -> Send email”).
Orchestration (Enterprise Level): Mature products use Customer Engagement Platforms like Braze, CleverTap, or OneSignal. These tools unify everything. They allow you to manage push, email, and in-app messages from a single dashboard, segmenting users by behavior without needing constant developer intervention.
The Gatekeepers: Moderation and Content Safety
Let’s go back to the user who just finished registration. They can swipe, but we cannot show their profile to others yet. Why? Because they might have uploaded explicit content, hate speech, or solicitation ads in their “About Me” section.
Moderation is the immune system of any product reliant on User Generated Content (UGC). In dating, UGC includes photos, videos, audio, and free-text bios.
Historically, we used classic Computer Vision AI to detect nudity in photos (via AWS Rekognition API or other API). Today, thanks to LLMs (Large Language Models) like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, we can also automate text moderation with incredible nuance. The machine can now understand intent. It can tell the difference between a romantic poem and a cleverly disguised solicitation for prostitution. Today, content moderation can be almost entirely automated.
The Trust Ladder: Verification
Another critical layer is Verification. A “Verified” badge is a psychological trigger; it signals safety, which increases the Reply Rate.
However, verification isn’t a single feature; it’s a ladder of friction vs. trust:
Email Verification: The baseline. Prevents typos, but offers zero protection against scammers. Bots can create thousands of emails instantly.
SMS Verification: Adds cost to the attacker. While disposable numbers exist, they cost money and vary by country. It’s a barrier, not a wall.
Liveness Check: This is not just asking the user to upload a video, which can easily be faked. It’s active liveness detection (powered by tools like AWS Rekognition). Here is how it works:
The Challenge: The user sees a specific prompt on their screen, such as fitting their face into an oval or watching a sequence of flashing colored lights.
Real-Time Analysis: As they react, the AI analyzes the video stream in real-time. It looks for 3D depth and subtle skin reflections that only occur on a live human face.
Spoof Detection: This process instantly detects if someone is holding up a phone with a video playing (a “replay attack”), wearing a realistic mask, or using deepfake software.
If the “live” person passes this test, we then use Face Matching to confirm they are the same person shown in their static profile photos.
The best part? It’s cheap. The cost of a single liveness check is negligible—often just pennies. This means we can perform this verification at our own expense. We don’t need to charge the user or put this behind a paywall;
ID Verification: The user scans a government ID. This is Liveness + Identity Confirmation. It offers high trust but high friction (users are hesitant to share IDs). Often reserved for Premium tiers.
While market prices for ID verification are dropping, it remains an order of magnitude more expensive than a standard Liveness + Face Comparison check. Because of this higher unit cost, you rarely want to run this on every single free user.
However, it serves a specific purpose that AI cannot fully solve: Age Verification. ID scanning is the only reliable way to validate a user’s exact age with legal certainty. If your product requires strict age compliance (e.g., ensuring 18+ users), this step is mandatory, regardless of the cost.
Background Check: This involves checking public records for criminal history. Unlike liveness checks (which cost pennies), a background check costs real money—typically $10–$30 each. You cannot subsidize this without destroying your unit economics; users usually pay for this themselves before a date.
Crucially, this is a US-centric feature. In the US, criminal records are public products you can buy via API. In Europe (GDPR), this data is private state property, making commercial background checks legally impossible.
Founder’s Advice: Don’t Overbuild Too Early. Your job is to choose the rung on the ladder that balances safety with growth. But here is a warning: if you are just launching, do not over-engineer this. Heavy verification creates friction, and friction kills growth. You need liquidity (users) before you need a fortress.
Look at Tinder. Even today, with unlimited resources, they do not make email or liveness verification mandatory for new users. They know that every extra step during onboarding drops conversion. Start with low friction to get traction, then tighten the screws as you scale.
The Safety Net: Support
Once you are in production, Customer Support stops being an option and becomes a system requirement. Users will write in about billing errors, harassment reports, bans, or emotional disputes.
Do not build this yourself. Use Zendesk or Freshdesk.
Crucially, do not view Support merely as a “Cost Center” (a department that only spends money). In dating, Support is a retention tool. Speed and quality of response define your brand’s trustworthiness. One mishandled ticket regarding harassment can cost you a user forever—and potentially trigger a PR crisis.
The Money: Payments Infrastructure
Finally, the layer that keeps the lights on.
Historically, mobile dating apps offloaded this headache to the App Store and Google Play. You paid a “tax” (30% commission, or 15% on your first $1M/year), and in exchange, Apple and Google handled the taxes, the refunds, and the fraud.
The landscape is shifting. In the US, Apple now allows alternative billing systems. This makes third-party processors like Stripe or Adyen attractive.
App Store: ~30% fee. Handles everything.
Stripe: ~2.9% + $0.30 fee. You handle everything.
The lower fee is tempting, but it comes with Merchant of Record responsibilities. If you use Stripe, you are responsible for refunds, chargebacks (when a user disputes a charge with their bank), and fraud detection. In dating, chargebacks are common—often due to “buyer’s remorse” or emotional reactions to a bad date. If your chargeback rate gets too high, Visa/Mastercard can blacklist you. Moving off-store saves money, but requires a dedicated team to manage the financial risk.
Conclusion: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
If there is one takeaway from dissecting the anatomy of a giant like Tinder, it is this: a modern dating product is a complex organism.
It requires native mobile apps, a PWA for retention, sophisticated lifecycle marketing tools, AI moderation, and a robust payment infrastructure. Building this “skeleton” from scratch can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This is the trap many founders fall into. They burn their entire budget building the infrastructure—the login systems, the chat servers, the payment gateways—and have nothing left for marketing. By the time they launch, they are exhausted and broke.
This is exactly why we built SkaDate.
We have spent years building and refining this anatomy so you don’t have to.
Need a PWA that supports push notifications on iOS? We have it.
Need native iOS and Android apps? We have them.
Need integrated payment gateways and anti-spam tools? It’s already there.
Your job as a founder is to provide the soul of the product: the brand, the niche, the marketing, and the community. Let us provide the body.
If you are ready to launch a product that has all these professional layers from Day 1—without the development nightmare—let’s talk.
You focus on finding the users; we’ll make sure the technology keeps them there.