How Much Does a Matchmaker Cost? I’ve Been on Both Sides of the Check

In 1990 I handed a dating service $1,450 I did not have, on a $35,000 salary, and maxed out both my credit cards to do it.

How Much Does a Matchmaker Cost? The Short Answer

A conventional retainer package starts around $10,000 and averages about $21,000. That average isn’t mine, and it isn’t a guess. It comes from a working matchmaker who quietly polled more than a hundred colleagues.

It climbs a long way above that. It also goes down to free, and that’s the part nobody tells you about.

I’m the one setting prices now, and I decline matchmaking work above $10,000, for a reason I’ll explain further down.

The Whole Price Ladder, From Free to a Million Dollars

Everybody starts this conversation at the expensive end. I’m starting at the bottom.

Free. It’s free and private to be registered with me, and about 40,000 people are. I give a first thirty minute call free to anyone who registers. Registration promises nothing. But nobody can introduce you to anybody if they don’t know you exist.

A few hundred dollars. I charge $295 for my in-depth consultation, an hour of your time and two hours of mine, because I run the search before you arrive. The fee applies toward higher services later. Carla Swiryn, who founded DateSpot after seven years at Google, charges for a deep dive video call before anybody becomes a client, and sells a match preview, a fee for a vetted shortlist of at least ten candidates.

Per introduction. Swiryn’s per-match price is $699, published on her website, and men and women pay the same. She names the downside herself. About a fifth of the time the client decides an interested person isn’t worth $699.

Ten thousand dollars, which Swiryn calls the minimum out there, is where conventional retainer matchmaking starts, and just above it sits the $21,000 average package. From there it climbs. When Evan Marc Katz asked me what matchmaking costs now, my answer was $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, then $150,000, then $300,000, and there’s one charging a million. I have no idea what a million dollars buys.

There is almost nothing in the middle, and that’s the industry’s problem rather than yours. I said on air that too many matchmakers offer two options only, register for free or pay $40,000, and that they should innovate. Swiryn’s reply was more diplomatic. It is a little bit polarized, she said, and there’s not much in that mid zone.

Where the $21,000 Average Comes From, and What It Isn’t

I did some research actually last year across over a hundred matchmakers who I collaborate with. And the average package price was 21K. That was last year. It’s probably a little higher now. But 21K is not chump change.

Carla Swiryn, DateSpot

That’s Carla Swiryn on episode 199 of my podcast. It isn’t a study. It’s one working matchmaker’s research across the colleagues she collaborates with, and she says the figure is probably higher now.

I’m pointing out the weakness in my own best number. Nobody selling you a package will. The agencies publishing price tables are all quoting themselves or guessing about a rival. A soft number honestly sourced beats a confident number from nowhere.

What It Used to Cost: Jeffrey Ullman’s Old Price List

Jeffrey Ullman built Great Expectations, the video dating company, in the mid-1970s. He was also my late husband Gil Ferman’s franchisor, which is how I walked into Gil’s St. Louis office in 1990 as a customer. Nobody has a longer price memory for this business, so I asked him.

Everybody across the board … paid the same amount of money, which got as high as … between $3,500 and $4,000. In 1990 through about 98, we were up to maybe $5,000 or $6,000, but we weren’t doing $10,000 programs or $25,000 or $50,000 like we hear today or $150,000.

Jeffrey Ullman, founder of Great Expectations

Three and a half to four thousand dollars, rising to five or six by the late nineties, and everybody paying the same. The package that cost five or six thousand in 1998 averages $21,000 today, and at the top of the market it’s $150,000 and up. Four times the price in the middle, thirty times at the top. The work hasn’t got four times better, let alone thirty. His logic for charging at all is one I still use. If you didn’t have skin in the game, you didn’t get to play.

My own answer is that prices went up for no really good reason, doubling and tripling in the last two or three years.

Nicole Middendorf, the Minneapolis wealth advisor, told me the story that shows it in one life. A man called John Mitchell met his wife Ginger through an agency that now has a $300,000 price point, back when it was, in her words, a $25,000 kind of a program. Twelve times the price, same company. And they’re as happy as they can be.

And when I paid my $1,450 I assumed everybody had. Some members haggled down to $495 against a list price of $1,995, and some got in free. Nobody tells buyers that.

What the Money Actually Buys You

When it’s done properly you’re buying labor, and nearly all of it’s invisible to you.

Vetting. Ann Parnes, who built a matchmaking practice in New Orleans after fourteen years in law and seven as an assistant district attorney, puts it plainly: if you’re paying us a lot of money to find your person, we need to know you, we need to hear it.

Before I introduce anybody I want to know how much do you drink, really. Do you smoke, really. Do you earn more than you spend, are there tax liens on the house. And the honest limit, in the same breath: we can’t promise we get all the details on everybody, but we try.

Rejection, absorbed on your behalf. For every one yes I get from a man, I typically get five, six, sometimes seven versions of no thanks, she’s not my type, who else you got. I don’t tell her I took a hit for her that day. I take the hit. And Swiryn, counting back through her clients who ended up in relationships, found it took between six and seven introductions before one landed. You’re buying a process with a realistic length, not one perfect person.

A network rather than one list. Gabriella Aratow, the Los Angeles matchmaker, once placed a client who came out of another matchmaker’s call-out, and the two married in Temecula. Matchmakers talk to each other all day long. The pool you’re buying into is bigger than one company’s database.

The afterlife. Aratow names the part clients miss. When a contract expires, a matchmaker who liked working with you keeps you in the database in their brain. If you weren’t gracious, they may not. Be nice to your matchmaker.

What the Money Never Buys: Nobody Can Guarantee You a Relationship

No price on earth buys an OUTCOME. Swiryn says so in three places, in her terms, on her website, and out loud in the video call: she doesn’t guarantee any matches. I put it more bluntly. No matchmaker can promise a relationship. We can’t even promise second dates.

Refunds. Dr. Frankie asked me on her show whether I got one on my $1,450. No. And had I asked for a refund he never would have had any respect for me. I don’t use the R word. That’s me, and it’s not advice. Ask about refunds before you sign, and get the cancellation terms in writing. At this price it isn’t a rude question, it’s the one that tells you whether the contract is promising work or promising outcomes.

My answer, then and now: a lot of matchmakers have made a lot of couples. But we’re all so different, so find out how this one operates and what they can promise.

The Thing Nobody Tells You: A Big Fee Buys You Worse Feedback

This is the part of the price conversation I’ve never seen anywhere else, and it’s why I cap my own fees.

When somebody pays you that kind of money, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s $5,000 or $15,000, you can’t say everything you want to say in feedback. You can’t. The reason is chargebacks. A client hears something they can’t handle, decides they were sold a bill of goods, and reverses the charge. Every matchmaker is afraid of that, believe me.

Now turn it over. When no fee was paid for an introduction, the pressure is off. If they haven’t written me a whopper check, I have permission to tell them what’s really going on.

The most valuable thing I own is the truth about how a client is coming across, and the bigger the check, the less safely I can hand it over.

Julie Ferman

Mark Brooks, who has analyzed this industry for over twenty years, sees the same effect from another angle. He has watched the matchmakers charging whopper, whopper fees, and when they send him a client profile hoping he has a candidate, it has about three words on it. The more you pay, the less is on your profile.

That’s why, these days, I don’t like to do anything more than $10,000 in matchmaking fees. Partly because I know too much. And partly because a problem with a client in California, where my company is based, gets handled in small claims court. That limit costs me money, and I think it buys my clients a better service.

Barry Selby, the relationship coach, goes further and calls this pricing a branding exercise. Blunter than I’d be, and not wrong.

When You Should Not Spend This Money

I have a rule and it has cost me clients.

It has to be Vegas money. You need to be in a strong enough financial position to walk away from that sum the way you walk away from a poker table, partner or no partner, and still feel you gave it a good effort. If losing it would make you want to go throw up, it’s the wrong decision. I’ll say so.

Then there are the failures, with numbers attached. Nicole Middendorf has watched clients buy matchmaking for years. The top she has seen anybody pay is 300 grand, and when she said it, I knew exactly who that was. She also described a woman who spent $30,000, got nothing substantial, and is now married to a man she met on Bumble.

Nicole’s own answer cost her nothing. I coached her on flirting, she practiced, she met Corey. Her advice to anybody weighing a five-figure fee: get your own financial plan first.

Where I stand: the price gouging in this space is nauseating to me, because I know too much. I know the people inside these companies and I hear what it’s like in the trenches. Very, very few success stories. And I’m aggravated that personal matchmaking has become a thing reserved for the very rich, high net worth men and the women who want that lifestyle. That is NOT what this business was.

Sometimes the honest answer to a paying prospect is no. In a consultation I run the search first, share my screen, and watch the person’s face. Today’s consultation, a whole bunch of yeses. One from two weeks ago, not a single yes. Am I taking that client on? I’m not stupid. Hell no.

What I say instead is that you should NEVER hire a matchmaker, ever, because if I show you everyone I have and none of them will do, then something is going on with your picker, darling, and we’re putting you in boot camp instead. If that’s you, whether you should hire a matchmaker at all matters more than any price.

When It Does Work, Including for Me

I wouldn’t have my life without it.

In 1990 I was opening new hotels for the Ritz-Carlton on eighty hour weeks for $35,000 a year. I had already hired a dating coach, run personal ads in the newspaper, and printed my own profile at Kinko’s to mail to everybody I knew. Then Gil Ferman talked me into joining his dating service. He took my $1,450 and maxed out both of my credit cards.

The remorse was immediate. They had only just opened, there were hardly any members, and I was the guinea pig. I sat there thinking, oh, Julie, what did you do.

I was engaged in five weeks and married in five months. Gil and I were married thirty-four years and raised two sons. My sister joined the same agency and found her husband there too. Two marriages out of one small, brand-new, imperfect database, and it’s why I’ve spent my working life on this and why more than 1,400 couples have come out of it.

The buyers I worry about most are weighing a five-figure fee against the time they think they have left. That’s why dating over 60 has a page of its own.

What to Do First, Before You Write Anybody a Check

Here is the strangest endorsement in this article. Carla Swiryn sells matchmaking, and this is what she tells prospects when a big package looks wrong for them.

If in my gut, I think that if they were my sister, I would say, you know what, hold on to the big bucks and try this other stuff first. Do Julie’s bootcamp and get prepared for dating. Do some one date at a time situations with DateSpot. Get into Julie’s database.

Carla Swiryn, DateSpot

A competitor of mine, telling a buyer to spend less. That’s the ladder I run.

Register free, take the free thirty minute call, then do the $295 consultation. That’s what a consultation with me costs, the cheapest useful thing I sell.

Do the boot camp before you consider a package. Get Your Act Together for Dating Boot Camp is nine video modules, office hours twice a week, homework, and four one-to-one calls. Men and women train together, always. The room usually runs from twenty-six to eighty-three years old.

By my own count, more than half the people in my first seven classes are now in a relationship who weren’t when they started. That is my count and not a success rate, and I’d rather you knew where it came from. Here is my dating boot camp.

Then the free introductions. Half the introductions I make today are FREE. In a given year there are more of them than there are contract matches. The idea came from my mother-in-law, Feisty Frida Ferman, eighty-six and widowed, who told me that if I ever had an introduction for her it would be a mitzvah. Her criteria were a pulse, could he fog a mirror, and could he still drive at night.

One condition, and I’m open about it. I make those introductions for people with a little skin in the game, people who have done the $295 consultation. Otherwise this would be a nonprofit and the company would fold.

What it looks like when it works: a seventy-four year old divorced man in boot camp, matched with Celia, a widow who had done a consultation seven years earlier and hadn’t dated in decades. I phoned them during the date. They booked a second one. Those are the free introductions I call mitzvah matches.

Seven Questions to Ask a Matchmaker Before You Pay

Take these into any consultation, mine included. The willingness to answer tells you plenty.

1. What is your price, and will you tell me over the phone? I worked inside a dating agency for years and the sales training was explicit. Do NOT give the price on the phone. Get them into the office, get them to cry, and then they’ll buy. Criers are buyers. If somebody still won’t quote a number until you’re in the room, you’ve learned something.
2. Is your pricing published, and does everybody pay the same? DateSpot publishes prices and charges men and women identically. Others price by how hard your search looks, which means the number moves.
3. Will you show me who you actually have, before I pay? Most won’t. They don’t want somebody weighing a contract to see who is behind the curtain, in case who is behind the curtain isn’t worth the check.
4. What do you guarantee in writing, and what happens if I’m unhappy? Nothing, and read the refund clause before you sign it.
5. How long does the contract run, and may I keep dating while it does? Aratow writes that permission into her contracts. Not everybody will.
6. Where do candidates come from, and how much do you know about one before you introduce them?
7. If I were your sister or your brother, would you tell me to buy this today?

If you’d rather start at the bottom of the ladder, that’s what I’d prefer too. Get registered with me, take the free call, and let’s look at real people together before anybody mentions a package. Everything I offer is set out here, and the first conversation is free.

FAQs About What a Matchmaker Costs

julieferman.com · Julie@JulieFerman.com · 805-371-9557